The Internet
Download The Internet PDF/ePub or read online books in Mobi eBooks. Click Download or Read Online button to get The Internet book now. This website allows unlimited access to, at the time of writing, more than 1.5 million titles, including hundreds of thousands of titles in various foreign languages.
The Internet Imaginaire
The collective vision that shaped the emergence of the Internet: what led software designers, managers, employees, politicians, and individuals to develop and adopt one particular technology. In The Internet Imaginaire, sociologist Patrice Flichy examines the collective vision that shaped the emergence of the Internet--the social imagination that envisioned a technological utopia in the birth of a new technology. By examining in detail the discourses surrounding the development of the Internet in the United States in the 1990s (and considering them an integral part of that development), Flichy shows how an entire society began a new technological era. The metaphorical "information superhighway" became a technical utopia that informed a technological program. The Internet imaginaire, Flichy argues, led software designers, businesses, politicians, and individuals to adopt this one technology instead of another. Flichy draws on writings by experts--paying particular attention to the gurus of Wired magazine, but also citing articles in Time, Newsweek, and Business Week--from 1991 to 1995. He describes two main domains of the technical imaginaire: the utopias (and ideologies) associated with the development of technical devices; and the depictions of an imaginary digital society. He analyzes the founding myths of cyberculture--the representations of technical systems expressing the dreams and experiments of designers and promoters that developed around information highways, the Internet, Bulletin Board systems, and virtual reality. And he offers a treatise on "the virtual society imaginaire," discussing visionaries from Teilhard de Chardin to William Gibson, the body and the virtual, cyberdemocracy and the end of politics, and the new economy of the immaterial.
The Heart of the Internet
Jacques Vallee was among the engineers and visionaries who set up the Internet, hoping to connect people -- not control them -- through information. For a few years, it seemed that this dream was being realized. But after the dot com crash of 2001, much of the Web's information flowed into the media giants and corporate conglomerates, leaving millions of Net denizens without true freedom of choice. And then there is the threat of government snooping... All is not lost, but it is time for public and private actions to rebuild the dream and win back our freedom. In The Heart of the Internet, Vallee: reconstructs the history of computer technology and destroys a few myths (Eniac was not the first computer; Apple did not invent the mouse, and neither did Xerox.); uses first-person recollections and notes to describe the series of breakthroughs that transformed computers from calculating machines to universal platforms for new media; describes the Internet in today's marketplace, pressured on the one hand by commercial interests seeking to influence not merely our purchases but our thoughts, and on the other by governmental obsession to harness the whole system to its own narrow definitions of security -- sacrificing our privacy and possibly our freedom in the process; states a set of principles for network citizens and suggests how we can create new standards for Internet usage. Book jacket.
The Future of the Internet and how to Stop it
The author pieces together the engine that has catapulted the Internet ecosystem into the prominence it has today, offers an accessible discussion of the problems of an "appliancized" future, and provides a set of solutions to help stop it.
