en-US Thu, 02 Feb 2023 17:57:11 -0800 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 34762552
In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color.

Through an analysis of textual and media searches as well as extensive research on paid online advertising, Noble exposes a culture of racism and sexism in the way discoverability is created online. As search engines and their related companies grow in importance - operating as a source for email, a major vehicle for primary and secondary school learning, and beyond - understanding and reversing these disquieting trends and discriminatory practices is of utmost importance.

An original, surprising and, at times, disturbing account of bias on the internet, Algorithms of Oppression contributes to our understanding of how racism is created, maintained, and disseminated in the 21st century.]]> 248 Safiya Umoja Noble 1479837245 Jason 0 3.89 2018
author: Safiya Umoja Noble
name: Jason
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2023/02/02
date added: 2023/02/02
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]]> 4960038 576 Arthur J. Pulos 0262160854 Jason 0 3.50 1983
author: Arthur J. Pulos
name: Jason
average rating: 3.50
book published: 1983
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/02/02
shelves: currently-reading, design, industrial-design, history
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]]> 52853
A colorful tale of scientific discovery and technological cunning, The Victorian Internet tells the story of the telegraph's creation and remarkable impact, and of the visionaries, oddballs, and eccentrics who pioneered it. By 1865 telegraph cables spanned continents and oceans, revolutionizing the ways countries dealt with one another. The telegraph gave rise to creative business practices and new forms of crime. Romances blossomed over the wires. Secret codes were devised by some users, and cracked by others. The benefits of the network were relentlessly hyped by its advocates and dismissed by its skeptics. And attitudes toward everything from news gathering to war had to be completely rethought.

The telegraph unleashed the greatest revolution in communications since the development of the printing press. Its saga offers many parallels to that of the Internet in our own time--and is a fascinating episode in the history of technology.]]> 240 Tom Standage 0425171698 Jason 5 3.93 1998
author: Tom Standage
name: Jason
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1998
rating: 5
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date added: 2018/11/12
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]]> 647390 the "Telefon Hirmondo" of Hungary--and the conflict between the technological development of broadcasting and the attempt to impose a homogenous, ethnocentric variant of Anglo-Saxon culture on the public. While focusing on the way professionals in the electronics field tried to control the new media, Marvin also illuminates the broader social impact, presenting a wide-ranging, informative, and entertaining account of the early years of electronic media.]]> 296 Carolyn Marvin 0195063414 Jason 5 3.89 1988
author: Carolyn Marvin
name: Jason
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1988
rating: 5
read at: 2017/07/17
date added: 2017/07/17
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]]> 151650 New Media, 1740-1915 promises to deepen our historical understanding of all media and thus to sharpen our critical awareness of how they acquire their meaning and power.

ContributorsWendy Bellion, Erin C. Blake, Patricia Crain, Ellen Gruber Garvey, Lisa Gitelman, Geoffrey B. Pingree, Gregory Radick, Laura Burd Schiavo, Katherine Stubbs, Diane Zimmerman Umble, Paul Young.]]> 305 Lisa Gitelman 0262572281 Jason 0 3.85 2003
author: Lisa Gitelman
name: Jason
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2003
rating: 0
read at: 2017/07/17
date added: 2017/07/17
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]]> 1792012 208 Ben Highmore 0415223032 Jason 5 3.84 2001
author: Ben Highmore
name: Jason
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2001
rating: 5
read at: 2017/07/17
date added: 2017/07/17
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]]> 9994925 248 Paul Dourish 0262015552 Jason 5 4.00 2011
author: Paul Dourish
name: Jason
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2017/07/17
date added: 2017/07/17
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]]> 23214145 The Undersea Network Nicole Starosielski follows these cables from the ocean depths to their landing zones on the sandy beaches of the South Pacific, bringing them to the surface of media scholarship and making visible the materiality of the wired network. In doing so, she charts the cable network's cultural, historical, geographic and environmental dimensions. Starosielski argues that the environments the cables occupy are historical and political realms, where the network and the connections it enables are made possible by the deliberate negotiation and manipulation of technology, culture, politics and geography. Accompanying the book is an interactive digital mapping project, where readers can trace cable routes, view photographs and archival materials, and read stories about the island cable hubs.]]> 312 Nicole Starosielski 0822357550 Jason 5 3.85 2015
author: Nicole Starosielski
name: Jason
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2015
rating: 5
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date added: 2015/10/28
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Why does the everyday user of the internet know so little about how it works and the physical objects in the world that are required to make it possible? Nicole Starosielski's book does an amazing job making these invisible infrastructures more visible and understandable. Moreover, she explores how infrastructures (and their invisibilities) have very profound political and cultural implications. I teach this book to my undergraduates and they overwhelming say it is their favorite read. I'll teach it next semester to my graduate students alongside Andrew Blum's work, Lisa Parks' writing on infrastructure, and a trip to a data center! I can't recommend this book enough!
]]> 918674
In a highly original and engaging fashion, Schivelbusch discusses the ways in which our perceptions of distance, time, autonomy, speed, and risk were altered by railway travel. As a history of the surprising ways in which technology and culture interact, this book covers a wide range of topics, including the changing perception of landscapes, the death of conversation while traveling, the problematic nature of the railway compartment, the space of glass architecture, the pathology of the railway journey, industrial fatigue and the history of shock, and the railroad and the city.

Belonging to a distinguished European tradition of critical sociology best exemplified by the work of Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, The Railway Journey is anchored in rich empirical data and full of striking insights about railway travel, the industrial revolution, and technological change. Now updated with a new preface, The Railway Journey is an invaluable resource for readers interested in nineteenth-century culture and technology and the prehistory of modern media and digitalization.]]> 219 Wolfgang Schivelbusch 0520059298 Jason 0 to-read 4.15 1977
author: Wolfgang Schivelbusch
name: Jason
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1977
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date added: 2013/01/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> 10475415 229 Mark Shepard 0262515865 Jason 5 3.81 2011
author: Mark Shepard
name: Jason
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2011
rating: 5
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date added: 2012/12/10
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]]> 8701960 Chaos and Genius, now brings us a work just as astonishing and masterly: a revelatory chronicle and meditation that shows how information has become the modern era's defining quality—the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world.

The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanishes as soon as it is born. From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long-misunderstood talking drums of Africa, Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. He provides portraits of the key figures contributing to the inexorable development of our modern understanding of information: Charles Babbage, the idiosyncratic inventor of the first great mechanical computer; Ada Byron, the brilliant and doomed daughter of the poet, who became the first true programmer; pivotal figures like Samuel Morse and Alan Turing; and Claude Shannon, the creator of information theory itself.

And then the information age arrives. Citizens of this world become experts willy-nilly: aficionados of bits and bytes. And we sometimes feel we are drowning, swept by a deluge of signs and signals, news and images, blogs and tweets. The Information is the story of how we got here and where we are heading.]]> 527 James Gleick 0375423729 Jason 5 4.02 2011
author: James Gleick
name: Jason
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2011
rating: 5
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]]> 13036199 —Tom Vanderbilt, New York Times bestselling author of Traffic When your Internet cable leaves your living room, where does it go? Almost everything about our day-to-day lives—and the broader scheme of human culture—can be found on the Internet. But what is it physically? And where is it really? Our mental map of the network is as blank as the map of the ocean that Columbus carried on his first Atlantic voyage. The Internet, its material nuts and bolts, is an unexplored territory. Until now. In  Tubes , journalist Andrew Blum goes inside the Internet's physical infrastructure and flips on the lights, revealing an utterly fresh look at the online world we think we know. It is a shockingly tactile realm of unmarked compounds, populated by a special caste of engineer who pieces together our networks by hand; where glass fibers pulse with light and creaky telegraph buildings, tortuously rewired, become communication hubs once again. From the room in Los Angeles where the Internet first flickered to life to the caverns beneath Manhattan where new fiber-optic cable is buried; from the coast of Portugal, where a ten-thousand-mile undersea cable just two thumbs wide connects Europe and Africa, to the wilds of the Pacific Northwest, where Google, Microsoft, and Facebook have built monumental data centers—Blum chronicles the dramatic story of the Internet's development, explains how it all works, and takes the first-ever in-depth look inside its hidden monuments. This is a book about real places on the their sounds and smells, their storied pasts, their physical details, and the people who live there. For all the talk of the "placelessness" of our digital age, the Internet is as fixed in real, physical spaces as the railroad or telephone. You can map it and touch it, and you can visit it. Is the Internet in fact "a series of tubes" as Ted Stevens, the late senator from Alaska, once famously described it? How can we know the Internet's possibilities if we don't know its parts? Like Tracy Kidder's classic  The Soul of a New Machine  or Tom Vanderbilt's recent bestseller  Traffic ,  Tubes  combines on-the-ground reporting and lucid explanation into an engaging, mind-bending narrative to help us understand the physical world that underlies our digital lives.]]> 294 Andrew Blum 0061994936 Jason 5 3.44 2012
author: Andrew Blum
name: Jason
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2012
rating: 5
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