Bücher der Reihe Algorithms and Society

Digital Totalitarianism focuses on important challenges to democratic values posed by our computational regimes: policing the freedom of inquiry, risks to the personal autonomy of thought, NeoLiberal management of human creativity and the collapse of critical thinking with the social media fueled rise of conspiranoia.

Privacy: Algorithms and Society focuses on encryption technologies and privacy debates in journalistic crypto-cultures, countersurveillance technologies, digital advertising and cellular location data.

Systemic Bias: Algorithms and Society looks at issues of computational bias in the contexts of cultural works, metaphors of magic and mathematics in tech culture, and workplace psychometrics.

Democratic Frontiers focuses on digital platforms' effects in societies with respect to key areas such as subjectivity and self-reflection, data and measurement for the common good, public health and accessible datasets, activism in social media and the import/export of AI technologies relative to regime type.

Deep Fakes: Algorithms and Society focuses on the use of artificial intelligence technologies to produce fictitious photorealistic audiovisual clips that are indistinguishable from traditional video media.For over a century, the indexical relationship of the photographic image, and its related media of film and video, to the scene of capture has served as a basis for truth claims. Historically, the iconicity of these images has featured a causal traceback to actual light rays in a particular time and space, which were fixed by chemical reactions or digital sensors to the resultant image. Today, photorealistic audiovisual media can be generated from deep learning networks that sever any connection to an actual event. Should society instantiate new regimes to manage this new challenge to our sense of reality and the traditional evidential capacities of the 'mechanical image'? How do these images generate information disorder while also providing the basis for legitimate tools used in entertainment and creative industries?Scholars and students from many backgrounds, as well as policymakers, journalists and the general reading public, will find a multidisciplinary approach to questions posed by deep fake research from Communication, International Studies, Writing and Rhetoric.

Democratic Frontiers: Algorithms and Society focuses on digital platforms' effects in societies with respect to key areas such as subjectivity and self-reflection, data and measurement for the common good, public health and accessible datasets, activism in social media and the import/export of AI technologies relative to regime type.Digital technologies develop at a much faster pace relative to our systems of governance which are supposed to embody democratic principles that are comparatively timeless, whether rooted in ancient Greek or Enlightenment ideas of freedom, autonomy and citizenship. Algorithms, computing millions of calculations per second, do not pause to reflect on their operations. Developments in the accumulation of vast private datasets that are used to train automated machine learning algorithms pose new challenges for upholding these values. Social media platforms, while the key driver of today's information disorder, also afford new opportunities for organized social activism. The US and China, presumably at opposite ends of an ideological spectrum, are the main exporters of AI technology to both free and totalitarian societies. These are some of the important topics covered by this volume that examines the democratic stakes for societies with the rapid expansion of these technologies.Scholars and students from many backgrounds as well as policy makers, journalists and the general reading public will find a multidisciplinary approach to issues of democratic values and governance encompassing research from Sociology, Digital Humanities, New Media, Psychology, Communication, International Relations and Economics.Chapter 3 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

Digital Totalitarianism: Algorithms and Society focuses on important challenges to democratic values posed by our computational regimes: policing the freedom of inquiry, risks to the personal autonomy of thought, NeoLiberal management of human creativity, and the collapse of critical thinking with the social media fueled rise of conspiranoia.Digital networks allow for a granularity and pervasiveness of surveillance by government and corporate entities. This creates power asymmetries where each citizen's daily 'data exhaust' can be used for manipulative and controlling ends by powerful institutional actors. This volume explores key erosions in our fundamental human values associated with free societies by covering government surveillance of library-based activities, cognitive enhancement debates, the increasing business orientation of art schools, and the proliferation of conspiracy theories in network media.Scholars and students from many backgrounds, as well as policy makers, journalists and the general reading public will find a multidisciplinary approach to questions of totalitarian tendencies encompassing research from Communication, Rhetoric, Library Sciences, Art and New Media.

Privacy: Algorithms and Society focuses on encryption technologies and privacy debates in journalistic crypto-cultures, countersurveillance technologies, digital advertising, and cellular location data.Important questions are raised such as: How much information will we be allowed to keep private through the use of encryption on our computational devices? What rights do we have to secure and personalized channels of communication, and how should those be balanced by the state's interests in maintaining order and degrading the capacity of criminals and rival state actors to organize through data channels? What new regimes may be required for states to conduct digital searches, and how does encryption act as countersurveillance? How have key debates relied on racialized social constructions in their discourse? What transformations in journalistic media and practices have occurred with the development of encryption tools? How are the digital footprints of consumers tracked and targeted?Scholars and students from many backgrounds as well as policy makers, journalists, and the general reading public will find a multidisciplinary approach to questions of privacy and encryption encompassing research from Communication, Sociology, Critical Data Studies, and Advertising and Public Relations.