From ‘cyberprotests’ to debates about whether cyberspace can be controlled or censored. From studying the long history of the collaborative creation of knowledge to looking closely at the social impact of mobile communications. These themes are all the focus of new book that have been published globally in recent months.
Cyberprotests to censorship
"Cyberprotests: New media, citizens and social movements" is edited by Wim van de Donk, Brian D. Loader, Paul G. Nixon and Dieter Rucht. It is published by the Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.
Explains the book: "Since the Seattle anti-globalisation protests in 1999 the adoption of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) by social movement activists has offered the prospect of a serious challenge to traditional forms of political participation."
This book explains that with its "transnational and many-to-many communication facility", the internet offers "revolutionary potential" for social movements to speak directly to the citizens of the world, circumventing the ‘official’ messages of political organisations and traditional media.
"Furthermore, electronic mail, mailing lists, websites, electronic forums and other online applications provide powerful tools for coordinating activity among geographically dispersed individuals, and for shaping collective identity," it adds.
This book also critically assesses how ICTs are "finding their way into the world of social movements", considering overarching issues and powerful examples of cyberprotest movements from across the globe.
Collaborative creation books
US professor Lawrence Lessig, best known for his articulate campaigns to make knowledge more sharable through public domain copyright licences, has come out with the ‘Version 2.0’ edition of ‘his’ book “Code”.
Priced at less than USD 20, Code Version 2.0 is from Basic Books in New York, and devoted to Wikipedia, “the one surprise that teaches more than everything here”.
First published in 1999, this book is considered a classic by some. Its new edition updates the work and "was prepared in part through a wiki, a web site allowing readers to edit the text, making this the first reader-revision of a popular book."
It’s self-description reads "Code counters the common belief that cyberspace cannot be controlled or censored. To the contrary, under the influence of commerce, cyberspace is becoming a highly regulable world where behaviour will be much more tightly controlled than in real space."
In this book, Lessig makes that point that "we can – we must" choose what kind of cyberspace we want and what freedoms it will guarantee. "These choices are all about architecture: what kind of code will govern cyberspace, and who will control it," he argues.
Lessig is Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school’s Centre for the Internet and Society. He "clerked" for some prominent US judges (Richard Posner, Antonin Scalia) and taught at Chicago, Yale, Harvard and Stanford. He has also authored Free Culture and The Future of Ideas.
Some of the chapters of this book include ‘Four Puzzles from Cyberspace’, ‘Architectures of Control’, ‘What Things Regulate’, ‘The Limits in Open Code’ and ‘Intellectual Property’.
Rishab Aiyer Ghosh recently finished editing a similar title called ‘Code: Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Commons’ and published with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) press.
The book that links the present with the past, argues: "Open source software is considered by many to be a novelty and the open source movement a revolution. Yet, the collaborative creation of knowledge has gone on for as long as humans have been able to communicate."
Ghosh’s Code argues that there exists a "collaborative model of creativity". It offers examples of collective ownership in indigenous societies, free software, academic science, and the human genome project. It says there is an alternative to proprietary frameworks for creativity based on strong intellectual property rights.
Writers of this book come from backgrounds like economics, anthropology, law, and software development. They examine collaborative creativity from diverse perspectives. To buttress their claims, they point to "new and old forms of creative collaboration and the mechanisms emerging to study them."
Editor Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, of Indian origin, is at the International Institute of Infonomics at Maastricht Universty. He was one of the founders and is the current managing editor of the peer-reviewed internet journal called ‘First Monday’.
Essays include "Why collaboration is important (again)" and "Who got left out of the property grab again: oral traditions, indigenous rights, and valuable old knowledge". One section of the book also deals with the "mechanics for collaboration".
Mobile communication
"Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective" is a just-out 2007-published book from, again, the MIT Press. It is by Manuel Castells, Mireia Fernandez-ardevol, Jack Linchuan Qui, and Araba Sey.
"Wireless networks are the fastest growing communications technology in history. Are mobile phones expressions of identity, fashionable gadgets, tools for life -or all of the above?" asks this 331-page book.
It "looks at how the possibility of multimodal communications from anywhere to anywhere at anytime affects everyday life at home, at work, and at school, and raises broader concerns about politics and culture both global and local."
This title looks at the social effects of wireless communication -"what it means for family life, for example, when everyone is constantly in touch, or for the idea of an office when workers can work anywhere." It debates where the "technological ability to multitask" is further "compressing time in our already hurried existence?"