San Antonio College Library

"This book sounds an alarm: after decades of being lulled into complacency by narratives of technological utopianism and neutrality, people are waking up to the large-scale consequences of Silicon Valley-led technophilia. This book trains a spotlight on the inequality, marginalization, and biases in our technological systems, showing how they are not just minor bugs to be patched, but part and parcel of ideas that assume technology can fix--and control--society"--...

Looks at the important issues that are often overlooked in the race to find the best, fastest, and most cutting-edge technological wonders.

No technology has spread around the world as fast as computers. Even before the internet, information technologies had diffused to dozens of countries all over the world and had already begun to fundamentally alter how businesses, governments, and whole societies functioned. In The Digital Flood, historian James W. Cortada is the first to offer a world-wide history of how computers appeared and were used in North America, Europe, and most of Asia...

"A revealing look at how tech industry bias and blind spots get baked into digital products--and harm us all. Buying groceries, tracking our health, finding a date: whatever we want to do, odds are that we can now do it online. But few of us ask why all these digital products are designed the way they are. It's time we change that. Many of the services we rely on are full of oversights, biases, and downright ethical nightmares: Chatbots that harass...

"Cyberethics explores the moral dilemmas that are arising as computer technology penetrates further into our professional, private, and social lives. Following an opening section concerned with defining the nature of this new moral landscape, four main issues are discussed: anonymity, personal identity, and the moral dimensions of creating new personalities; privacy, in light of the ability of computers to store vast amounts of information on individuals,...

Since the 1960s, the rapid evolution of technology has created a new cultural geography--a virtual geography. The Difference Engine: Computing, Knowledge and the Transformation of Learning offers a conscious critique of this change and its effects on contemporary culture and education. This engaging text assumes that we are at a critical moment--one where we are moving from a modern into a post-modern culture-- and examines the seven key components...

Lanier offers powerful and personal reasons for all of us to leave the dangers of online platforms behind. He has seen their tendency to bring out the worst in us, to make politics terrifying, to trick us with illusions of popularity and success, to twist our relationship with the truth, to disconnect us from other people. And he asks: How could the benefits of social media possibly outweigh the catastrophic losses to our personal dignity, happiness,...

This book about America's romance with computer communication looks at the Internet, not as a harbinger of the future or the next big thing, but as an expression of the times. Streeter demonstrates that our ideas about what connected computers are for have been in constant flux since their invention. In the 1950s they were imagined as the means for fighting nucelar wars, in the 1960s as systems for bringing mathematical certainty to the messy complexity...

The phenomenal growth of gaming has inspired plenty of hand-wringing since its inception--from the press, politicians, parents, and everyone else concerned with its effect on our brains, bodies, and hearts. But what if games could be good, not only for individuals but for the world? In Power Play, Asi Burak and Laura Parker explore how video games are now pioneering innovative social change around the world. As the former executive director and now...

"In 2004, Kentaro Toyama, an award-winning computer scientist, moved to India to start a new research group for Microsoft. Its mission: to explore novel technological solutions to the world's persistent social problems. Together with his team, he invented electronic devices for under-resourced urban schools and developed digital platforms for remote agrarian communities. But after a decade of designing technologies for humanitarian causes, Toyama...