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As the United States contends with issues of populism and de-democratization, this book considers the impacts of digital technologies on the country's politics and society. The book provides a Marxist analysis of the rise of digital media, social networks and technology giants like Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft. It looks at the impact of these new platforms and technologies on their users who have made them among the most valuable firms in the world. The book is concerned with unfreedom and class rule in contemporary American capitalism as seen in the digital realm. Class struggle is the first and last force shaping developments in communication. The book looks at the response of the ruling class to an organic crisis in the United States, and it traces how digital media instruments are used by different factions within the capitalist ruling class to capture and maintain the commanding heights of the American social structure. The book moves on to examine the role of data and whiteness in American social life. It traces the evolving intersection of capital, security and technology to examine the broad trajectory of unfreedom. The book concludes that digital society requires significant restructuring if it is to facilitate greater democratization. Offering bold, new thinking across data politics and digital and economic sociology, this is a powerful demonstration of how algorithms have come to shape everyday life and political legitimacy in the United States and beyond.

How can we begin to grasp the scope and scale of our new data-rich world, and can we truly comprehend what is at stake? This book explores the intricacies of data creation and charts how data-driven technologies have become essential to how society, government and the economy work. Creatively blending scholarly analysis, biography and fiction, the book demonstrates how data are shaped by social and political forces, and the extent to which they influence our daily lives. The book begins with an overview of the sociality of data. Data-driven endeavours are as much a result of human values, desires, and social relations as they are scientific principles and technologies. The data revolution has been transforming work and the economy, the nature of consumption, the management and governance of society, how we communicate and interact with media and each other, and forms of play and leisure. Indeed, our lives are saturated with digital devices and services that generate, process, and share vast quantities of data. The book reveals the many, complex, contested ways in which data are produced and circulated, as well as the consequences of living in a data-driven world. The book concludes with an exploration as to what kind of data future we want to create and strategies for realizing our visions. It highlights the need to enact 'a digital ethics of care', and to claim and assert 'data sovereignty'. Ultimately, the book reveals our data world to be one of potential danger, but also of hope.

Media Technologies for Work and Play in East Asia: Critical Perspectives on Japan and the Two Koreas examines work and play technologies in the three Northeast Asian countries by collecting ten essays on analogue and digital technologies such as pachinko, Pokėmon GO, esports, and televised nuclear testing. This book argues that the development and practices of media technologies have to be situated in the local contexts; therefore, Asia is neither an exception to nor a laggard to western technologies. To advance this argument, the first aim of the book is to use three approaches—political economy, cultural studies, and science and technology studies—to examine the complexity of media technologies. The second aim is to discuss how media technologies in Asia illustrate the peculiar geopolitical relations between Japan, South Korea, and North Korea as results of colonisation and independence, war and reconstruction, westernisation and indigenisation, as well as state-led development and globalisation. This volume bridges two groups of current literature: an examination of technological development in Japan and South Korea since the 1970s and the use of technologies in local contexts. In addition, it also enhances an understanding of how North Korean leaders and citizens use media technologies to connect themselves to the world.

As social media is increasingly becoming a standard feature of sociological practice, this book rethinks the role of these mediums in public sociology and what they can contribute to the discipline in the post-COVID world. It reconsiders the history and current conceptualizations of what sociology is, and analyzes what kinds of social life emerge in and through the interactions between ‘intellectuals’, ‘publics’ and ‘platforms’ of communication. Cutting across multiple disciplines, the book envisions a new kind of public sociology that brings together the digital and the physical to create public spaces where critical scholarship and active civic engagement can meet in a mutually reinforcing way.

Social media platforms hold vast amounts of biographical data about our lives. They repackage our past content as ‘memories’ and deliver them back to us. But how does that change the way we remember? Drawing on original qualitative research as well as industry documents and reports, this book critically explores the process behind this new form of memory making. In asking how social media are beginning to change the way we remember, it will be essential reading for scholars and students who are interested in understanding the algorithmically defined spaces of our lives.

The concept of transhumanism emerged in the middle of the 20th century and has influenced discussions around artificial intelligence, brain–computer interfaces, genetic technologies and life extension. Despite its enduring influence in the public imagination, a fully developed philosophy of transhumanism has not yet been presented. This book explores the critical issues that link transhumanism with digitalization, gene technologies, and ethics. It examines the history and meaning of transhumanism and asks bold questions about human perfection, cyborgs, genetically enhanced entities, and uploaded minds. Offering insightful reflections on values, norms, and utopia, this will be an important guide for readers interested in contemporary digital culture, gene ethics, and policy making.

Youth Prospects in the Digital Society In an age when the next generation have worse prospects than their parents, this book appraises the challenges that young people face resulting from the instability and uncertainty of their lives. Based on young people’s experience of education, training, employment, family life and political participation in England and Germany, the book examines the impact of digitalisation on identity in the context of rising inequality. The focus is on the effects of technological transformation, fragile European Union institutions, growing nationalism and mental and economic stress arising from the Covid-19 pandemic on youth transitions and the ever-present shadow of climate change. Such an uncertain context presents systemic challenge for the forms and effectiveness of youth policy in the different national contexts as addressed in each of the chapters that follows. Youth policy is shaped by such key issues as the future of vocational education and training in the digital society, job creation, family, political engagement and community life, the impact of social media and universal connectivity. The book argues that government should be under an obligation to ensure that every young person has access to the technical, economic, and educational resources needed to shape their personal transition to adulthood and acquire the capability needed to participate fully in the digital society.