The Dark Side of Our Digital World: And What You Can Do about It: LITA Guides Andrew Weiss Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

The Dark Side of Our Digital World

And What You Can Do about It

The Dark Side of Our Digital World

And What You Can Do about It

Description

An all-in-one guide to understanding and managing the dark side of our digital lives.

It all started out so well: the online world began as an effective tool for communication that carried with it a great promise to level the playing field and eliminate borders. But it’s morphed into something totally unintended. We’ve all had to endure the troll that derails a generally benign conversation; or received that scam email from a wealthy Nigerian prince; or felt the strange feeling of being watched and tracked by advertising companies as we navigate the web. Welcome to the modern internet.

These are but a few of the topics that The Dark Side of Our Digital World: And What You Can Do about It examines to get at the root causes of our current problems with information technology, social media, and problematic online behavior. The book explores the issues raised by the negative side of information technology, including surveillance and spying, declining privacy, information overload, surveillance capitalism and big data analytics, conspiracy theories and fake news, misinformation and disinformation, trolling and phishing.

What’s ultimately at stake is how we are able to cope with increasingly invasive anti-social behaviors, the overall decline of privacy in the face of total surveillance technologies, and the lack of a quality online experience that doesn’t devolve into flame wars and insults. The future of the internet as well as our societies depends upon our ability to discern truth from lies and reality from propaganda. The book will therefore also examine the possible directions we could take to improve the situation, looking at solutions in the areas of psychology and behavioral conditioning, social engineering through nudging techniques, the development of e-democracy movements, and the implementation of public policy.

Contents

List of illustrations and tables

Acknowledgments

Dedication

Preface: The dark side of our digital world

Part I: Information and the weapons of mass-distraction

Chapter 1: Into the ‘upside-down’: identifying our problem

Chapter 2: Online Behavioral Conditioning

Chapter 3: ‘Nudged’: Why your decisions may not be your own

Chapter 4: Surveillance capitalism and the ‘New Economy’

Part II: Drinking directly from a firehose: the impact of information glut, conspiracy theories, and Internet Balkanization

Chapter 5: Information overload and how to combat it

Chapter 6: Conspiracy, belief, and the compromising of research

Chapter 7: “Whose culture is it, anyway?” Ownership of culture in a digitized world in danger of fragmenting

Part III: Information and Power

Chapter 8: The Online Surveillance State

Chapter 9: Disinformation, misinformation, and “reality”

Chapter 10: The Anti-social network: Dealing with online social media misbehaviors and pathologies

Part IV: Draining the fever swamp

Chapter 11: Combating the Trolls and ‘Bots

Chapter 12: How to keep your privacy – and still live in the real world

Chapter 13: Wide Awake: The future of democracy, digital commons and digital rights advocacy

About the Author

Index

Product details

Published	May 18 2020
Format	Hardback
Edition	1st
Extent	282
ISBN	9781538119051
Imprint	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Illustrations	15 b/w photos; 15 tables
Dimensions	9 x 6 inches
Series	LITA Guides
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

RECOMMENDED. . . [Weiss] explores the many ills that accompany modern internet-mediated society, from data loss to trolling to surveillance capitalism. Weiss presents these as what he calls "information pathologies," and in discussing them he compares the visible and underlying issues in information to the symptoms and root causes of a disease. . . . Weiss's overview of all these problems would be useful for readers looking for an entry point into this community of thought.

Choice Reviews
The Dark Side of Our Digital World covers a challenge that is not just timely, but will be with us for the rest of our lives. In an easy to read, but informative manner, Weiss masterfully lays out how your Internet experience, and how you act and believe, can be shaped from afar. If knowing is half the battle, this is a valuable resource to fighting back.

P.W. Singer, author of Cybersecurity and Cyberwar, Ghost Fleet, Burn-In, and LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media
In Big Data Shocks (2018), Andrew Weiss had already started to take a critical and sophisticated view on the shocking nature of the digital reality we have created. In The Dark Side of Our Digital World, he takes the logical next step, and goes way beyond librarianship, and into some of the most fundamental building blocks of the shadows of the technological paradigm that characterizes our generation. In a refreshing and easy-to-read style, he interweaves up-to-date examples from current events, with long-standing concepts from academic research. From nudging, to surveillance, to deep fakes, to the role of ‘bots, to the future of democracy, Andrew Weiss take readers on an enjoyable journey that invites to reflect on a series of naturally arising questions: “Do we make our own decisions?”, “Why is it hard to quit?”, “Do you want the carrot or the stick?”, “What is truth?”, “Mind over matter, or matter over mind?”, “Freedom or safety?”, “Who watches the watchman?”, “Whose culture is it, anyway?”, and most pressing “What are we going to do about it?”. Each one of us will have to answer the questions that arise from this book, first for ourselves, and then, for the sake of helping us all to find a sustainable way forward. It is the inexcusable responsibility of each user of digital technology to be informed about the Dark Side of Our Digital World: And What You Can Do about It.

Martin Hilbert, professor, Chair DE Computational Social Science, Dpt Communication, DataLab, GG, Computer Science, University of California, Davis