21 Jun 09 Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion

Description: Every day, billions of photographs, news stories, songs, X-rays, TV shows, phone calls, and emails are being scattered around the world as sequences of zeroes and ones: bits. We can’t escape this explosion of digital information and few of us want to–the benefits are too seductive. The technology has enabled unprecedented innovation, collaboration, entertainment, and democratic participation.

But the same engineering marvels are shattering centuries-old assumptions about privacy, identity, free expression, and personal control as more and more details of our lives are captured as digital data.

Can you control who sees all that personal information about you? Can email be truly confidential, when nothing seems to be private? Shouldn’t the Internet be censored the way radio and TV are? Is it really a federal crime to download music? When you use Google or Yahoo! to search for something, how do they decide which sites to show you? Do you still have free speech in the digital world? Do you have a voice in shaping government or corporate policies about any of this?

Related eBooks :

1. The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers
2. Windows Home Server: Protect and Simplify your Digital Life
3. Introducing Microsoft Expression Studio: Using Design, Web, Blend, and Media to Create Professional Digital Content
4. Digital Multimedia Perception and Design
5. User-Centered Interaction Design Patterns for Interactive Digital Television Applications