In this age of DNA computers and artificial intelligence, information is becoming disembodied even as the "bodies" that once carried it vanish into virtuality. While some marvel at these changes, envisioning consciousness downloaded into a computer or humans "beamed" Star Trek-style, others view them with horror, seeing monsters brooding in the machines. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles separates hype from fact, investigating the fate of embodiment in an information age.
Hayles relates three interwoven stories: how information lost its body, that is, how it came to be conceptualized as an entity separate from the material forms that carry it; the cultural and technological construction of the cyborg; and the dismantling of the liberal humanist "subject" in cybernetic discourse, along with the emergence of the "posthuman."
Ranging widely across the history of technology, cultural studies, and literary criticism, Hayles shows what had to be erased, forgotten, and elided to conceive of information as a disembodied entity. Thus she moves from the post-World War II Macy Conferences on cybernetics to the 1952 novel Limbo by cybernetics aficionado Bernard Wolfe; from the concept of self-making to Philip K. Dick's literary explorations of hallucination and reality; and from artificial life to postmodern novels exploring the implications of seeing humans as cybernetic systems.
Although becoming posthuman can be nightmarish, Hayles shows how it can also be liberating. From the birth of cybernetics to artificial life, How We Became Posthuman provides an indispensable account of how we arrived in our virtual age, and of wherewe might go from here.

A vivid look at China’s shifting place in the global political economy of technology production
How did China’s mass manufacturing and “copycat” production become transformed, in the global tech imagination, from something holding the nation back to one of its key assets? Prototype Nation offers a rich transnational analysis of how the promise of democratized innovation and entrepreneurial life has shaped China’s governance and global image. With historical precision and ethnographic detail, Silvia Lindtner reveals how a growing distrust in Western models of progress and development, including Silicon Valley and the tech industry after the financial crisis of 2007–08, shaped the rise of the global maker movement and the vision of China as a “new frontier” of innovation.
Lindtner’s investigations draw on more than a decade of research in experimental work spaces—makerspaces, coworking spaces, innovation hubs, hackathons, and startup weekends—in China, the United States, Africa, Europe, Taiwan, and Singapore, as well as in key sites of technology investment and industrial production—tech incubators, corporate offices, and factories. She examines how the ideals of the maker movement, to intervene in social and economic structures, served the technopolitical project of prototyping a “new” optimistic, assertive, and global China. In doing so, Lindtner demonstrates that entrepreneurial living influences governance, education, policy, investment, and urban redesign in ways that normalize the persistence of sexism, racism, colonialism, and labor exploitation.
Prototype Nation shows that by attending to the bodies and sites that nurture entrepreneurial life, technology can be extricated from the seemingly endless cycle of promise and violence.
Cover image: Courtesy of Cao Fei, Vitamin Creative Space and Sprüth Magers

Scientific knowledge grows at a phenomenal pace-but few books have had as lasting an impact or played as important a role in our modern world as "The Mathematical Theory of Communication", published originally as a paper on communication theory in the "Bell System Technical Journal" more than fifty years ago. Republished in book form shortly thereafter, it has since gone through four hardcover and sixteen paperback printings. It is a revolutionary work, astounding in its foresight and contemporaneity. The University of Illinois Press is pleased and honored to issue this commemorative reprinting of a classic.

北魏云冈石窟规模宏大，气势雄浑，这样的大型工程在当时如何规划设计，又如何施工开凿，是一个值得探讨的问题。本书通过考察石窟外部的山体崖面、斩山遗迹，石窟内部的空间层次、壁面龛像，分析各类工程遗迹的空间关系，探讨云冈石窟的营造工程。
研究表明，云冈石窟所在的武州山南麓，原为两级阶地地貌，阶地后缘分布有自然断崖，石窟工程利用了山体上部的自然断崖，并向下斩山局部改造了山形。进入到洞窟开凿阶段，第一期工程主要为大像窟，依就大像头、身、腿的设计高度，从上往下分层施工，对大像以外的壁面控制力度较弱，允许民间势力进入开龛造像。而第二期工程逐渐采用了室窟设计，强调洞窟室内空间，壁面平直，多无凸出石壁的大像，逐渐流行统一施工，加强了壁面控制力度，分栏开龛造像，营造出规整完善的洞窟空间。可以说，云冈石窟的营造工程，从一期到二期有一个大的转变，规划设计、施工模式、工程组织都在逐渐进步。
彭明浩著的《云冈石窟的营造工程》从营造工程的视角，考察云冈石窟各类工事活动的关系，注重空间层次及打破、避让等遗迹现象，可视为考古层位学在石窟研究中的具体应用，与考古类型学结合，或有助于更为全面完整地考察石窟。

软件工程牵涉的范围很广, 同时也是一般院校的同学反映比较空洞乏味的课程。 但是，软件工程 的技术对于投身 IT 产业的学生来说是非常重要的。作者有在世界一流软件企业 20 年的一线软件开 发经验，他在数所高校进行了多年的软件工程教学实践，总结出了在 16 周的时间内让同学们通过 “做 中学 (Learning By Doing)” 掌握实用的软件工程技术的教学计划，并得到高校师生的积极反馈。在此 基础上，作者对软件工程的各个知识点和实战技能要求进行了系统性整理，形成教材。目前，本书已经在至少 25 所高校作为软件工程课程的教材。
本书共分 17 章， 对照美国 ACM/IEEE 2013 年出版的计算机科学教学指导中软件工程相关部分， 本书覆盖了其中大多数的核心内容。本书同时覆盖了最新的业界实战方法，软件团队中各个角色的成 长和关系，以及 IT 行业的创新奥秘。作者可以向感兴趣的读者提供全部章节的教学课件。

The technologically tethered, iPhone-addicted figure is an image we can easily conjure. Most of us complain that there aren't enough hours in the day and too many e-mails in our thumb-accessible inboxes. This widespread perception that life is faster than it used to be is now ingrained in our culture, and smartphones and the Internet are continually being blamed. But isn't the sole purpose of the smartphone to give us such quick access to people and information that we'll be free to do other things? Isn't technology supposed to make our lives easier?
In Pressed for Time, Judy Wajcman explains why we immediately interpret our experiences with digital technology as inexorably accelerating everyday life. She argues that we are not mere hostages to communication devices, and the sense of always being rushed is the result of the priorities and parameters we ourselves set rather than the machines that help us set them. Indeed, being busy and having action-packed lives has become valorized by our productivity driven culture. Wajcman offers a bracing historical perspective, exploring the commodification of clock time, and how the speed of the industrial age became identified with progress. She also delves into the ways time-use differs for diverse groups in modern societies, showing how changes in work patterns, family arrangements, and parenting all affect time stress. Bringing together empirical research on time use and theoretical debates about dramatic digital developments, this accessible and engaging book will leave readers better versed in how to us

微软创始人比尔·盖茨曾经称雷·库兹韦尔是“我知道在预测人工智能上最厉害的人”。过去30年他对未来预测的准确率超过了86%。在这本书中，雷·库兹韦尔阐述了极其令人信服的大胆预测：未来的世界，人类和机器将难分彼此，人类将不再是万物之灵。电脑将比人脑有高一万倍的智能。量子计算将引爆技术未来。机器不仅拥有智能，而且拥有心灵，将具有人类的意识、情绪和欲望。人类身体中植入了用生物工程和纳米材料制成的电脑芯片、人造器官，将比现代人类更长寿（甚至长生不老），有更强的学习能力，更灵敏的视觉和听觉。虚拟现实有可能使人机发生“恋爱”……你会认为这不可能？当人类不再继续生活在树上，并且吃烤熟了的东西的时候，有某个猴子也是和你一样看待人类进化的。

What happens when media technologies are able to interpret our feelings, emotions, moods, and intentions? In this cutting edge new book, Andrew McStay explores that very question and argues that these abilities result in a form of technological empathy. Offering a balanced and incisive overview of the issues raised by ‘Emotional AI’, this book:
Provides a clear account of the social benefits and drawbacks of new media trends and technologies such as emoji, wearables and chatbots
Demonstrates through empirical research how ‘empathic media’ have been developed and introduced both by start-ups and global tech corporations such as Facebook
Helps readers understand the potential implications on everyday life and social relations through examples such as video-gaming, facial coding, virtual reality and cities
Calls for a more critical approach to the rollout of emotional AI in public and private spheres
Combining established theory with original analysis, this book will change the way students view, use and interact with new technologies. It should be required reading for students and researchers in media, communications, the social sciences and beyond.

In 1957, decades before Steve Jobs dreamed up Apple or Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook, a group of eight brilliant young men defected from the Shockley Semiconductor Company in order to start their own transistor business. Their leader was 29-year-old Robert Noyce, a physicist with a brilliant mind and the affability of a born salesman who would co-invent the microchip -- an essential component of nearly all modern electronics today, including computers, motor vehicles, cell phones and household appliances.

Individuals all over the world can use Airbnb to rent an apartment in a foreign city, check Coursera to find a course on statistics, join PatientsLikeMe to exchange information about one's disease, hail a cab using Uber, or read the news through Facebook's Instant Articles. The promise of connective platforms is that they offer personalized services and contribute to innovation and economic growth, while bypassing cumbersome institutional or industrial overhead.
In The Platform Society, Van Dijck, Poell and De Waal offer a comprehensive analysis of a connective world where platforms have penetrated the heart of societies-disrupting markets and labor relations, circumventing institutions, transforming social and civic practices and affecting democratic processes. This book questions what role online platforms play in the organization of Western societies. First, how do platform mechanisms work and to what effect are they deployed? Second, how can platforms incorporate public values and benefit the public good?
The Platform Society analyzes intense struggles between competing ideological systems and contesting societal actors-market, government and civil society-raising the issue of who is or should be responsible for anchoring public values and the common good in a platform society. Public values include of course privacy, accuracy, safety, and security, but they also pertain to broader societal effects, such as fairness, accessibility, democratic control, and accountability. Such values are the very stakes in the struggle over the platformization of societies around the globe.
The Platform Society highlights how this struggle plays out in four private and public sectors: news, urban transport, health, and education. Each struggle highlights local dimensions, for instance fights over regulation between individual platforms and city governments, but also addresses the level of the platform ecosystem as well as the geopolitical level where power clashes between global markets and (supra-)national governments take place.

Just about any social need is now met with an opportuniy to "connect" through digital means. But this convenience is not free—it is purchased with vast amounts of personal data transferred through shadowy backchannels to corporations using it to generate profit. The Costs of Connection uncovers this process, this "data colonialism," and its designs for controlling our lives—our ways of knowing; our means of production; our political participation.
Colonialism might seem like a thing of the past, but this book shows that the historic appropriation of land, bodies, and natural resources is mirrored today in this new era of pervasive datafication. Apps, platforms, and smart objects capture and translate our lives into data, and then extract information that is fed into capitalist enterprises and sold back to us. The authors argue that this development foreshadows the creation of a new social order emerging globally—and it must be challenged. Confronting the alarming degree of surveillance already tolerated, they offer a stirring call to decolonize the internet and emancipate our desire for connection.

越来越多的人沉迷于智能手机，而技术公司让用户上瘾的各种手段，开始浮出水面。包括：利用人类的沟通认同需求，利用注意捕获现象，利用视觉线索误导，利用大数据为用户量身定制，利用奖赏回路，利用不可预期的奖励，利用多重感官刺激……而作为用户，成瘾后果令人担忧。包括：成瘾症状，注意涣散，睡眠问题，亲子矛盾，各种精神障碍，校园欺凌伤害性的剧增，精神控制……

A new paperback edition of the first book by the bestselling author of "A History of the World in 6 Glasses"--the fascinating story of the telegraph, the world's first "Internet," which revolutionized the nineteenth century even more than the Internet has the twentieth and twenty first. "The Victorian Internet "tells the colorful story of the telegraph's creation and remarkable impact, and of the visionaries, oddballs, and eccentrics who pioneered it, from the eighteenth-century French scientist Jean-Antoine Nollet to Samuel F. B. Morse and Thomas Edison. The electric telegraph nullified distance and shrank the world quicker and further than ever before or since, and its story mirrors and predicts that of the Internet in numerous ways. Tom Standage is the former technology editor and current business editor at the" Economist." He is the author of "A History of the World in 6 Glasses," "The Turk," and "The Neptune File." "The Victorian Internet "tells the story of the telegraph, the world's first 'internet, ' which revolutionized the nineteenth century even more than the internet has the twentieth and twenty-first. The electric telegraph nullified distance and shrank the world quicker and further than any technology before or since, and its story mirrors and predicts that of the internet in numerous intriguing ways. Tom Standage covers the creation of the telegraph and remarkable impact it had on communication and society. He writes about the visionaries, oddballs, and eccentrics who pioneered it, from the eighteenth-century French scientist Jean-Antoine Nollet to Samuel F. B. Morse and Thomas Edison. By 1865, telegraph cables spanned continents and oceans, revolutionizing the ways countries dealt with one another. The new technology gave rise to creative business practices and new forms of crime. Romances blossomed over the wires. Secret codes were devised by some and cracked by others. The benefits of the network were relentlessly hyped by advocates and vehemently dismissed by skeptics. Government regulators tried and failed to control the new medium. Attitudes toward everything from news gathering to war had to be reconsidered. Meanwhile, on the wires, a technological subculture with its own customs and vocabulary was establishing itself. As globalization continues to makes the world seem smaller, "The Victorian Internet" reflects on what was the greatest revolution in communication since the invention of the printing press. The telegraph took that initial step toward connectedness across geographical, economical and social distances. "With every new technology, we overestimate how quickly people change their behavior. This dot-com cult classic compares Web fever to the awe of the telegraph. When Queen Victoria sent the first transatlantic cable to President Buchanan in 1858, the London Times said that the invention 'has half undone the Revolution of 1776, ' and torch-bearing revelers, celebrating the cable's completion, nearly burned down New York's City Hall. Publisher James Gordon Bennett rued: 'Mere newspapers must submit to destiny and go out of existence.' What was the best way to profit? Faster communications created our Information Age, but the telegraph industry was a short-lived wonder. By 1880, Western Union carried 80% of the traffic. Then came the phone."--L. Gordon Crovitz, "The Wall Street Journal ""Standage has written a lively book on the telegraph and its roles in helping 19th century business and technology grow . . . "The Victorian Internet "demonstrates engagingly that not even the 21st century technology is totally new."--"Denver"" Post "" The telegraph's] capacity to convey large amounts of information over vast distances with unprecedented dispatch was an irresistible form, causing what can only be called global revolution."--"Washington"" Post ""An entertaining primer on a complex subject of increasing interest."--"Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review ""One of the most fascinating books of the dotcom era . . . Standage is a good storyteller, and provides an engaging account of the rise and fall of the telegraph."--"The Financial Times ""Blends anecdote, suspense and science into richly readable stuff."--"The Independent" "A fascinating walk through a pivotal period in human history."--"USA Today ""Standage tells his fascinating story in an engaging, readable style, from the moment a bunch of Carthusian monks get suckered into a hilarious human electrical-conductivity experiment in 1746 to the telegraph's eventual eclipse by the telephone. If you've ever hankered for a perspective on media Net hype, this book is for you."--Hari Kunzru, "Wired ""Richly detailed . . . Standage's writing is colourful, smooth and wonderfully engaging."--"Smithsonian" magazine "A new technology will connect everyone It's making investors rich It's the Internet boom--except Samuel Morse is there "--"Fortune" magazine "This book should be essential reading for those caught up in our own information revolution."--"Christian Science Monitor ""I was simply fascinated by this book. It contains parallels between the reception of the telegraph and the Internet which I knew nothing about."--Vinton Cerf, co-inventor of the Internet "An inspired and utterly topical rediscovery of the emergence of the earliest modern communications technology."--William Gibson, author of "All Tomorrow's Parties" "A great read . . . The book makes the argument that the telegraph in its day was much more revolutionary than the internet is in our day."--Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia.org "An admirably efficient and concise telling of the story of the rise and decline of the telegraph. As with all good case histories, this one excites the mind with parallels to present day experience."--Henry Petroski, author of "The Pencil: A History of Design and Circunstance ""An almost unputdownable account of a technical revolution of a magnitude and

If the twentieth century saw the rise of “Big Science,” then the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were surely an age of thrift. As Simon Werrett’s new history shows, frugal early modern experimenters transformed their homes into laboratories as they recycled, repurposed, repaired, and reused their material possessions to learn about the natural world.
Thrifty Science explores this distinctive culture of experiment and demonstrates how the values of the household helped to shape an array of experimental inquiries, ranging from esoteric investigations of glowworms and sour beer to famous experiments such as Benjamin Franklin’s use of a kite to show lightning was electrical and Isaac Newton’s investigations of color using prisms. Tracing the diverse ways that men and women put their material possessions into the service of experiment, Werrett offers a history of practices of recycling and repurposing that are often assumed to be more recent in origin. This thriving domestic culture of inquiry was eclipsed by new forms of experimental culture in the nineteenth century, however, culminating in the resource-hungry science of the twentieth. Could thrifty science be making a comeback today, as scientists grapple with the need to make their research more environmentally sustainable?

“One of the most exciting developments from the world of ideas in decades, presented with panache by two frighteningly brilliant, endearingly unpretentious, and endlessly creative young scientists.” – Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature<br /><br />Our society has gone from writing snippets of information by hand to generating a vast flood of 1s and 0s that record almost every aspect of our who we know, what we do, where we go, what we buy, and who we love. This year, the world will generate 5 zettabytes of data. (That’s a five with twenty-one zeros after it.) Big data is revolutionizing the sciences, transforming the humanities, and renegotiating the boundary between industry and the ivory tower.<br /> <br />What is emerging is a new way of understanding our world, our past, and possibly, our future. In Uncharted , Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel tell the story of how they tapped into this sea of information to create a new kind of a tool that, instead of uncovering the motions of distant stars, charts trends in human history across the centuries. By teaming up with Google, they were able to analyze the text of millions of books. The result was a new field of research and a scientific tool, the Google Ngram Viewer, so groundbreaking that its public release made the front page of The New York Times , The Wall Street Journal , and The Boston Globe , and so addictive that Mother Jones called it “the greatest timewaster in the history of the internet.”<br /> <br />Using this scope, Aiden and Michel—and millions of users worldwide—are beginning to see answers to a dizzying array of once intractable questions. How quickly does technology spread? Do we talk less about God today? When did people start “having sex” instead of “making love”? At what age do the most famous people become famous? How fast does grammar change? Which writers had their works most effectively censored by the Nazis? When did the spelling “donut” start replacing the venerable “doughnut”? Can we predict the future of human history? Who is better known—Bill Clinton or the rutabaga?<br /> <br />All over the world, new scopes are popping up, using big data to quantify the human experience at the grandest scales possible. Yet dangers lurk in this ocean of 1s and 0s—threats to privacy and the specter of ubiquitous government surveillance. Aiden and Michel take readers on a voyage through these uncharted waters.

Provides an exciting approach to some of the most contentious issues in discussions around globalization—bioscientific research, neoliberalism, governance—from the perspective of the "anthropological" problems they pose; in other words, in terms of their implications for how individual and collective life is subject to technological, political, and ethical reflection and intervention.
Offers a ground-breaking approach to central debates about globalization with chapters written by leading scholars from across the social sciences.
Examines a range of phenomena that articulate broad structural transformations: technoscience, circuits of exchange, systems of governance, and regimes of ethics or values.
Investigates these phenomena from the perspective of the “anthropological” problems they pose.
Covers a broad range of geographical areas: Africa, the Middle East, East and South Asia, North America, South America, and Europe.
Grapples with a number of empirical problems of popular and academic interest — from the organ trade, to accountancy, to pharmaceutical research, to neoliberal reform.

A surprising, lively, and rich history of that ubiquitous doorstop that most of us take for granted.
Ammon Shea is not your typical thirtysomething book enthusiast. After reading the Oxford English Dictionary from cover to cover (and living to write about it in Reading the OED ), what classic, familiar, but little-read book would he turn to next? Yes, the phone book. With his signature combination of humor, curiosity, and passion for combing the dustbins of history, Shea offers readers a guided tour into the surprising, strange, and often hilarious history of the humble phone book.
From the first printed version in 1878 (it had fifty listings and no numbers) to the phone book's role in presidential elections, Supreme Court rulings, Senate filibusters, abstract art, subversive poetry, circus sideshows, criminal investigations, mental-health diagnoses, and much more, this surprising volume reveals a rich and colorful story that has never been told-until now.