一位妇女丢掉了手机，但征召了一群志愿者将其从盗窃者手中夺回。一个旅客在乘坐飞机时领受恶劣服务，她通过自己的博客发动了一场全民运动。在伦敦地铁爆炸案和印度洋海啸中，公民们用可拍照手机提供了比摄影记者更完备的记录。世界上最大的百科全书是由管理甚少的参与者们撰写的……
不论在何处，你都能看见人们走到一起彼此分享，共同工作，或是发起某种公共行动。一部集众人之力的百科全书、一个丢失手机的传奇，这些事情看上去似乎没有什么联系，但它们乃至更多事情的影响实际上有着共同的根基：在人类历史上第一次，我们的交流工具支持群体对话与群体行动。聚集一群人并使之行动原本对资源有极高的要求，使得全世界范围内的群体努力都被置于一种制度的垄断之下。今天，全球分享与合作的工具终于交到了个体公民的手中。
如同印刷机放大了个人的头脑，电话加强了双向沟通，一系列新工具如即时通信、移动电话、网络日志和维基百科也强化了群体交流。因为人类天生就擅长群体工作，所有能够强化群体努力的东西终会改变社会。商业模式以一种令人头晕目眩的速度被改变，更大的社会影响达到极为深刻的程度，以致我们无法认识。现在一个拥有笔记本电脑的人可以掀起一场颠覆10亿美元产业的运动。
在本书中，克雷·舍基，一个新文化的最敏锐的观察者，对此种社会革命的后果——无论是好是坏——给予了明晰而富有穿透力的解析，并思考了我们是谁，我们可以做什么。

Will new information technologies, especially the Internet, bring freedom and democracy to authoritarian China? This study argues that the Internet has brought about new dynamics of socio-political changes in China, and that state power and social forces are transforming in Internet-mediated public space. Its findings are fourfold. First, the Internet empowers both the state and society. The Internet has played an important role in facilitating political liberalization, and made government more open, transparent, and accountable. Second, the Internet produces enormous effects which are highly decentralized and beyond the reach of state power. Third, the Internet has created a new infrastructure for the state and society in their engagement with (and disengagement from) each other. Fourth, the Internet produces a recursive relationship between state and society. The interactions between the state and society over the Internet end up reshaping both the state and society.

While social scientists and historians have been exchanging ideas for a long time, they have never developed a proper dialogue about social theory. William H. Sewell Jr. observes that on questions of theory the communication has been mostly one way: from social science to history. Logics of History argues that both history and the social sciences have something crucial to offer each other. While historians do not think of themselves as theorists, they know something social scientists do not: how to think about the temporalities of social life. On the other hand, while social scientists’ treatments of temporality are usually clumsy, their theoretical sophistication and penchant for structural accounts of social life could offer much to historians.
Renowned for his work at the crossroads of history, sociology, political science, and anthropology, Sewell argues that only by combining a more sophisticated understanding of historical time with a concern for larger theoretical questions can a satisfying social theory emerge. In Logics of History, he reveals the shape such an engagement could take, some of the topics it could illuminate, and how it might affect both sides of the disciplinary divide.

《失控》，全名为《失控：机器、社会与经济的新生物学》（Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World）。
2006年，《长尾》作者克里斯·安德森在亚马逊网站上这样评价该书：
“这可能是90年代最重要的一本书”，并且是“少有的一年比一年卖得好的书”。“尽管书中的一些例子在十几年后可能有些过时，但（它们所表达的）信息却越来越成为真知灼见”。“在那时人们还无法想象博客和维基等大众智慧的突起，但凯利却分毫不差地预见到了。这可能是过去十年来最聪明的一本书。”
这是一部思考人类社会（或更一般意义上的复杂系统）进化的“大部头”著作，对于那些不惧于“头脑体操”的读者来说，必然会开卷有益。
《失控》成书于1994年，作者是《连线》杂志的创始主编凯文·凯利。这本书所记述的，是他对当时科技、社会和经济最前沿的一次漫游，以及借此所窥得的未来图景。
书中提到并且今天正在兴起或大热的概念包括：大众智慧、云计算、物联网、虚拟现实、敏捷开发、协作、双赢、共生、共同进化、网络社区、网络经济，等等。说它是一本“预言式”的书并不为过。其中必定还隐藏着我们尚未印证或窥破的对未来的“预言”。

In The Network Society, Darin Barney provides a compelling examination of the social, political and economic implications of network technologies and their application across a wide range of practices and institutions.
Are we in the midst of a digital revolution? Have new information and communication technologies given birth to a new form of society, or do they reinforce and extend existing patterns and relationships? This book provides a clear and engaging discussion of these and other questions. Using a sophisticated model of the relationship between technology and society, Barney investigates both what has changed, and what has remained the same, in the age of the Internet. Among the issues discussed are debates concerning the emergence of a 'knowledge economy'; digital restructuring of employment and work; globalization and the status of the nation-state; the prospects of digital democracy; the digital divide; new social movements; and culture, community and identity in the age of new media.
This book provides an accessible resource for a thoughtful engagement with life in the network society. It will be essential reading for students in sociology and media and communication studies. This will be a valuable textbook for undergraduate students of sociology and media and communication studies.

This is Jurgen Habermas's most concrete historical-sociological book and one of the key contributions to political thought in the postwar period. It will be a revelation to those who have known Habermas only through his theoretical writing to find his later interests in problems of legitimation and communication foreshadowed in this lucid study of the origins, nature, and evolution of public opinion in democratic societies.

This authoritative study explores China's rapidly evolving polity, economy, and society through the prism of its communication system. Yuezhi Zhao offers a multifaceted, interdisciplinary analysis of communication in China and its central role in the struggle for control during the country's rise to global power. The industry in all its forms-ranging from the news media to entertainment outlets to the Internet-has been a critical battleground among different social forces in this period of wrenching change. The author explores alterations in the structure and content of Chinese communication in light of the rapid evolution of state-society relations to reveal the profoundly contradictory, conflicted, and uncertain nature of China's ongoing transformation.

Contesting Media Power is the most ambitious international collection to date on the worldwide growth of alternative media that are challenging the power concentration in large media corporations. Media scholars and political scientists develop a broad comparative framework for analyzing alternative media in Australia, Chile, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Russia, Sweden, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Topics include independent media centers, gay online networks and alternative web discussion forums, feminist film, political journalism and social networks, indigenous communication, and church-sponsored media. This important book will help shape debates on the media's role in current global struggles, such as the anti-globalization movement.

The Internet in China examines the cultural and political ramifications of the Internet for Chinese society. The rapid growth of the Internet has been enthusiastically embraced by the Chinese government, but the government has also rushed to seize control of the virtual environment. Individuals have responded with impassioned campaigns against official control of information. The emergence of a civil society via cyberspace has had profound effects upon China--for example, in 2003, based on an Internet campaign, the Chinese Supreme People's Court overturned the ruling of a local court for the first time since the Communist Party came to power in 1949.
The important question this book asks is not whether the Internet will democratize China, but rather in what ways the Internet is democratizing communication in China. How is the Internet empowering individuals by fostering new types of social spaces and redefining existing social relations?

Manuel Castells is one of the world's leading thinkers on the new information age, hailed by The Economist as "the first significant philosopher of cyberspace," and by Christian Science Monitor as "a pioneer who has hacked out a logical, well-documented, and coherent picture of early 21st
century civilization, even as it rockets forward largely in a blur." Now, in The Internet Galaxy, this brilliantly insightful writer speculates on how the Internet will change our lives.
Castells believes that we are "entering, full speed, the Internet Galaxy, in the midst of informed bewilderment." His aim in this exciting and profound work is to help us to understand how the Internet came into being, and how it is affecting every area of human life--from work, politics,
planning and development, media, and privacy, to our social interaction and life in the home. We are at ground zero of the new network society. In this book, its major commentator reveals the Internet's huge capacity to liberate, but also its ability to marginalize and exclude those who do not
have access to it. Castells provides no glib solutions, but asks us all to take responsibility for the future of this new information age.
The Internet is becoming the essential communication and information medium in our society, and stands alongside electricity and the printing press as one of the greatest innovations of all time. The Internet Galaxy offers an illuminating look at how this new technology will influence business,
the economy, and our daily lives.

《信息时代三部曲：经济、社会与文化》包括《网络社会的崛起》《认同的力量》《千年终结》，由英国Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 授权出版，据原书1997版和2000版译出。2001年和2006年版《网络社会的崛起》也使用了同一ISBN。

Digital technology is changing our politics. The World Wide Web is already a powerful influence on the public's access to government documents, the tactics and content of political campaigns, the behavior of voters, the efforts of activists to circulate their messages, and the ways in which topics enter the public discourse. The essays collected here capture the richness of current discourse about democracy and cyberspace. Some contributors offer front-line perspectives on the impact of emerging technologies on politics, journalism, and civic experience. What happens, for example, when we increase access to information or expand the arena of free speech? Other contributors place our shifting understanding of citizenship in historical context, suggesting that notions of cyber-democracy and online community must grow out of older models of civic life. Still others consider the global flow of information and test our American conceptions of cyber-democracy against developments in other parts of the world. How, for example, do new media operate in Castro's Cuba, in post-apartheid South Africa, and in the context of multicultural debates on the Pacific Rim? For some contributors, the new technologies endanger our political culture; for others, they promise civic renewal.

Information and computer technologies are used every day by real people with real needs. The authors contributing to Shaping the Network Society describe how technology can be used effectively by communities, activists, and citizens to meet society's challenges. In their vision, computer professionals are concerned less with bits, bytes, and algorithms and more with productive partnerships that engage both researchers and community activists. These collaborations are producing important sociotechnical work that will affect the future of the network society.Traditionally, academic research on real-world users of technology has been neglected or even discouraged. The authors contributing to this book are working to fill this gap; their theoretical and practical discussions illustrate a new orientation -- research that works with people in their natural social environments, uses common language rather than rarefied academic discourse, and takes a pragmatic perspective. The topics they consider are key to democratization and social change. They include human rights in the "global billboard society"; public computing in Toledo, Ohio; public digital culture in Amsterdam; "civil networking" in the former Yugoslavia; information technology and the international public sphere; "historical archaeologies" of community networks; "technobiographical" reflections on the future; libraries as information commons; and globalization and media democracy, as illustrated by Indymedia, a global collective of independent media organizations.

It is widely recognized that internet technology has had a profound effect on political participation in China, but this new use of technology is not unprecedented in Chinese history. This is a pioneering work that systematically describes and analyzes the manner in which the Chinese used telegraphy during the late Qing, and the internet in the contemporary period, to participate in politics. Drawing upon insights from the fields of anthropology, history, political science, and media studies, this book historicizes the internet in China and may change the direction of the emergent field of Chinese internet studies. In contrast to previous works, this book is unprecedented in its perspective, in the depth of information and understanding, in the conclusions it reaches, and in its methodology. Written in a clear and engaging style, this book is accessible to a broad audience.

Chinese Cyberspaces provides a multi-disciplinary study on the recent development and
consequences of Internet expansion in China taken from social, political, cultural and
economic perspectives. The book provides critical analysis of the effects of Internet
technology on China’s information policy and overall political stability as well as the
political implications.
Original fieldwork from a leading group of international scholars carried out over the
last two years suggests that although the digital divide has developed along typical lines
of gender, urban versus rural, and income, it has also been greatly influenced by the
Communist Party’s attempts to exert efficient control. This compelling overview of the
current situation regarding Internet development in China and its potential future trends
will appeal to social science academics and decision makers in politics, business and
international organizations.

本书主要讨论网络中的民主问题。网络技术已经深刻地影响了我们的生活，我们随时可以获得我们需要的信息，我们也随时可以与别人联系，那么网络技术是不是就是民主的福音呢？作者回答说不，他认为通过网络人们更容易获得的是自己喜欢的信息，而拒绝接受自己不喜欢的信息，事实上人们得到的是窄化的信息，很多的网站也不和与自己立场相反的网站链接。而在一个真正的民主的环境中，信息应是多元的并且不是我们事先选择的，在其中我们还拥有一些共同的经验，例如公园和街谈巷议。作者认为信息的窄化其结果是社会会趋于分裂，各种仇恨群体更容易相互联系和影响，也更容易对社会发动攻击。作者认为政府应积极介入以提供一个多元的信息环境。
本书译文质量较差。

本书作者近距离地采访了与Facebook相关的人士，其中包括Facebook的创始人、员工、投资人、意向投资人以及合作伙伴，加起来超过了130人。这是真切详实的访谈，更是超级精彩的故事。作者以其细腻的笔触，精巧的叙事结构，解密了Facebook如何从哈佛的宿舍里萌发，创始人的内讧，权力之争，如何放弃华盛顿邮报的投资，怎样争取到第一个广告客户，而第一轮融资又如何获得一亿美元的估值，让人痴迷的图片产品如何上线，面对Twitter的竞争，与Google的世纪之争……一个创办仅7年，就拥有5亿活跃用户，年收入超过5亿美元，估值超过200亿美元的传奇企业再加上一个年仅26岁的的“娃娃CEO”，在你面前“裸奔”。激情澎湃的创业精神，智慧传奇的融资经历，一个聚合世界的社交帝国向你彻底开放，你还等什么？

This is a co-authored book of all new material on the topic of media democracy and activism.
The authors consider the ways in which media, particularly broadcast media is made by and for a narrow audience of white, middle-class, heterosexual, Westerners that conform to the ideal values of the governing body. They consider how certain demographics are denied representation in the news, how they are unable to afford new technologies (digitalization, the internet, broadband) and cannot afford the education in order to get employment in the media industries and thus gain equality in choosing content. The authors call this the democratic deficit of mainstream media and look at alternate forms of activism to redress the imbalance in the media. They consider ways in which new media like the internet could be used to allow multiple perspectives of the same event, rather than only one side of the story being broadcast, and then consider how this still negates the reason for the activism as the internet is not available to all.
The text considers the key concepts of political media theory. The main cast are all here: Gramsci, Bourdieu, Habermas, Baudrillard etc as well as the new activism groups - CPBF, Media Alliance, FAIR.
Freedom of speech and the importance of freedom of the media is more at debate now than ever before with the issuance of special journalism visas for British journalists to enter the USA and the whole BBC sexing up Iraq debacle, so the book will be quite topical if the authors deliver on time.