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16 books match the query 'Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)'

cover of Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being

Becoming Beside Ourselves

The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being

Brian Rotman

Duke University Press, 2008

Becoming Beside Ourselves continues the investigation that the renowned cultural theorist and mathematician Brian Rotman began in his previous books Signifying Nothing and Ad Infinitum...The Ghost in Turing’s Machine: exploring certain signs and the conceptual innovations and subjectivities that they facilitate or foreclose. In Becoming Beside Ourselves, Rotman turns his attention to alphabetic writing or the inscription of spoken language. Contending that all media configure what they mediate, he maintains that alphabetic writing has long served as the West’s dominant cognitive technology. Its logic and limitations have shaped thought and affect from its inception until the present. Now its grip on Western consciousness is giving way to virtual technologies and networked media, which are reconfiguring human subjectivity just as alphabetic texts have done for millennia.

Alphabetic texts do not convey the bodily gestures of human speech: the hesitations, silences, and changes of pitch that infuse spoken language with affect. Rotman suggests that by removing the body from communication, alphabetic texts enable belief in singular, disembodied, authoritative forms of being such as God and the psyche. He argues that while disembodied agencies are credible and real to “lettered selves,” they are increasingly incompatible with selves and subjectivities formed in relation to new virtual technologies and networked media. Digital motion-capture technologies are restoring gesture and even touch to a prominent role in communication. Parallel computing is challenging the linear thought patterns and ideas of singularity facilitated by alphabetic language. Barriers between self and other are breaking down as the networked self is traversed by other selves to become multiple and distributed, formed through many actions and perceptions at once. The digital self is going plural, becoming beside itself.

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cover of Bodies In Technology

Bodies In Technology

Don Ihde

University of Minnesota Press, 2001

An original exploration of the ways cyberspace affects human experience.

New technologies suggest new ideas about embodiment: our "reach" extends to global sites through the Internet; we enter cyberspace through the engines of virtual reality. In this book, a leading philosopher of technology explores the meaning of bodies in technology-how the sense of our bodies and of our orientation in the world is affected by the various information technologies.

Bodies in Technology begins with an analysis of embodiment in cyberspace, then moves on to consider ways in which social theorists have interpreted or overlooked these conditions. An astute and sensible judge of these theories, Don Ihde is a uniquely provocative and helpful guide through contemporary thinking about technology and embodiment, drawing on sources and examples as various as video games, popular films, the workings of e-mail, and virtual reality techniques.Charting the historical, philosophical, and practical territory between virtual reality and real life, this work is an important contribution to the national conversation on the impact technology-and information technology in particular-has on our lives in a wired, global age.
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cover of Buy It Now: Lessons from eBay

Buy It Now

Lessons from eBay

Michele White

Duke University Press, 2012

In Buy It Now, Michele White examines eBay and its emphasis on community and social norms, revealing the cultural assumptions about gender, race, and sexuality that are reinforced throughout the site. She shows how instructional texts, rule systems, and advertisements "configure the user," allowing eBay to indicate how the site is supposed to function while also upholding particular values and practices. White details how eBay reinforces stereotypes about gender and sexuality, looking, for example, at descriptions included in wedding dress listings, and how eBay directs individuals to the "Adult Only" part of the website when they use the search terms "gay" and "lesbian." She discloses the ways that eBay promises a caring community but its "Black Americana" category reproduces racism by allowing sellers' narratives that excuse and romanticize slavery and insult African Americans. White also looks at how participants challenge eBay's categories, rules, and values, examining widely used strategies of resistance by sellers and buyers in the lesbian and gay interest listings. By analyzing the organizational and cultural logics present in eBay, White emphasizes how other Internet settings, including craigslist, are not as transparent, community-oriented, and empowering as they claim. She proposes methods for researching and reconceptualizing new media sites.
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cover of Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work

Designing Culture

The Technological Imagination at Work

Anne Balsamo

Duke University Press, 2011

The renowned cultural theorist and media designer Anne Balsamo maintains that technology and culture are inseparable; those who engage in technological innovation are designing the cultures of the future. Designing Culture is a call for taking culture seriously in the design and development of innovative technologies. Balsamo contends that the wellspring of technological innovation is the technological imagination, a quality of mind that enables people to think with technology, to transform what is known into what is possible. She describes the technological imagination at work in several multimedia collaborations in which she was involved as a designer or developer. One of these entailed the creation of an interactive documentary for the NGO Forum held in conjunction with the UN World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. (That documentary is included as a DVD in Designing Culture.) Balsamo also recounts the development of the interactive museum exhibit XFR: Experiments in the Future of Reading, created by the group RED (Research in Experimental Documents) at Xerox PARC. She speculates on what it would mean to cultivate imaginations as ingenious in creating new democratic cultural possibilities as they are in creating new kinds of technologies and digital media. Designing Culture is a manifesto for transforming educational programs and developing learning strategies adequate to the task of inspiring culturally attuned technological imaginations.
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cover of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): Concepts, enabling tools, technologies and applications

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)

Concepts, enabling tools, technologies and applications

Pethuru Raj

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2023

The world is keen to leverage multi-faceted AI techniques and tools to deploy and deliver the next generation of business and IT applications. Resource-intensive gadgets, machines, instruments, appliances, and equipment spread across a variety of environments are empowered with AI competencies. Connected products are collectively or individually enabled to be intelligent in their operations, offering and output.
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cover of Managing the Infosphere: Governance, Technology, and Cultural Practice in Motion

Managing the Infosphere

Governance, Technology, and Cultural Practice in Motion

Stephen D. McDowell, Philip E. Steinberg and Tami K. Tomasello

Temple University Press, 2007

Managing the Infosphere examines the global world of communications as a mobile space that overlaps uneasily with the world of sovereign, territorial nation-states.  Drawing on their expertise in geography, political science, international relations, and communication studies, the authors investigate specific policy problems encountered when international organizations, corporations, and individual users try to "manage" a space that simultaneously contradicts and supports existing institutions and systems of governance, identity, and technology.

The authors argue that the roles of these systems in cyberspace cannot be fully understood unless they are seen as mutually constituting each other in specific historical structures, institutions, and practices.  With vision and insight, the authors look beyond the Internet to examine the entire networked world, from cell phones and satellites to global tourism and business travel.
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cover of More-than-Human Aging: Animals, Robots, and Care in Later Life

More-than-Human Aging

Animals, Robots, and Care in Later Life

Cristina Douglas

Rutgers University Press, 2025

What does later life look like when it is lived in the companionship of other species? Similarly, how do other species age (or not) with humans, and what sort of (a)symmetries, if any, are brought to light around how we understand and think about aging? So far, aging has been investigated in the social sciences in purely human terms. This is the first collection of original work that considers aging as taking place in relation to other species. This volume aims to start a conversation about aging by taking its more-than-human participants seriously—that is, not only as a support for or context of human aging but also, more symmetrically, as agents and subjects in the process of aging. The contributors draw upon richly descriptive ethnographic accounts, including moments of connection between seniors and dogs in a long-term care facility, human care for aging laboratory animals, and robotic companionship in later life. The ethnographies in this volume not only enrich our understanding of more-than-human companionship during the human aging process but also challenge and urge us to rethink what it means to live later in life in ecologically entangled social and moral worlds.
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cover of Phantom Politics: Bots, Humans, AI, and Social Media

Phantom Politics

Bots, Humans, AI, and Social Media

Mina Momeni

Rutgers University Press, 2027

Phantom Politics develops a new framework for understanding how humans, bots, and AI systems interact on social media platforms and structure political communication. Focusing primarily on X (formerly Twitter), it analyzes three cases: the 2017 Women’s March, the 2019 “Build the Wall” discourse, and U.S. federal election discourse in 2024, to demonstrate how X functions not only as a mirror of political trends but also as a driver of change in the digital public sphere. The book shows how political participation is shaped by both authentic political expression and bot-driven narratives. It introduces new concepts to explain how AI-generated political speech can appear human while remaining detached from a human speaker, raising urgent questions about agency, accountability, and political voice. At a time when AI technologies are becoming increasingly integrated into public life, the book examines how emerging forms of automation are reshaping democratic discourse, challenging traditional understandings of participation, and transforming the ways political ideas circulate, gain visibility, and influence public debate.

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cover of Reverse Engineering Social Media: Software, Culture, and Political Economy in New Media Capitalism

Reverse Engineering Social Media

Software, Culture, and Political Economy in New Media Capitalism

Robert W Gehl

Temple University Press, 2014

Robert Gehl's timely critique, Reverse Engineering Social Media, rigorously analyzes the ideas of social media and software engineers, using these ideas to find contradictions and fissures beneath the surfaces of glossy sites such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter. 

 

Gehl adeptly uses a mix of software studies, science and technology studies, and political economy to reveal the histories and contexts of these social media sites. Looking backward at divisions of labor and the process of user labor, he provides case studies that illustrate how binary "Like" consumer choices hide surveillance systems that rely on users to build content for site owners who make money selling user data, and that promote a culture of anxiety and immediacy over depth.

 

Reverse Engineering Social Media also presents ways out of this paradox, illustrating how activists, academics, and users change social media for the better by building alternatives to the dominant social media sites.

 
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cover of Simulating Good and Evil: The Morality and Politics of Videogames

Simulating Good and Evil

The Morality and Politics of Videogames

Marcus Schulzke

Rutgers University Press, 2020

Simulating Good and Evil shows that the moral panic surrounding violent videogames is deeply misguided, and often politically motivated, but that games are nevertheless morally important. Simulated actions are morally defensible because they take place outside the real world and do not inflict real harms. Decades of research purporting to show that videogames are immoral has failed to produce convincing evidence of this. However, games are morally important because they simulate decisions that would have moral weight if they were set in the real world. Videogames should be seen as spaces in which players may experiment with moral reasoning strategies without taking any actions that would themselves be subject to moral evaluation. Some videogame content may be upsetting or offensive, but mere offense does not necessarily indicate a moral problem. Upsetting content is best understood by applying existing theories for evaluating political ideologies and offensive speech.
 
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cover of Technology and Engagement: Making Technology Work for First Generation College Students

Technology and Engagement

Making Technology Work for First Generation College Students

Rowan-Kenyon, Heather T.

Rutgers University Press, 2018

Winner of the 2018 Association for the Study of Higher Education Outstanding Book Award​

Technology and Engagement is based on a four-year study of how first generation college students use social media, aimed at improving their transition to and engagement with their university. Through web technology, including social media sites, students were better able to maintain close ties with family and friends from home, as well as engage more with social and academic programs at their university. This ‘ecology of transition’ was important in keeping the students focused on why they were in college, and helped them become more integrated into the university setting. By showing the gains in campus capital these first-generation college students obtained through social media, the authors offer concrete suggestions for how other universities and college-retention programs can utilize the findings to increase their own retention of first-generation college students.  
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cover of The Counterfeit Coin: Videogames and Fantasies of Empowerment

The Counterfeit Coin

Videogames and Fantasies of Empowerment

Christopher Goetz

Rutgers University Press, 2023

The Counterfeit Coin argues that games and related entertainment media have become almost inseparable from fantasy. In turn, these media are making fantasy itself visible in new ways. Though apparently asocial and egocentric—an internal mental image expressing the fulfillment of some wish—fantasy has become a key term in social contestations of the emerging medium. At issue is whose fantasies are catered to, who feels powerful and gets their way, and who is left out. This book seeks to undo the monolith of commercial gaming by locating multiplicity and difference within fantasy itself. It introduces and tracks three broad fantasy traditions that dynamically connect apparently distinct strata of a game (story and play), that join games to other media, and that encircle players in pleasurable loops as they follow these connections.
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cover of Time and the Digital: Connecting Technology, Aesthetics, and a Process Philosophy of Time

Time and the Digital

Connecting Technology, Aesthetics, and a Process Philosophy of Time

Timothy Scott Barker

Dartmouth College Press, 2012

Eschewing the traditional focus on object/viewer spatial relationships, Timothy Scott Barker’s Time and the Digital stresses the role of the temporal in digital art and media. The connectivity of contemporary digital interfaces has not only expanded the relationships between once separate spaces but has increased the complexity of the temporal in nearly unimagined ways. Invoking the process philosophy of Whitehead and Deleuze, Barker strives for nothing less than a new philosophy of time in digital encounters, aesthetics, and interactivity. Of interest to scholars in the fields of art and media theory and philosophy of technology, as well as new media artists, this study contributes to an understanding of the new temporal experiences emergent in our interactions with digital technologies.
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cover of Transparency for Robots and Autonomous Systems: Fundamentals, technologies and applications

Transparency for Robots and Autonomous Systems

Fundamentals, technologies and applications

Robert H. Wortham

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2020

Based on scientific understanding and empirical evidence of how humans understand and interact with robotic and autonomous systems, the author reviews the concerns that have been raised around the deployment of AI and robots in human society, and the potential for disruption and harm. He explains why transparency ought to be a fundamental design consideration for Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and artificial intelligent systems. Starting with a survey of global research in the field and what transparency means in the wider context of trust, control and ethics, the author then introduces a transparent robot control architecture, and the impact of transparency using real-time displays. He presents a case study of a muttering robot, and covers current and upcoming standards for transparency, as well as future perspectives for the design, manufacture and operation of autonomous robotic systems.
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cover of Waiting for Robots: The Hired Hands of Automation

Waiting for Robots

The Hired Hands of Automation

Antonio A. Casilli

University of Chicago Press, 2025

An essential investigation that pulls back the curtain on automation, like AI, to show human workers’ hidden labor.
 
Artificial Intelligence fuels both enthusiasm and panic. Technologists are inclined to give their creations leeway, pretend they’re animated beings, and consider them efficient. As users, we may complain when these technologies don’t obey, or worry about their influence on our choices and our livelihoods. And yet, we also yearn for their convenience, see ourselves reflected in them, and treat them as something entirely new. But when we overestimate the automation of these tools, award-winning author Antonio A. Casilli argues, we fail to recognize how our fellow humans are essential to their efficiency. The danger is not that robots will take our jobs, but that humans will have to do theirs.
 
In this bracing and powerful book, Casilli uses up-to-the-minute research to show how today’s technologies, including AI, continue to exploit human labor—even ours. He connects the diverse activities of today’s tech laborers: platform workers, like Uber drivers and Airbnb hosts; “micro workers,” including those performing atomized tasks like data entry on Amazon Mechanical Turk; and the rest of us, as we evaluate text or images to show we’re not robots, react to Facebook posts, or approve or improve the output of generative AI. As Casilli shows us, algorithms, search engines, and voice assistants wouldn’t function without unpaid or underpaid human contributions. Further, he warns that if we fail to recognize this human work, we risk a dark future for all human labor.
 
Waiting for Robots urges us to move beyond the simplistic notion that machines are intelligent and autonomous. As the proverbial Godot, robots are the bearers of a messianic promise that is always postponed. Instead of bringing prosperity for all, they discipline the workforce, so we don’t dream of a world without drudgery and exploitation. Casilli’s eye-opening book makes clear that most “automation” requires human labor—and likely always will—shedding new light on today’s consequences and tomorrow’s threats of failing to recognize and compensate the “click workers” of today.
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cover of War Games

War Games

Jonna Eagle

Rutgers University Press, 2020

The word “wargames” might seem like a contradiction in terms. After all, the declaration “This is war” is meant to signal that things have turned deadly serious, that there is no more playing around. Yet the practices of war are intimately entangled with practices of gaming, from military videogames to live battle reenactments. How do these forms of play impact how both soldiers and civilians perceive acts of war?
 
This Quick Take considers how various war games and simulations shape the ways we imagine war. Paradoxically, these games grant us a sense of mastery and control as we strategize and scrutinize the enemy, yet also allow us the thrilling sense of being immersed in the carnage and chaos of battle. But as simulations of war become more integrated into both popular culture and military practice, how do they shape our apprehension of the traumatic realities of warfare?
 
Covering everything from chess to football, from Saving Private Ryan to American Sniper, and from Call of Duty to drone interfaces, War Games is an essential guide for anyone seeking to understand the militarization of American culture, offering a compact yet comprehensive look at how we play with images of war.
 
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