"Tiffany Shlain explores how turning off screens one day a week can work wonders on your brain, body, and soul." -- from book jacket flap.

Over the past few decades there has been a revolution in terms of who controls knowledge and information. This rapid change has imperilled the way we think. Without pausing to consider the cost, the world has rushed to embrace the products and services of four titanic corporations. We shop with Amazon; socialise on Facebook; turn to Apple for entertainment; and rely on Google for information. These firms sell their efficiency and purport to make the world a better place, but what they have done instead is to enable an intoxicating level of daily convenience. As these companies have expanded, marketing themselves as champions of individuality and pluralism, their algorithms have pressed us into conformity and laid waste to privacy. They have produced an unstable and narrow culture of misinformation, and put us on a path to a world without private contemplation, autonomous thought, or solitary introspection - a world without mind. In order to restore our inner lives, we must avoid being co-opted by these gigantic companies, and understand the ideas that underpin their success. Elegantly tracing the intellectual history of computer science - from the Descartes and the enlightenment to Alan Turing to Stuart Brand and the hippie origins of today's Silicon Valley - Foer exposes the dark underpinnings of our most idealistic dreams for technology. The corporate ambitions of Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon, he argues, are trampling longstanding liberal values, especially intellectual property and privacy. This is a nascent stage in the total automation and homogenization of social, political, and intellectual life. By reclaiming our private authority over how we intellectually engage with the world, we have the power to stem the tide. At stake is nothing less than who we are, and what we will become. There have been monopolists in the past but today's corporate giants have far more nefarious aims. They're monopolists who want access to every facet of our identities and influence over every corner of our decision-making. Until now few have grasped the sheer scale of the threat. Foer explains not just the looming existential crisis but the imperative of resistance.

In 1946, the World Health Organization defined health as: "a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity." Until now, no one has defined this third dimension to health, or described strategies to deliver it. This ground-breaking book is the first to do so. Twenty-five years after the arrival of the Internet, we are drowning in data and deadlines; we can never have imagined that our daily intake of information and achieving a healthy balance in our personal and professional lives could feel so complex and so unhealthy. In recent years, organizations have come a long way towards promoting health literacy (on obesity, smoking, diet, and exercise) and some way in acknowledging mental health issues. But acknowledging the challenges of the Internet and social media on employee and workplace health is the social element, and most have not yet begun to offer solutions around either better information and knowledge management, or developing better and more sustaining relationships. The challenges, threats, and opportunities of a "perma-connected" global economy and society could not be greater-and they will only increase. This is the first book to define what social health means in both society and the modern workplace. Here, Julia Hobsbawm argues that developing social health will help employees become more efficiently engaged with each other and their work, and help employers to create workplaces that support social health and thus greater productivity.

Long with its interrelated companion volume, The Technology, Business, and Economics of Streaming Video, this book examines the next generation of TV--online video. It reviews the elements that lead to online platforms and video clouds and analyzes the software and hardware elements of content creation and interaction, and how these elements lead to different styles of video content. What are the models of this new content? What kind of cultural and societal acceleration can we expect? What are the public implications of the next-generation media system? What problems are arising? What kind of market power is emerging in media industries around the world? And how can one deal with them? The author addresses these questions with facts and figures, ranging across technology, economics, communications studies, business, policy, and law. He reviews the regulatory options, and recommends a new approach for video media. Media professionals in academia, management, technology, policy, and creative production will value the approachable yet thorough information presented in The Content, Impact, and Regulation of Streaming Video. --

Alan Sondheim's Writing Under explores and examines what happens to writing as it takes place on and through the networked computer. Sondheim began experimenting with artistic and philosophical writing using computers in the early 1970s. Since 1994, he has explored the possibilities of writing on the Internet, whether using blogs, web pages, e-mails, virtual worlds, or other tools. The sum total of Sondheim's writing online is entitled "The Internet Text." Writing Under selects from this work to provide insight into how writing takes place today and into the unique practices of a writer. The selections range from philosophical musings, to technical explorations of writing practice, to poetic meditations on the writer online. This work expands our understanding of writing today and charts a path for writing's future.