Articulos
“The Internet has revolutionized our lives!” is an often heard exclamation. The Internet has added a lot to our lives indeed, and has also made a few things disappear. Think of all the things that became obsolete due to the Internet, such as letter writing, privacy, and all kinds of brokers and middlemen. These developments […]
What Happened? The Internet has turned our existence upside down. It has revolutionized communications, to the extent that it is now our preferred medium of everyday communication. In almost everything we do, we use the Internet. Ordering a pizza, buying a television, sharing a moment with a friend, sending a picture over instant messaging. Before […]
Introduction In many ways, it is difficult to discuss any aspect of contemporary society without considering the Internet. Many people’s lives are saturated so thoroughly with digital technology that the once obvious distinction between either being online or offline now fails to do justice to a situation where the Internet is implicitly always on. Indeed, it is often observed that […]
No one disputes that new technologies, including the ubiquitous Internet and World Wide Web along with social media, have changed our lives and how we work and play. Most people who use these technologies can point to many positive things that have resulted. What we tend not to focus on, though, is the primary downside […]
Most believe that the Internet is either a tool to subjugate or liberate. But it can do both and in different ways depending on the specific historical conditions in a given country. The Internet is like money; you cannot identify its good or evil in general as it already forms part of society and it will depend on the individual conditions. How and why we have settled on this language and this set of metaphors, i.e. the idea that the Internet is an agent similar to printing, constitutes in itself a matter of profound importance that our digital intellectuals avoid addressing as it deserves to be addressed. The great intellectual mistake we could make would be to assume that, somehow, if we reflect enough on the Internet, we will get the right answer about what will happen in the world when everything is digital and it is interconnected. […]
Introduction The Internet is the decisive technology of the Information Age, as the electrical engine was the vector of technological transformation of the Industrial Age. This global network of computer networks, largely based nowadays on platforms of wireless communication, provides ubiquitous capacity of multimodal, interactive communication in chosen time, transcending space. The Internet is not […]
Preface The real world isn’t like the online world. In the real world, you only have to worry about the criminals who live in your city. But in the online world, you have to worry about criminals who could be on the other side of the planet. Online crime is always international because the Internet […]
In 2010, the CEO of Google at the time, Eric Schmidt, made a remarkable statement at a media event in Abu Dhabi: “One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just [use Google’s data about its users] to predict the stock market. And then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped […]
As children, we were fascinated by seemingly everyday objects that turned out to be magic. The heroes of fairytales, legends, and myths would routinely surmount the difficulties they faced with the help of some magic item whose hidden powers defied the laws of nature. In modern popular culture this motif is perhaps best embodied in […]
The web will change dramatically—will disappear, and be replaced by a new form of Cybersphere—because there are only two basic choices when you arrange information, and the web chose wrong. You can arrange information in space or in time. Arranging information in space means distributing it over a surface or through a volume, as in […]