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In this book, the world's foremost cyber security experts share critical practical knowledge on how the cyberspace ecosystem is structured, how it functions, and what we can do to protect it and ourselves from attack and exploitation. It collects the wisdom of cyber security professionals and practitioners from government, academia, and industry across national and international boundaries. It provides readers with the information they need to secure and sustain the cyberspace ecosystem and to defend themselves against all kinds of adversaries and attacks. It provides critical intelligence on cyber crime and security—including details of real-life operations. Among the many important topics it covers are: building a secure cyberspace ecosystem; public-private partnerships to secure cyberspace; law enforcement to protect cyber citizens and to safeguard cyber infrastructure; and strategy and policy issues relating to the security of the cyberecosystem.

This volume not only examines traditional questions about broadband, such as availability and access, but also explores and evaluates new metrics that are more applicable to the evolving technologies of information access. It brings together a group of media policy scholars from a wide range of disciplines including economics, law, policy studies, computer science, information science, and communications studies. It asks questions such as: After broadband access, what next? What role do metrics play in understanding information societies and, more important, in shaping their policies? Beyond counting people with broadband access, how can economic and social metrics inform broadband policies, help evaluate their outcomes, and create useful models for achieving national goals? Importantly, the book provides a well-rounded, international perspective on theoretical approaches to communications policymaking in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Showcasing a diversity of approaches, this collection aims to help meet the myriad challenges involved in improving the development of communications policy around the world.

In a crucial shift within posthumanistic media studies, Bernhard Siegert dissolves the concept of media into a network of operations that reproduce, displace, process, and reflect the distinctions fundamental for a given culture. Siegert seeks to re-locate media and culture on a level where the distinctions between object and performance, matter and form, human and non-human, sign and channel, the symbolic and the real, are still in the process of becoming. The result is to turn ontology into a domain of all that is meant in German by the word Kultur. Cultural techniques comprise not only self-referential symbolic practices like reading, writing, counting or image-making. The analysis of “media” as cultural techniques emphasizes the practices in which they are embedded, shifting from first-order to second-order techniques, from the technical to the artistic, from object to sign, from the natural to the cultural, from the operational to the representational. Cultural Techniques ranges from seafaring, drafting, and eating, to the production of the sign-signal-distinction in old and new media, to the reproduction of anthropological difference, to the study of trompe-l’oeils, grids, registers, and doors. All chapters address the fundamental question of how ontological distinctions can be replaced by chains of operations that process those alleged ontological distinctions within the ontic.

In this witty and openly polemical critique of Google, Barbara Cassin looks at Google’s claims to organize knowledge, and its alleged ethical basis, through a reading of its two founding principles: “Our mission is to organize the world’s information” and “Don’t be evil”. Cassin is a formidable Hellenist by training, and in Google-Me she uses her profound knowledge of Greek culture, philology and philosophy (and of the history of philosophy more broadly) to challenge the basis on which Google makes its claims and the manner in which it carries out its operations. The perspective it presents on Google is anything but drily philological, densely philosophical, or academic in its tone, but it offers us an entertaining account of its origins and history up until 2007. We would all be well-advised to take this critique seriously, since it goes to the heart of what we often think of rather uncritically as the benefits to humanity of increasingly advanced internet technology. As Cassin puts it toward the end, “Google is a champion of cultural democracy, but without culture and without democracy.” Published originally in French in 2007, Cassin’s book is translated into English for the first time by Michael Syrotinski, and includes a co-authored and updated afterword by Cassin and Syrotinski.

In this book, the author argues that media pluralism needs to be rescued from its depoliticized uses and re-imagined more broadly as a normative value that refers to the distribution of communicative power in the public sphere. It notes that access to a broad range of different political views and cultural expressions is often regarded as a self-evident value in both theoretical and political debates on media and democracy. While this pluralism is commonly accepted as a guiding principle of media policy, the book argues that opinions on the meaning and nature of media pluralism vary widely, and that definitions of it can easily be adjusted to suit different political purposes. It contends that the notions of media pluralism and diversity have been reduced to empty catchphrases or that they have been conflated with consumer choice and market competition. This has left key questions about social and political values, democracy and citizenship unexamined. The book argues that, instead of something that is simply measured through the number of media outlets available, media pluralism should be understood in terms of its ability to challenge inequalities and create a more democratic public sphere.

This collection brings together strategies for advancing media reform objectives, prepared by 33 scholars and activists working in and/or studying in more than 25 countries, including: Canada, Mexico and the United States; Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Uruguay, and Venezuela; Iceland; Germany, Switzerland and the UK; Burma/Myanmar, Taiwan, Thailand and the Philippines; Egypt, Ghana, Israel and Qatar. Contributors first presented their ideas in the summer of 2013 at a preconference of the International Communication Association, hosted by Goldsmiths, University of London in the UK. The goal then, as it is now, was to bring together successful and promising strategies for media reform to be shared across international lines and media reform contexts. The editors and authors hope this volume will serve as a useful resource for scholars and activists alike, looking to better understand the concept of media reform, and how it is being advanced around the world. The book is organized into four sections: contexts, digital activism, media reform movements, and media reform in action. It opens with a consideration of some theoretical approaches to media reform while the digital activism section includes chapters that present a range of strategies that media reformers might want to consider. The section on media reform movements includes examples from across the globe and highlights a variety of online and offline strategies to achieve change. The final section consists of short chapters submitted by activist organizations that include a description of their mission and examples of successful strategies employed in the pursuit of media reform goals.