The Digital Closet

The Digital Closet PDF

Author: Alexander Monea

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2023-05-02

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0262545950

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An exploration of how heteronormative bias is deeply embedded in the internet, hidden in algorithms, keywords, content moderation, and more. A Next Big Idea Club nominee. In The Digital Closet, Alexander Monea argues provocatively that the internet became straight by suppressing everything that is not, forcing LGBTQIA+ content into increasingly narrow channels—rendering it invisible through opaque algorithms, automated and human content moderation, warped keywords, and other strategies of digital overreach. Monea explains how the United States’ thirty-year “war on porn” has brought about the over-regulation of sexual content, which, in turn, has resulted in the censorship of much nonpornographic content—including material on sex education and LGBTQIA+ activism. In this wide-ranging, enlightening account, Monea examines the cultural, technological, and political conditions that put LGBTQIA+ content into the closet. Monea looks at the anti-porn activism of the alt-right, Christian conservatives, and anti-porn feminists, who became strange bedfellows in the politics of pornography; investigates the coders, code, and moderators whose work serves to reify heteronormativity; and explores the collateral damage in the ongoing war on porn—the censorship of LGBTQ+ community resources, sex education materials, art, literature, and other content that engages with sexuality but would rarely be categorized as pornography by today’s community standards. Finally, he examines the internet architectures responsible for the heteronormalization of porn: Google Safe Search and the data structures of tube sites and other porn platforms. Monea reveals the porn industry’s deepest, darkest secret: porn is boring. Mainstream porn is stuck in a heteronormative filter bubble, limited to the same heteronormative tropes, tagged by the same heteronormative keywords. This heteronormativity is mirrored by the algorithms meant to filter pornographic content, increasingly filtering out all LGBTQIA+ content. Everyone suffers from this forced heteronormativity of the internet—suffering, Monea suggests, that could be alleviated by queering straightness and introducing feminism to dissipate the misogyny.

The Internet Idea Book

The Internet Idea Book PDF

Author: Michelle McGarry

Publisher: iUniverse

Published: 2000-10

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 0595144373

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Brainstorm Your Best Internet Business! The Internet is booming, and so is the small- and home-business market. Many people want to gain more control over their lives by starting their own business. The Internet has opened the door to millions of people who thought that starting their own business was a faint dream. The Internet Idea Book is a collection of brainstorms, 101 ideas of the kinds of businesses that could be started on the Internet by the everyday ordinary person. But how do you compete with huge companies that are creating complex Web sites laden with moving and talking graphics and high-tech HTML, run by large staffs of whiz kids? You don’t! The goal of this book is to get you, the hopeful online entrepreneur, to brainstorm what your dreams are and how these dreams can fit into the needs of others. You do that by discovering the right niche in the marketplace. Every idea in The Internet Idea Book is followed by workbook space designed to help you find a competitive niche so you can design a successful site that is all yours. Here is a book that will help you brainstorm your future.

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? PDF

Author: John Brockman

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2011-01-18

Total Pages: 450

ISBN-13: 0062078550

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How is the internet changing the way you think? That is one of the dominant questions of our time, one which affects almost every aspect of our life and future. And it's exactly what John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org, posed to more than 150 of the world's most influential minds. Brilliant, farsighted, and fascinating, Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? is an essential guide to the Net-based world.

The Road Ahead

The Road Ahead PDF

Author: Bill Gates

Publisher: Penguin Group

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13:

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In this clear-eyed, candid, and ultimately reassuring

Who Controls the Internet?

Who Controls the Internet? PDF

Author: Jack Goldsmith

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2006-03-17

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 9780198034803

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Is the Internet erasing national borders? Will the future of the Net be set by Internet engineers, rogue programmers, the United Nations, or powerful countries? Who's really in control of what's happening on the Net? In this provocative new book, Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu tell the fascinating story of the Internet's challenge to governmental rule in the 1990s, and the ensuing battles with governments around the world. It's a book about the fate of one idea--that the Internet might liberate us forever from government, borders, and even our physical selves. We learn of Google's struggles with the French government and Yahoo's capitulation to the Chinese regime; of how the European Union sets privacy standards on the Net for the entire world; and of eBay's struggles with fraud and how it slowly learned to trust the FBI. In a decade of events the original vision is uprooted, as governments time and time again assert their power to direct the future of the Internet. The destiny of the Internet over the next decades, argue Goldsmith and Wu, will reflect the interests of powerful nations and the conflicts within and between them. While acknowledging the many attractions of the earliest visions of the Internet, the authors describe the new order, and speaking to both its surprising virtues and unavoidable vices. Far from destroying the Internet, the experience of the last decade has lead to a quiet rediscovery of some of the oldest functions and justifications for territorial government. While territorial governments have unavoidable problems, it has proven hard to replace what legitimacy governments have, and harder yet to replace the system of rule of law that controls the unchecked evils of anarchy. While the Net will change some of the ways that territorial states govern, it will not diminish the oldest and most fundamental roles of government and challenges of governance. Well written and filled with fascinating examples, including colorful portraits of many key players in Internet history, this is a work that is bound to stir heated debate in the cyberspace community.

Weaving the Web

Weaving the Web PDF

Author: Tim Berners-Lee

Publisher: Turtleback Books

Published: 2004-04

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780606303583

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Tim Berners-Lee tells the story of how he came to create the World Wide Web, looks at the future development of the medium, and offers his opinions on censorship, privacy, and other issues.

Where Wizards Stay Up Late

Where Wizards Stay Up Late PDF

Author: Matthew Lyon

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 1999-08-19

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0684872161

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Twenty five years ago, it didn't exist. Today, twenty million people worldwide are surfing the Net. Where Wizards Stay Up Late is the exciting story of the pioneers responsible for creating the most talked about, most influential, and most far-reaching communications breakthrough since the invention of the telephone. In the 1960's, when computers where regarded as mere giant calculators, J.C.R. Licklider at MIT saw them as the ultimate communications devices. With Defense Department funds, he and a band of visionary computer whizzes began work on a nationwide, interlocking network of computers. Taking readers behind the scenes, Where Wizards Stay Up Late captures the hard work, genius, and happy accidents of their daring, stunningly successful venture.

After the Internet

After the Internet PDF

Author: Tiziana Terranova

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2022-12-13

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 1635901685

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On the internet's transformation from communication tool to computational infrastructure. The internet is no more. If it still exists, it does so only as a residual technology, still effective in the present but less intelligible as such. After nearly two decades and a couple of financial crises, it has become the almost imperceptible background of today’s Corporate Platform Complex (CPC)—a pervasive planetary technological infrastructure that meshes communication with computation. In the essays collected in this book, written mostly between the mid-2000s and the late 2010s, Tiziana Terranova bears witness to this monstrous transformation. Mobilizing theories of cognitive capitalism, neo-monadology, and sympathetic cooperation, considering ideas such as the attention economy and its psychopathologies, and evoking the relation between algorithmic automation and the Common, she provides real-time takes on the mutations that have changed the technological, cultural, and economic ethos of the Internet. Mostly conceived, elaborated, and discussed in collective activist spaces, After the Internet is neither apocalyptic lamentation nor melancholic “rise and fall” story of betrayed great expectations. On the contrary, it looks within the folds of the recent past to unfold the potential futurities that the post-digital computational present still entails.

Life on the Screen

Life on the Screen PDF

Author: Sherry Turkle

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2011-04-26

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 1439127115

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Life on the Screen is a book not about computers, but about people and how computers are causing us to reevaluate our identities in the age of the Internet. We are using life on the screen to engage in new ways of thinking about evolution, relationships, politics, sex, and the self. Life on the Screen traces a set of boundary negotiations, telling the story of the changing impact of the computer on our psychological lives and our evolving ideas about minds, bodies, and machines. What is emerging, Turkle says, is a new sense of identity—as decentered and multiple. She describes trends in computer design, in artificial intelligence, and in people’s experiences of virtual environments that confirm a dramatic shift in our notions of self, other, machine, and world. The computer emerges as an object that brings postmodernism down to earth.