The Information Animal
eBook - ePub

The Information Animal

Humans, Technology and the Competition for Reality

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Information Animal

Humans, Technology and the Competition for Reality

About this book

Depending on the news you read, new tools like AI will either save or destroy us. But our response to emerging technology’s ‘unprecedented’ threats actually follows a pattern as old as civilisation. From ancient Athens to COVID-19, social media to spam, Alicia Wanless shows how humans have always consumed information, whether accurate or not.

First a new technology changes how information is shared, broadening its availability and accelerating how fast it travels. Then, as more people engage with this new content, fresh ideas arise, often challenging prevailing beliefs. Some use the new tools to promote their views, win power or simply profit, adding to the mounting information pollution. Competition and conflict follow. We scramble—in vain—to control information flows and use of the new technology.

With democracies worldwide lurching from crisis to crisis, knee-jerk reactions to information conflict won’t suffice. What’s needed is an understanding of our nature as ‘information animals’, in a millennia-long relationship with technology—and of how a content-saturated world impacts the political battle for hearts and minds.


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Yes, you can access The Information Animal by Alicia Wanless in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Semantics. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title
  3. Copyright
  4. Contents
  5. Acknowledgements
  6. Introduction
  7. 1. What Can Ecology Teach Us about the Information Environment?
  8. 2. For Your Information
  9. 3. The Information Environment
  10. 4. Pulling Threads Together: Ancient Greece
  11. 5. Tyrannical Ties: Charles versus the Godly
  12. 6. A Tale of Two Countries: American Civil War
  13. 7. Alphabets and Aliens: Vietnamese Independence
  14. 8. The Ukrainian Curse of Nonexistence
  15. 9. All Hail Finland?
  16. 10. The Future of the Information Animal
  17. Glossary of Terms
  18. Notes
  19. Index
  20. Back Cover