Towards a Digital Health Ecology : NHS Digital Adoption through the COVID-19 Looking Glass is about technology adoption in the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) as told from the inflection point of a disaster. In 2020 the world lived through a disaster of epic proportions, devastating humanity around the globe. It took a microscopic virus to wreak havoc on our healthcare system and force the adoption of technology in a way that had never been seen before. This book tells the story of digital technology take-up in the NHS through the lens of that disaster. This book documents use of technology in the NHS through the lens of the first pandemic shock. Our healthcare system, paid for by general taxation and free at the point of demand, was conceived and developed in a firmly analogue world. Created in 1948, the NHS predates the invention of the World Wide Web by some forty years. This is not a book simply about technology, it is a study of the painful process of reengineering a mammoth and byzantine system that was built for a different era. The digital health sector is a microcosm of the wider healthcare system, through which grand themes of social inequality, public trust, private versus commercial interests, values and beliefs are played out. The sector is a clash of competing discourses: the civic and doing good for society; the market and wealth creation; the industrial creating more efficient and effective systems; the project expressed as innovation and experimentation; lastly the notion of vitality and leading a happier, healthy life. Each of these discourses exists in a state of flux and tension with the other. This book is offered as a critique of the role of digital technologies within healthcare. It is an examination of competing interests, approaches, and ideologies. It is a story of system complexity told through analysis and personal stories.

Popular notions of sustainability in architecture and urbanism idealizes nature as primary over the mediated complexity that is inevitable in a modern city's functioning. More specifically, contemporary ecological debates and models have failed to sufficiently account for the convergence of computers, automation and machine intelligence with the physical and social environments that is gradually emerging in the post-digital condition. The following publication takes an ecological view to interpret critically the micro-ecology of Amazon's automated warehouses which rely on adaptive machine intelligence which is further examined critically within the framework of cybernetic systems. Paradoxically, it also happens to thrive within the logic of the dominant global mode of consumption and production which is capitalism. Most importantly, this relational ecology lies at the intersection of the mediated complexity where the digital and physical worlds meet.

Our digital world is often described using terms such as immateriality and virtuality. The discourse of cloud computing is the latest in a long line of nebulous, dematerialising tropes which have come to dominate how we think about information and communication technologies. Digital Media Ecologies argues that such rhetoric is highly misleading, and that engaging with the key cultural, agential, ethical and political impacts of contemporary media requires that we do not just engage with the surface level of content encountered by the end users of digital media, but that we must additionally consider the affordances of software and hardware. Whilst numerous existing approaches explore content, software and hardware individually, Digital Media Ecologies provides a critical intervention by insisting that addressing contemporary technoculture requires a synthetic approach that traverses these three registers. Digital Media Ecologies re-envisions the methodological approach of media ecology to go beyond the metaphor of a symbolic information environment that exists alongside a material world of tantalum, turtles and tornados. It illustrates the social, cultural, political and environmental impacts of contemporary media assemblages through examples that include mining conflict-sustaining minerals, climate change blogging, iOS jailbreaking, and the ecological footprint of contemporary computing infrastructures. Alongside foregrounding the deleterious social and environmental impacts of digital technologies, the book considers numerous ways that these issues are being tackled by a heterogeneous array of activists, academics, hackers, scientists and citizens using the same technological assemblages that ostensibly cause these problems.

When issued by the European Comm., this Green Paper was intended to launch an active discussion amongst all interested bodies. Includes an extensive review of technological & market developments, an analysis of the European environment for future development, a review of worldwide developments, & an analysis of the extension of the principles of European Union telecomm. policy to the mobile sector. Glossary. Charts & tables.

The first edition of Toward a Unified Ecology was ahead of its time. For the second edition, the authors present a new synthesis of their core ideas on evaluating communities, organisms, populations, biomes, models, and management. The book now places greater emphasis on post-normal critiques, cognizant of ever-present observer values in the system. The problem it addresses is how to work holistically on complex things that cannot be defined, and this book continues to build an approach to the problem of scaling in ecosystems. Provoked by complexity theory, the authors add a whole new chapter on the central role of narrative in science and how models improve them. The book takes data and modeling seriously, with a sophisticated philosophy of science.

As we enter a new millennium, it is clear that we are in the midst of one of the most dramatic technological revolutions in history that is changing everything from the ways that we work, communicate, participate in politics, and spend our leisure time. The technological revolution centers on computer, information, communication, and multimedia technologies, is often interpreted as the beginnings of a knowledge or information society, and therefore ascribes technologies a central role in every aspect of life. This Great Transformation poses tremendous challenges to critical social theorists, citizens, and educators to rethink their basic tenets, to deploy the media in creative and productive ways, and to restructure the workplace, social institutions, and schooling to respond constructively and progressively to the technological and social changes that we are now experiencing.

How does sound ecology—an acoustic connective tissue among communities—also become a basis for a healthy economy and a just community? Jeff Todd Titon's lived experiences shed light on the power of song, the ecology of musical cultures, and even cultural sustainability and resilience. In Toward a Sound Ecology, Titon's collected essays address his growing concerns with people making music, holistic ecological approaches to music, and sacred transformations of sound. Titon also demonstrates how to conduct socially responsible fieldwork and compose engaging and accessible ethnography that speaks to a diverse readership. Toward a Sound Ecology is an anthology of Titon's key writings, which are situated chronologically within three particular areas of interest: fieldwork, cultural and musical sustainability, and sound ecology. According to Titon—a foundational figure in folklore and ethnomusicology—a re-orientation away from a world of texts and objects and toward a world of sound connections will reveal the basis of a universal kinship.

Museums have been a domain of study and design intervention for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) for several decades. However, while resources providing overviews on the key issues in the scholarship have been produced in the fields of museum and visitor studies, no such resource as yet existed within HCI. This book fills this gap and covers key issues regarding the study and design of HCIs in museums. Through an on-site focus, the book examines how digital interactive technologies impact and shape galleries, exhibitions, and their visitors. It consolidates the body of work in HCI conducted in the heritage field and integrates it with insights from related fields and from digital heritage practice. Processes of HCI design and evaluation approaches for museums are also discussed. This book draws from the authors' extensive knowledge of case studies as well as from their own work to provide examples, reflections, and illustrations of relevant concepts and problems. This book is designed for students and early career researchers in HCI or Interaction Design, for more seasoned investigators who might approach the museum domain for the first time, and for researchers and practitioners in related fields such as heritage and museum studies or visitor studies. Designers who might wish to understand the HCI perspective on visitor-facing interactive technologies may also find this book useful.