Optimistic technologists and entrepreneurs often see the potential for positive societal transformation through technology-driven innovations, but it's becoming increasingly clear that a huge challenge faces the Always On world. The very nature of "On" means that information about you is flowing to the network. How can we manage the risks associated with the network knowing more and more about each of us?

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I see the increased public attention and the general level of clamoring as the beginning of full-scale social debate on a truly complex set of issues. As such, we will sometimes step sideways or even backwards. For example, halting research or rushing to legislation may only delay the process of really sorting out the issues.

How the Internet search engine Google is changing what we can find out about one another -- and raising questions about whether we should.

... But somewhere along the path toward changing our daily lives, Google changed our concept of time as well. It has helped make our past -- or oddly refracted shards of it -- present and permanent. That's a radical notion for a medium usually defined by its ability to constantly update itself.

... perhaps you once went on a rant ... You may think those chapters are closed. Google begs to differ.

"It's the collapse of inconvenience. It turns out inconvenience was a really important part of our lives, and we didn't realize it."

Since the end of the cold war, the United States has been trying to come up with an operating theory of the world -- and a military strategy to accompany it.

Now there's a leading contender. It involves identifying the problem parts of the world and aggressively shrinking them.

How would it be if what we take for human advance were simply a technological progress that literally leaves us out of its equations? What if Progress is not humanity striking out bravely towards the future, but an ultimately destructive force?

In a remarkable tour d'horizon, Paul Virilio paints a bleak picture of current scientific, cultural, social and political values.

Art has succumbed to the techniques of advertising and in politics, the battle for hearts and minds has become a mere convergence of opinion. TV ratings have triumphed over universal suffrage. The events of September 11 reflect both the manipulation of a global sub-proletariat and the delusions of an élite of rich students and technicians who resemble the 'suicidal members of the Heaven's Gate cybersect'.

... interviews with artists, critics, and theorists who are intimately involved in building the content, interfaces, and architectures of new media ...

Topics discussed include digital aesthetics, sound art, navigating deep audio space, Japanese techno tribes, hybrid identities, the storage of social movements, theory of the virtual class, virtual and urban spaces, corporate takeover of the Internet, and the role of cyberspace in the rise of nongovernmental organizations.

The tendency to synchronize may be the most mysterious and pervasive drive in all of nature. But only in the past decade have scientists come to realize that the study of synchrony could revolutionize our understanding of everything ...

At once elegant and riveting, SYNC tells the story of the dawn of a new science. Strogatz explains how enormous systems can synchronize themselves ...

Only recently did mankind realize that it resides on a world of networks. The Internet and the World Wide Web are changing our life. Our physical existence is based on various biological networks. We have recently learned that the term "network" turns out to be a central notion in our time, and the onsequent explosion of interest in networks is a social and cultural phenomenon.

The principles of the complex organization and evolution of networks, natural and artificial are the topic of this book, which is written by physicists and is addressed to all involved researchers and students. The aim of the text is to understand networks and the basic principles of their structural organization and evolution.