Living in The Information Age: A New Media Reader -2/E.

Understand the impact of new technologies on the media landscape with LIVING IN THE INFORMATION AGE with InfoTrac! Examining the conceptual and practical aspects of life in an information society, this communication text encourages you to consider how the media industries are being transformed through digital convergence and corporate concentration. Each reading is prefaced by a short introduction and three questions for critical thinking and discussion to help you master the material. Each article is followed by suggestions for taking research online using InfoTrac College Edition so that you can enhance your understanding of the materia

Contemporary Overstimulation in the Age of Information: The Blurring of The Personal and Political in Ben Lerner’s 10:04 and Olivia Laing’s Crudo

Olivia Laing’s Crudo and Ben Lerner’s 10:04 depict the constant interruption of the personal by global concerns and politics. Both novels are concerned with the decision between the personal and the global selves, and how these impending social, environmental, or political crises cloud the narrators’ minds. Their structure reflects this confusion and dislocation of the personal self, as the novels contain non-sequiturs, urban noise, and unrelated sections that have been pieced together deliberately. These novels capture the overstimulation of contemporary life and mass media or the information age while trying to navigate how art can reflect that and encapsulate a reality that is at once absurd and (seemingly) not contrived. While the barrier between the personal and global collapses, Lerner and Laing find a space in between where a realist yet raw (or ‘crudo’) retelling of contemporary media-addled experience can be represented. This essay incorporates commentary on how these texts engage with the idea of the troubled personal and the demise of individuality in the light of 21st-century overstimulation

Information Literacy in Islam

Information literacy is the set of skills needed in the modern age to discover, evaluate, interpret, and use information properly and truthfully. With the worldwide proliferation of misinformation on the internet, information literacy is rapidly becoming the most important human competency of the 21st century, as important as reading and writing were to previous generations. Essential components of information literacy include maintaining appropriate attitudes towards learning, assessing the authority of information providers, employing appropriate research methodologies, engaging information-sharing and scholarly communities, and utilizing the latest technology. In many ways, the scholastic tradition of Islam foreshadowed modern information literacy concepts as classical scholars prioritized ethics and manners, systematic curricular learning, and a devotion to understanding the truth of matters as they actually exist in objective reality. This article introduces readers to modern information literacy concepts, drawing parallels to their precedents in Islamic tradition

National Security in the Information Age

The information environment has been changing right along with the broader security environment. Today, the information environment connects almost everyone, almost everywhere, almost instantaneously. The media environment has become global, and there’s no longer such thing as “the news cycle” —everything is 24/7. Barriers between US and global publics have virtual disappeared: Everything and anything can “go viral” instantly, and it’s no longer possible to say one thing to a US audience and another thing to a foreign audience and assume no one will ever set the statements side by side. The Pakistani military has a very clear idea of what the Secretary of Defense tells Congress about Pakistan, for instance—and Congress has an equally clear idea of how Pakistani leaders talk about the United States to their domestic constituencies. Technological changes and lower costs have also democratized the media and information environment: Internet and cell phone access is increasingly ubiquitous, and individuals and organizations are ever more reliant on electronic communication. Today, news, commentary, and video can be produced and accessed equally by first world media producers, Washington decision-makers, Iowa housewives, Afghan shepherds, Chinese university students, Colombian insurgents, and Al Qaeda members. As with the security environment more broadly, the rapidly changing information environment creates both new challenges and new opportunities for the US government. The author emphasizes that this is true across the executive branch. All USG agencies, from Defense to State to Treasury and beyond, are struggling to adapt anachronistic programs and policies

The age of information in gossip networks

We introduce models of gossip based communication networks in which each node is simultaneously a sensor, a relay and a user of information. We model the status of ages of information between nodes as a discrete time Markov chain. In this setting a gossip transmission policy is a decision made at each node regarding what type of information to relay at any given time (if any). When transmission policies are based on random decisions, we are able to analyze the age of information in certain illustrative structured examples either by means of an explicit analysis, an algorithm or asymptotic approximations. Our key contribution is presenting this class of models.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figure

REFRIGERATED TRUCKING IN THE INFORMATION AGE

Trends in refrigerated trucking since the 1980s were examined. Owner-operators have maintained their importance, but are more likely to operate under leases. Equipment replacement and utilization rates are good. Finally, drivers express high levels of satisfaction with driving and compensation and the large majority intend to remain in the profession.refrigerated trucking, driver supply, brokers, transactions costs, Public Economics,