Information & Knowledge Management books

Sponsored by the Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology section of the American Sociological Association (CITAMS), this volume assembles the contributions of a dynamic editorial team composed of leading scholars from Brazil and the United States. Volume 13 provides an unparalleled compilation of research on Brazilian media and communication studies guided by the expert hands of prominent scholars from both Brazil and the United States. Over twenty chapters explore five key themes: the new face of news and journalism, social movements and protest, television, cinema, publicity and marketing, and media theory. Selections encompass research on emergent phenomena, as well as studies with a historical or longitudinal dimension, that reflect the Brazilian case as laboratory for exploring the evolving media environment of one of the world’s most fascinating societies.

More and more, the advance of enterprise computing and cloud technologies means that managers are responsible for retrieving data ad-hoc and constructing business reports for decision-making and storytelling. The technical competencies necessary for such tasks can be daunting, and most database teaching methods do little to mitigate the confusion. They tend to follow traditional computer science methods that expose all computational and matrix theory complexities as well as various design theories, and in so doing, they present an excess of information that unnecessarily complicates the learning process for business-minded readers. Zygiaris simplifies his teaching method in order to provide an accessible walkthrough of all technological advances of databases in the business environment. Readers learn how to design, develop, and use databases to provide business analytical reports with the three major database management systems: Microsoft Access, Oracle Express and MariaDB (formerly MySQL). This is all delivered through clearly structured, streamlined chapters, all of which link to online videos that demonstrate visually, in step-by-step tutorials, how to implement the processes outlined in the book. All of these features help the non-IT student or manager to understand the importance of databases in the business environment and to learn how to use those databases to solve real-world problems. This book is of particular interest to students of management and to business managers, and it is of keen interest to anyone who works with major business database systems.

Over the last decade, the digital technologies in everyday life have multiplied. Our lives have been gradually taken over by digital devices, networks, and services. Although useful, they have also become invasive additions to our personal, professional and public lives. This process has occurred in a globalized and deregulated economy and a few US-based start-ups transformed into an oligopoly of multinationals that today govern the informational infrastructure of our societies. This book offers an analytical framework of the contemporary internet studied through the lens of history and political economy. Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft are examined as emblematic products of a new capitalist order that is resolutely opposed to the original project of the internet. The author retraces the process of commodification that resulted in financial rationales taking over from collective and individual emancipation and uncovers how this internet oligopoly uses its exorbitant market power to eliminate competition; take advantage of global financialization to exploit human labour on a global scale and to avoid taxation; and how it implements strategies to control our communication methods for accessing information and content online, thus increasingly controlling the digital public sphere. The book reveals how the reshaping of society via private company business models impact on the place of work in future societies, social and economic inequalities, and, ultimately, democracy.

This book investigates the language created and used on social media to express and respond to personal experiences of illness, dying and mourning. The authors begin by setting out the established and recent research on social and existential media, affect and language, before focusing on Facebook groups dealing with the illness and death of two Danish children. Through these in-depth case studies, they produce insights into different ways of engaging in affective processes related to illness and death on social media, and into both the ritualized and innovative vernacular vocabulary created through these encounters. Developing an analytical framework for understanding the social role and logics of "affective language" (such as emojis, interjections and other forms of expressive interactive writing), The Language of Illness and Death on Social Media will be of great interest to all those striving to understand the affective importance and roles of language for sharing experiences of illness, death and commemoration in these spheres.