Download or read book Global Civilization in the 21st Century written by Andrew Targowski and published by Nova Science Publishers. This book was released on 2016-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The purpose of this book is to evaluate the question: What does the New World Order (NWO) mean in the 21st century? After the Polish Revolution in 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Soviet Union in 1991, many people expected better times than those during the Cold War between the West and East. Since Communism lost to Capitalism, can the latter promote freedom and happiness for all of us everywhere? However, this dream did not happen, vice versa we face now so called liquid times, times of instability and chaos. Therefore, this book is written for those who would like to know why the supposedly ideal economic solution known as Capitalism cannot bring happiness to all of us as it is promised by its promoters. This means that the book should be interesting for all kinds of readers and could be potentially read by millions. The book discusses Hegelian dialectics under the form of competition among ideas that have been neglected in the NOW-21st century and unopposed Capitalism has been transformed into Turbo-Capitalism, also known as Undemocratic Capitalism. This process is supported by additive waves of globalisation taking place in the last 500+ years. Eventually in the 21st century humanity is facing the resulted transformation of western civilization into global civilisation. The book analyses this transformational process and its positive and negative repercussions for humanity.
Download or read book Transforming Virtual World Learning written by Charles Wankel and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2011-09-28 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A practical guide on how to transform your ideas from virtual world course ware to virtual world learning experiences. It argues that setting up learning in 3D virtual worlds requires a transformative approach.
Download or read book Western Civilization in the 21st Century written by Andrew Targowski and published by Nova Science Publishers. This book was released on 2016-12-29 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book took the task of conceptualising Western civilisation in the 21st century. It examines Western Civilisation and its encounters from a viewpoint of the impact of rising Global civilisations in the 21st century. This political and technological success of Western civilisation in the last 500 years triggered a dream of spreading around the globe Democracy and liberal Capitalism. Western society was held together by Christian morality (regardless whether someone was a believer or a non-believer or agnostic). The medicine for all shortcomings faced by Western civilisation in the 21st century is offered by Al Gore in his book "The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change" (2013). He thinks that inventions and technology will save Western civilisation. The author of this book argues that vice versa, the rise of certain technologies are the main reason for the decline of Western civilisation. These kind of issues will be investigated in this book and the message is not optimistic, since Westerners, when are poor are wise, and when are better off are stupid. Hence, without practicing wisdom, Western civilisation cannot be revived.
Download or read book Exodus to the Virtual World written by Edward Castronova and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2007-11-27 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Virtual worlds have exploded out of online game culture and now capture the attention of millions of ordinary people: husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, workers, retirees. Devoting dozens of hours each week to massively multiplayer virtual reality environments (like World of Warcraft and Second Life), these millions are the start of an exodus into the refuge of fantasy, where they experience life under a new social, political, and economic order built around fun. Given the choice between a fantasy world and the real world, how many of us would choose reality? Exodus to the Virtual World explains the growing migration into virtual reality, and how it will change the way we live--both in fantasy worlds and in the real one.
Download or read book Higher Education in Virtual Worlds written by Charles Wankel and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2009-11-23 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Targeted at educators and researchers wishing to use virtual environments in their teaching practice, this work provides practical advice specifically for educators in higher education. It focuses on the use of Second Life - a free, readily-accessible virtual world which is increasingly being used for both formal and informal learning.
Download or read book The Virtual Self written by Nora Young and published by McClelland & Stewart. This book was released on 2013-08-13 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The new radically social habit of tracking our behaviours and preferences is booming. From Facebook timelines to Google Navigator to Twitter, we generate enormous amounts of online data about our activities: where we go, what we do, how we feel. In The Virtual Self, journalist Nora Young examines this growing phenomenon of self-tracking - why it's compulsive, its attractions and benefits, the dangers surrounding privacy and information control, and moreover, what it means for our sense of self. Fascinating and entertaining, and offering unique insights into our emerging technological culture, The Virtual Self takes the personal, psychological reality of everything from smart phones to social networking and teases out the increasing impact of the virtual information we all produce on the real world around us.
Download or read book Internet Afterlife written by Kevin O'Neill and published by Praeger. This book was released on 2016-08-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can you imagine swapping your body for a virtual version? This technology-based look at the afterlife chronicles America's fascination with death and reveals how digital immortality may become a reality. The Internet has reinvented the paradigm of life and death: social media enables a discourse with loved ones long after their deaths, while gaming sites provide opportunities for multiple lives and life forms. In this thought-provoking work, author Kevin O'Neill examines America's concept of afterlife—as imagined in cyberspace—and considers how technologies designed to emulate immortality present serious challenges to our ideas about human identity and to our religious beliefs about heaven and hell. The first part of the work—covering the period between 1840 and 1860—addresses post-mortem photography, cemetery design, and spiritualism. The second section discusses Internet afterlife, including online memorials and cemeteries; social media legacy pages; and sites that curate passwords, bequests, and final requests. The work concludes with chapters on the transhumanist movement, the philosophical and religious debates about Internet immortality, and the study of technologies attempting to extend life long after the human form ceases.
Download or read book Virtual Afterlives written by Candi K. Cann and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-06-24 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For millennia, the rituals of death and remembrance have been fixed by time and location, but in the twenty-first century, grieving has become a virtual phenomenon. Today, the dead live on through social media profiles, memorial websites, and saved voicemails that can be accessed at any time. This dramatic cultural shift has made the physical presence of death secondary to the psychological experience of mourning. Virtual Afterlives investigates emerging popular bereavement traditions. Author Candi K. Cann examines new forms of grieving and evaluates how religion and the funeral industry have both contributed to mourning rituals despite their limited ability to remedy grief. As grieving traditions and locations shift, people are discovering new ways to memorialize their loved ones. Bodiless and spontaneous memorials like those at the sites of the shootings in Aurora and Newtown and the Boston Marathon bombing, as well as roadside memorials, car decals, and tattoos are contributing to a new bereavement language that crosses national boundaries and culture-specific perceptions of death. Examining mourning practices in the United States in comparison to the broader background of practices in Asia and Latin America, Virtual Afterlives seeks to resituate death as a part of life and mourning as a unifying process that helps to create identities and narratives for communities. As technology changes the ways in which we experience death, this engaging study explores the culture of bereavement and the ways in which it, too, is being significantly transformed.
Download or read book Neurotheology written by Laurence O. McKinney and published by Amer Inst for Mindfulness. This book was released on 1994-07-01 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Strategies of Informing Technology in the 21st Century written by Targowski, Andrew and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2021-09-18 with total page 557 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Digital technology is ever-changing, which means that those working or planning to work in IT or apply IT systems must strategize how and what applications and technologies are ideal for sustainable civilization and human development. Developmental trends of IT and the digitalization of enterprise, agriculture, healthcare, education, and more must be explored within the boundaries of ethics and law in order to ensure that IT does not have a harmful effect on society. The Strategies of Informing Technology in the 21st Century is a critical authored reference book that develops the strategic attitude in developing and operating IT applications based on the requirements of sustainable civilization and ethical and wise applications of technology in society. Technological progress is examined including trends in automation, artificial intelligence, and information systems. The book also specifically covers applications of digital informing strategies in business, healthcare, agriculture, education, and the home. Covering key concepts such as automation, robotization, and digital infrastructure, it is ideal for IT executives, CIS/MIS/CS faculty, cyber ethics professionals, technologists, systems engineers, IT specialists and consultants, security analysts, students, researchers, and academicians.
Download or read book Cinematic Virtual Reality written by Kath Dooley and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With reference to traditional film theory and frameworks drawn from fields such as screenwriting studies and anthropology, this book explores the challenges and opportunities for both practitioners and viewers offered by the 360-degree storytelling form. It focuses on cinematic virtual reality (CVR), a format that involves immersive, high quality, live action or computer-generated imagery (CGI) that can be viewed through head mounted display (HMD) goggles or via online platforms such as YouTube. This format has surged in popularity in recent years due to the release of affordable high quality omnidirectional (360-degree) cameras and consumer grade HMDs. The book interrogates four key concepts for this emerging medium: immersion, presence, embodiment and proximity through an analysis of innovative case studies and with reference to practitioner interviews. In doing so, it highlights the specificity of the format and provides a critical account of practitioner approaches to the concept development, writing and realisation of short narrative CVR works. The book concludes with an account of the author’s practice-led research into the form, providing a valuable example of creative practice in the field of immersive media.
Download or read book Informing and Civilization written by Prof. Dr. Andrew Targowski and published by Informing Science. This book was released on 2016 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The aim of this book is to synthesize the role of information throughout the history of civilization’s development. This will be defined through the convergence of (a) the cumulative evolution and revolution of the intellect (cognition as data, information, concepts, knowledge, and wisdom), (b) labor, and (c) politics which seek to control the environment, society, and the world, applying culture and infrastructure as tools. Whereas researchers reveal the myriad of dimensions of the social order and its historiography, this book provides a synthesis of the relations, which is limited to information (and its informing systems) and civilization within the context of historiosophie (history with judgment). The method presented in this book—the architectural approach to the dynamics of civilizational development—is a new layer over the quantitative history based on statistical data. In an architectural synthesis of civilization, we seek a “big picture” of “civilization waves” in order to develop some criteria-oriented views of the world and its future predictability. To understand the crises and conflicts of civilization which are driven by technology in recent centuries, such a synthesis as well as optimism for human proactive adaptation, survival, and, development must be undertaken. This approach to civilizational development should allow humans to eventually “reinvent the future” in a continuous manner. We, in due course, should be able to predict the “rate of change” and provide “civilization bridging solutions” based on original thinking. It is important to remind ourselves that information is as old as our world (about 15 billion years) because plants and trees and, in general, non-human nature produces all sorts of information, for example, the changing colors of plants and trees, which is associated with the different seasons. When the first living organisms appeared on our planet, they had ability to inform as well by changing forms, colors, signals and, so one. The first signs of life on our planet came into being about 3.85 billion years ago. Therefore, organism-based life on the Earth actually came to be over a period of just 130 million years. Hominids diverged from apes some 10-6 million years ago (instinct-driven info-communication, i.e., behavior less controlled by cognition), and the first humans (bipeds with large brains who could use tools and sound-driven info-communication) took form around 6-2.5 million years ago in Southeast Africa. Homo symbolicus, who could skillfully use language, appeared about 60,000 years ago. The origin of civilization some 6,000 years ago marks the beginning of the first advanced info-communication systems applied by humans, who could even record information.
Download or read book Minnesota s Black Community in the 21st Century written by Anthony R. Scott and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An inspiring celebration of the accomplishments of African American professionals in Minnesota, highlighting the contributions of individuals and organizations in a wide range of fields.
Download or read book Video Games and American Culture written by Aaron A. Toscano and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-12-12 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Digital media are immersive technologies reflecting behaviors, attitudes, and values. The engrossing, entertaining virtual worlds video games provide are important sites for 21st century research. This book moves beyond assertions that video games cause violence by analyzing the culture that produces such material. While some popular media reinforce the idea that video games lead to violence, this book uses a cultural studies lens to reveal a more complex situation. Video games do not lead to violence, sexism, and chauvinism. Rather, Toscano argues, a violent, sexist, chauvinistic culture reproduces texts that reflect these values. Although video games have a worldwide audience, this book focuses on American culture and how this multi-billion dollar industry entertains us in our leisure time (and sometimes at work), bringing us into virtual environments where we have fun learning, fighting, discovering, and acquiring bragging rights. When politicians and moral crusaders push agendas that claim video games cause a range of social ills from obesity to mass shooting, these perspectives fail to recognize that video games reproduce hegemonic American values. This book, in contrast, focuses on what these highly entertaining cultural products tell us about who we are.
Download or read book Civilization in the 21st Century written by and published by How to Save the Future?. This book was released on with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book African Civilization in the 21st Century written by Tseggai Isaac and published by Nova Science Publishers. This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book took the task of conceptualizing the change of African Civilization in the 21st century. It examines African Civilization and its encounters in view of the last 500 years of European and American slavery, exploitation and diplomatic paralysis. In post-colonial Africa (1960-2014), foreign powers have more influence on Africa. However, Africa cannot claim to have the diplomatic prestige to influence European, American or Asian powers. The overwhelming challenges that Africa has been experiencing did attract global reaction ranging from military intervention, diplomatic push or pull (rarely in between), and frequent humanitarian involvements. It is still inconclusive if global attention on Africa has had impact as much as it has been a stomping ground for advisors, donors, politicians, international agencies and a phalanx of well-meaning NGOs. However, their impact can be exemplified by the fact that in Sub-Saharan Africa, every second individual still does not have access to fresh water and electricity in the 21st century. In this book, the focus is put on Sub-Saharan Africa, where every other habitant has no access to fresh water and electricity. In this book, the following modernization strategies are recognized and discussed in Africa today: Westernizatio, Africanization, Chinezation, and Globalization. The evaluation of these policies is done with the civilization approach which is characterized by a big-picture view of the integration of society, culture (including religion), and infrastructure over a long period of time on a large territory. Furthermore, in the 21st century, global civilization are forming and penetrating contemporary civilizations such as: Western, Eastern, Chinese, Japanese, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, and African enforcing the development of large scale global businesses and capital. In such a context, should African Civilization follow the questionable policy of Westernization and Globalization? Or should it not follow these challenges and avoid the temptations of fast development and look rather towards the Africanization approach, which could make it last longer than the so called more modern, mentioned civilizations. These kinds of considerations are debated in this book.
Download or read book The History Present State and Future of Information Technology written by Andrew Targowski and published by Informing Science. This book was released on 2016 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Part I, Prof. Targowski takes us through the evolution of modern computing and information systems. While much of this material is familiar to those of us who have lived through these developments, it would definitely not be familiar to our children or our students. He also introduces a perspective that I found both refreshing and useful: looking at the evolution on a country by country basis. For those of us who live in the U.S., it is all too easy to imagine that evolution to be a purely local phenomenon. I found my appreciation of the truly global nature of computing expanding as he walked me through each country’s contributions. In Parts II and III, constituting nearly half of the book, Targowski provides what I would describe as an in-depth case study of the challenges and successes of informatics in Poland. As he tells each story—many of which involved him personally—the reader cannot help but better understand the close relationship between the freedoms that we in the west take for granted and the ability to produce innovations in IT. Even after Poland left the orbit of the former Soviet Union, the remaining vestiges of the old way of thinking remained a major impediment to progress. Being right and being rigorous were far less important than being in tune with the “approved” ways of thinking. There are important lessons to be learned here, particularly as we try to project how IT will evolve in rapidly developing economies such as China. But, from my experience, they apply equally well to western academia, where moving outside of preferred values and patterns of research can lead a scholar to be ignored or even disparaged. In Part IV, Targowski presents a bold, forward-looking synthesis of informatics and informing science in the future. Building upon articles recently published in Informing Science: The International Journal of an Emerging Transdiscipline, he presents a conceptual scheme of historical informing waves that builds upon historians such as Toynbee. He then considers how these trends will necessarily force us to rethink how we develop and apply IT. He does not steer away from the controversial. But he also provides cogent arguments for all his predictions and recommendations.
