What if an app gave X-ray vision to see the people around you, through the steel and brick and sometimes their clothes? What if you could communicate with them as if through telepathy so that no one else knew? Welcome to Grindr, which uses the Gps capabilities on smartphones to help its five million users discover users nearby to meet. Meet Grindr illuminates the new world of meeting online, exploring its ups and downs. How is Grindr more addictive than slot machines? Why are users like jars of jam? What if Grindr is actually a game, and should it be more of a team sport? Meet Grindr uncovers surprising answers and explores where design subtly influences users, how users could make better connections, and why Grindr has changed the way people connect.

This edited volume aims to unpack the digitisation of art and media within the dynamics of participatory culture, and how these changes affect the power relations between the production and consumption of these new forms in a globalised Asia. This follows the rise of new art forms and social media platforms in wake of rapid and ongoing digitisation, which has, in turn, produced far-reaching implications for changing media ownership and its role in social, cultural, economic, as well as political activities. New challenges arise every day in relation to digital art and design practices and social media communications, and their respective impact on identity politics. This book showcases a diverse range of interdisciplinary research on these concomitant changes and challenges associated with digital media and technologies within the context of a globalised Asia. The case studies included present perspectives on Asia’s evolving digital humanities landscape from Hong Kong, China, India, Korea and from across Southeast Asia, with topics that tackle organisational digital marketing, brand advertising and design, mobile gaming, interactive art, and the cultural activities of ethnic and sexual minority communities in the region. This book will of interest to scholars in digital humanities focused on new media and cultural studies.

In light of the increasing disengagement between urban and rural areas, this book address the interdependency of cities with ecological and technological processes outside the purview of traditional urban planning. It compiles a huge amount of essays in regards to the most important topics that cities must address today, such as their connection with global data networks, ecological cycles of resources which supersede the traditional boundaries of urbanism. For this reason, it frames investigation of contemporary urbanism on nine imminent commons grouping the urban commons into resources and technologies lead us to the arcane classification of natural resources: air, water, fire, and earth, the four elements of ancient cosmologies; and five basic technological commons based on expanded human capacities: sensing, communicating, moving, making, and recycling.

This insightful and accessible book is a response to the increasing important role that technology plays in everyday life, and the urgent need for empirical studies that analyse the impact of technology on social practices. The chapters in this co-edited collection reveal how technology is oriented to and embedded within the social organization of action in a wide range of settings and institutions, including education, markets, arts and culture, health and social care, media, politics, and science. In their analyses, the contributing authors adopt interactionist perspectives to explore how the meanings of technology emerge and are negotiated within and through action and interaction. The volume comprises 14 empirical chapters from authors working in fields such as symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, discourse methods, ethnographic enquiry, video-based methods, and others. The chapters are framed by an introduction and a concluding discussion by the co-editors which draws out the key themes and issues that the individual chapters speak to, and show the importance of these themes for the social sciences and for society. The book is primarily aimed at researchers in the social sciences, including sociology, social psychology, organization studies, and beyond whose work is concerned with the interplay between social interaction, technology, and institutions.

A FINANCIAL TIMES ECONOMICS BOOK OF THE YEAR 'Compulsively readable... An essential course in geopolitical self-help' - Adam Tooze 'Full of fresh - and often surprising - ideas' - Niall Ferguson 'Extraordinary... One of those rare books that defines the terms of our conversation about our times' - Michael Ignatieff We thought connecting the world would bring lasting peace. Instead, it is driving us apart. In the three decades since the end of the Cold War, global leaders have been integrating the world's economy, transport and communications, breaking down borders in the hope of making war impossible. In doing so, they have unwittingly created a formidable arsenal of weapons for new kinds of conflict and the motivation to keep fighting. Rising tensions in global politics are not a bump in the road - they are part of the paving. Troublingly, we are now seeing rising conflict at every level, from individuals on social media all the way up to nation-states in entrenched stand-offs. The past decade has seen a new antagonism between the US and China; an inability to co-operate on global issues such as climate change or pandemic response; and a breakdown in the distinction between war and peace, as overseas troops are replaced by sanctions, cyberwar, and the threat of large migrant flows. As a leading authority on international relations, Mark Leonard has been inside many of the rooms where our futures, at every level of society, are being decided - from the Facebook HQ and facial recognition labs in China to meetings in presidential palaces and at remote military installations. In seeking to understand the ways that globalisation has broken its fundamental promise to make our world safer and more prosperous, Leonard explores how we might wrest a more hopeful future from an age of unpeace.

Sex, Time and Place extensively widens the scope of what we might mean by 'queer London studies'. Incorporating multidisciplinary perspectives – including social history, cultural geography, visual culture, literary representation, ethnography and social studies – this collection asks new questions, widens debates and opens new subject terrain. Featuring essays from an international range of established scholars and emergent voices, the collection is a timely contribution to this growing field. Its essays cover topics such as activist and radical communities and groups, AIDS and the city, art and literature, digital archives and technology, drag and performativity, lesbian Londons, notions of bohemianism and deviancy, sex reform and research and queer Black history. Going further than the existing literature on Queer London which focuses principally on the experiences of white gay men in a limited time frame, Sex, Time and Place reflects the current state of this growing and important field of study. It will be of great value to scholars, students and general readers who have an interest in queer history, London studies, cultural geography, visual cultures and literary criticism.