This book is a distinctive fusion of philosophy and technology, delineating the normative landscape that informs today’s technologies and tomorrow’s inventions. The authors examine what we deem to be the internal norms that govern our ever-expanding technical universe. Recognizing that developments in technology and engineering literally create our human future, transforming existing knowledge into tomorrow’s tools and infrastructure, they chart the normative criteria we use to evaluate novel technological artifacts: how, for example, do we judge a ‘good’ from a ‘bad’ expert system or nuclear power plant? As well as these ‘functional’ norms, and the norms that guide technological knowledge and reasoning, the book examines commonly agreed benchmarks in safety and risk reduction, which play a pivotal role in engineering practice. Informed by the core insight that, in technology and engineering, factual knowledge relating, for example, to the properties of materials or the load-bearing characteristics of differing construction designs is not enough, this analysis follows the often unseen foundations upon which technologies rest—the norms that guide the creative forces shaping the technical landscape to come. The book, a comprehensive survey of these emerging topics in the philosophy of technology, clarifies the role these norms (epistemological, functional, and risk-assessing) play in technological innovation, and the consequences they have for our understanding of technological knowledge.

Schumpeter was interested in dynamic economics rather than the economics of stagnation; in the economics of the creation of wealth rather than the economics of the redistribution of wealth; in the economics of technological innovation rather than the economics of industrial management. The major thrust of the volume, then, concerns studies of industrial change with emphasis both on analysis of the impact of innovation and on the interrelatedness of industries viewed through the process of innovation.

Privacy is one of the most urgent issues associated with information technology and digital media. This book claims that what people really care about when they complain and protest that privacy has been violated is not the act of sharing information itself—most people understand that this is crucial to social life —but the inappropriate, improper sharing of information. Arguing that privacy concerns should not be limited solely to concern about control over personal information, Helen Nissenbaum counters that information ought to be distributed and protected according to norms governing distinct social contexts—whether it be workplace, health care, schools, or among family and friends. She warns that basic distinctions between public and private, informing many current privacy policies, in fact obscure more than they clarify. In truth, contemporary information systems should alarm us only when they function without regard for social norms and values, and thereby weaken the fabric of social life.

This open access book provides researchers and professionals with a foundational understanding of online privacy as well as insight into the socio-technical privacy issues that are most pertinent to modern information systems, covering several modern topics (e.g., privacy in social media, IoT) and underexplored areas (e.g., privacy accessibility, privacy for vulnerable populations, cross-cultural privacy). The book is structured in four parts, which follow after an introduction to privacy on both a technical and social level: Privacy Theory and Methods covers a range of theoretical lenses through which one can view the concept of privacy. The chapters in this part relate to modern privacy phenomena, thus emphasizing its relevance to our digital, networked lives. Next, Domains covers a number of areas in which privacy concerns and implications are particularly salient, including among others social media, healthcare, smart cities, wearable IT, and trackers. The Audiences section then highlights audiences that have traditionally been ignored when creating privacy-preserving experiences: people from other (non-Western) cultures, people with accessibility needs, adolescents, and people who are underrepresented in terms of their race, class, gender or sexual identity, religion or some combination. Finally, the chapters in Moving Forward outline approaches to privacy that move beyond one-size-fits-all solutions, explore ethical considerations, and describe the regulatory landscape that governs privacy through laws and policies. Perhaps even more so than the other chapters in this book, these chapters are forward-looking by using current personalized, ethical and legal approaches as a starting point for re-conceptualizations of privacy to serve the modern technological landscape. The book's primary goal is to inform IT students, researchers, and professionals about both the fundamentals of online privacy and the issues that are most pertinent to modern information systems. Lecturers or teachers can assign (parts of) the book for a “professional issues” course. IT professionals may select chapters covering domains and audiences relevant to their field of work, as well as the Moving Forward chapters that cover ethical and legal aspects. Academics who are interested in studying privacy or privacy-related topics will find a broad introduction in both technical and social aspects.

The interrelations of science and technology as an object of study seem to have drawn the attention of a number of disciplines: the history of both science and technology, sociology, economics and economic history, and even the philosophy of science. The question that comes to mind is whether the phenomenon itself is new or if advances in the disciplines involved account for this novel interest, or, in fact, if both are intercon nected. When the editors set out to plan this volume, their more or less explicit conviction was that the relationship of science and technology did reveal a new configuration and that the disciplines concerned with 1tS analysis failed at least in part to deal with the change because of conceptual and methodological preconceptions. To say this does not imply a verdict on the insufficiency of one and the superiority of any other one disciplinary approach. Rather, the situation is much more complex. In economics, for example, the interest in the relationship between science and technology is deeply influenced by the theoretical problem of accounting for the factors of economic growth. The primary concern is with technology and the problem is whether the market induces technological advances or whether they induce new demands that explain the subsequent diffusion of new technologies. Science is generally considered to be an exogenous factor not directly subject to market forces and, therefore, appears to be of no interest.

New technologies may be heralded as life-changing innovations or feared as risks to moral values, human health, and environmental safety. Anxieties surrounding technology are often heightened by perceptions that their benefits will accrue to small sections of society while the risks are more widely distributed. Innovation and Its Enemies identifies the tension between the need for innovation and the pressure to maintain continuity, social order and stability as one of today's biggest policy challenges. It looks at a number of historical examples, including coffee, electricity, margarine, farm mechanization, recorded music, transgenic crops and transgenic animals, to show how new technologies emerge, take root and create new institutional ecologies that favor their dominance in the marketplace.

Few people know that women were a significant presence in the early decades of computing in both the United States and Britain; programming in postwar years was considered woman's work (perhaps in contrast to the more manly task of building the computers themselves). This BIT offers a chapter in this untold history of women and computing, describing women's career stratagems in academic computing—recounting both the obstacles female scholars have faced and their resourceful strategies for gaining credentials and finding alternative ladders to visibility and career advancement.