Digital War offers a comprehensive overview of the impact of digital technologies upon the military, the media, the global public and the concept of ‘warfare’ itself. This introductory textbook explores the range of uses of digital technology in contemporary warfare and conflict. The book begins with the 1991 Gulf War, which showcased post-Vietnam technological developments and established a new model of close military and media management. It explores how this model was reapplied in Kosovo (1999), Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003), and how, with the Web 2.0 revolution, this informational control broke down. New digital technologies allowed anyone to be an informational producer leading to the emergence of a new mode of ‘participative war’, as seen in Gaza, Iraq and Syria. The book examines major political events of recent times, such as 9/11 and the War on Terror and its aftermath. It also considers how technological developments such as unmanned drones and cyberwar have impacted upon global conflict and explores emerging technologies such as soldier-systems, exo-skeletons, robotics and artificial intelligence and their possible future impact. This book will be of much interest to students of war and media, security studies, political communication, new media, diplomacy and IR in general.

What new directions in China’s digital economy mean for us all China is the largest homogenous digital market on Earth: unified by language, culture, and mobile payments. Not only a consumer market of unrivaled size, it’s also a vast and hyperactive innovation ecosystem for new technologies. And as China’s digital economy moves from a consumer-focused phase to an enterprise-oriented one, Chinese companies are rushing to capitalize on ways the newer wave of tech—the Internet of Things, AI, blockchain, cloud computing, and data analytics (iABCD)—can unlock value for their businesses from non-traditional angles. In China’s Data Economy, Winston Ma—investment professional, capital markets attorney, adjunct professor of digital economy, and bestselling author—details the profound global implications of this new direction, including how Chinese apps for services such as food delivery expand so quickly they surpass their U.S. models within a couple of years, and how the sheer scale and pace of Chinese innovation might lead to an AI arms race in which China and the U.S. vie aggressively for leadership. How China’s younger netizens participate in their evolving digital economy as consumers, creators, and entrepreneurs Why Online/Office (OMO, Online-merge-with-Offline) integration is viewed as the natural next step on from the O2O (Online-to-Offline) model used in the rest of the world The ways in which traditional Chinese industries such as retail, banking, and insurance are innovating to stay in the game What emerging markets can learn from China as they leapfrog past the personal computer age altogether, diving straight into the mobile-first economy Anyone interested in what’s next for Chinese digital powerhouses—investors, governments, entrepreneurs, international business players—will find this an essential guide to what lies ahead as China’s flexes new digital muscles to create new forms of value and challenge established tech giants across the world.

A deep look into the raging social media battles between red and blue Americans and the growing threat to US democracy from right-wing extremism. The Far Right’s rise to power has ignited a digital civil war that rages across multiple fronts and multiple platforms. It is waged with words and images that are designed to inflict psychological harm, to injure through verbal violence, to intimidate and incite, to wreak havoc with rhetoric. The combatants are citizens, activists, politicians, pundits, coders, conspiracists, trolls, agitators, hackers, and journalists. At stake are the nation’s bedrock principles: equal rights, fair elections, freedom of speech, racial justice, and the rule of law. In Digital Civil War: Confronting the Far-Right Menace, Peter Daou, a veteran digital media adviser to major political figures, provides a firsthand account from the war’s front lines. He explains that the unceasing toxicity of social media—often treated as an aberration—is a feature, not a bug, of digital warfare. A better understanding of how the underlying value systems and moral arguments of the warring parties play out online, Daou argues, aids us in confronting the Far Right’s takeover of the Republican Party and the consequent assault on truth, facts, and the foundations of our democracy.

From the bestselling author of Black Hawk Down, the gripping story of the Conficker worm—the cyberattack that nearly toppled the world. The Conficker worm infected its first computer in November 2008, and within a month had infiltrated 1.5 million computers in 195 countries. Banks, telecommunications companies, and critical government networks—including British Parliament and the French and German military—became infected almost instantaneously. No one had ever seen anything like it. By January 2009, the worm lay hidden in at least eight million computers, and the botnet of linked computers it had created was big enough that an attack might crash the world. In this “masterpiece” (The Philadelphia Inquirer), Mark Bowden expertly lays out a spellbinding tale of how hackers, researchers, millionaire Internet entrepreneurs, and computer security experts found themselves drawn into a battle between those determined to exploit the Internet and those committed to protecting it.

The role of social media in the events of the Arab Spring and its aftermath in the Muslim world has stimulated much debate, yet little in the way of useful insight. Now Haroon Ullah, a scholar and diplomat with deep knowledge of politics and societies in the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, draws the first clear picture of the unprecedented impact of Twitter, Facebook, and other means of online communication on the recent revolutions that blazed across Muslim nations. The author carefully analyzes the growth of social media throughout the Muslim world, tracing how various organizations learned to employ such digital tools to grow networks, recruit volunteers, and disseminate messages. In Egypt, where young people rose against the regime; in Pakistan, where the youth fought against the intelligence and military establishments; and in Syria, where underground Islamists had to switch alliances, digital communications played key roles. Ullah demonstrates how social media have profoundly changed relationships between regimes and voters, though not always for the better. Looking forward he identifies trends across the Muslim world and the implications of these for regional and international politics.

An investigation into how the Pentagon, NSA, and other government agencies are uniting with corporations to fight in cyberspace, the next great theater of war.

Human communication has traditionally revealed important aspects of identity such as gender, age and race. However, such information is now often masked by computer-mediated communications. This text examines the various ways modern technology is challenging conventional notions of gender identity.