Dear CITASA:  My new book is out and it's called "Pax Technica:  How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up".  I wrote with an academic press, but it is crafted for a wide audience because I'm hoping to reach a lot of people with some ideas for how to make the internet of things a civic engagement infrastructure we might actually want to live with.

Excerpts and interactive content up at:

www.paxtechnica.org

I argue that as more wireless sensors get embedded in everyday objects--and our bodies--we are actually building the most powerful political tool we have ever created.  My book explains how the internet of things is being designed for censorship and surveillance.  But I also illustrate how it is being used to promote democracy and strengthen civic engagement around the world.

Your help in bringing the book to the attention of others through word-of-mouth, Facebook, Twitter (I'm www.twitter.com/pnhoward) or other means would be DEEPLY appreciated.  I'm really hoping the book will spark discussion on urgent questions about the next internet.

There are some policy ideas that you might love, or love to hate. Both are good reasons to pick up the book!  It is shipping now and of course the electronic versions will be quickly sent to devices. If this is topically interesting for you, and I'd certainly welcome your feedback.

Sincerely,
Phil

Dr. Philip N. Howard
Professor, University of Washington
Professor, Central European University
GPG Key: 9CAAEABC
www.philhoward.org
@pnhoward

New Book
Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up. Yale University Press, 2015, www.paxtechnica.org

Dear CITASA members,

I’m happy to announce that my new book, Neutral Accent: How Language, Labor and Life Become Global, has recently been published by Duke U Press. While the book is broad in scope, a couple of components may appeal to section members, particularly an evolving concept of system identity that I introduce in this book and distinguish it from social and bureaucratic identities. System identity includes but goes beyond the concerns of privacy, surveillance, and control. While social identity is an identity continually renegotiated through linguistic interactions and social performances, bureaucratic identity—glimpsed in passports, driver’s licenses, and other identity cards—is a construction of fixed personhood for the purposes of modern organizational needs, ensuring that the member has remained essentially the same despite changes in personality, body, and behavior. With the spread of information technologies, however, there has emerged a new variation of identity, which represents persons as dynamically forming clouds of data without depending on pre-determined attributes. My student and I will be presenting some of our latest thinking on this issue at the ASA this year.

Duke has posted the book's introduction on Scribd:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/260609029/Neutral-Accent-by-A-Aneesh

Thanks,

Aneesh

A. Aneesh
Director, Institute of World Affairs
Associate Professor of Sociology and Global Studies
Garland Hall 114
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Milwaukee, WI 53201-0413