Digital And Emerging Technology books

Discover the profitable business opportunities within the metaverse and learn how you can and why you should get your company involved today. In Decoding the Metaverse, Creative Cloud strategist and Web3 expert Chris Duffey establishes a roadmap for entry to the metaverse. Written to help businesses get a handle on a complex new business opportunity, the book begins by explaining how previous iterations of the internet led to the creation of immersive digital technology with Web3 before detailing the building blocks of the metaverse. The book takes readers through the future of digital spaces, offering insight into immersive experiences, customer engagement, product-led growth and profitability. The chapters focus on the building blocks of the metaverse, including NFTs, blockchain, tokenomics, gaming and virtual real estate. Each chapter is paired with a corresponding case study from well-known brands currently working in the metaverse. Decoding the Metaverse ends with guiding principles about the ethical ramifications of immersive experiences and digital governance.Throughout Decoding the Metaverse, Duffey highlights the importance of reaching customers through shared immersive experiences. Showcasing the potential impact of working with Web3, he explains how companies can use these opportunities to further their reach and grow their revenue. Readers will step away from the book eager to get their companies involved today.

The long-standing cultural imperative of augmenting human intellect continues to move ever closer to its full manifestation, described by Marshall McLuhan as an extension of the human nervous system. The escalating blending of immersive technologies with advanced computation has created an emerging domain which increasingly allows socio-technical system makers to produce not only human-computer interactions, but advanced, multi-minded human+computer (H+C) systems. The critical shift toward user immersion within systems of digital information and simulation makes the scale of immersive media's potential impact on human life, culture and well-being unlike that of any previous medium. In Designing XR, Peter (Zak) Zakrzewski presents H+C immersion as a multi-dimensional design problem - a Research Through Design (RTD) zone which addresses the question of: How can transformative design-thinking-based knowledge system complement the existing human-computer interaction (HCI) invention model to contribute to the creation of more participatory, socially viable, and humane immersive media environments? The book lays out a proposal for ushering the creation of ecologically sound augmented mind based on two essential tasks. The first involves a framework for the design, implementation, and iteration of purposeful, multi-minded, participatory immersive H+C systems. The second focuses on the extended reality experience (XRX) design practice that rhetorically invites users to actively engage with immersive systems while fully exercising their autonomy and agency based on informed choice.

This book analyses the role of technology in the realm of health. Health apps can promote medicalization and the idea that health is an individual matter, rather than a political and social one. The authors base their arguments around three theoretical frameworks. Quantification: the growing importance in our society of markers, rankings, and scores, which thanks to digital devices is fueled by the ease with which it is now possible to collect data. Gamification: a powerful trend in digital society, using playful features to transform what are seen as dull tasks into competitive and appealing ones. Gamified self-tracking seemingly increases our productivity without oppressing us with apparent self-governance. Finally, Medicalization: a growing social phenomenon of the transformation of a 'normal' condition into something pathological. Several health apps presuppose a conception of the user as an individualized subject divorced from any social determinants of health. The authors investigate the possibility of people sharing their most private states leading to new forms of algorithmic surveillance. Alongside this negative vision of medicalization the authors recover the now-rare concept of positive medicalization, looking at how apps can work as positive self-help devices though promoting a medical framework. A selection of digital programs related to fitness in the workplace are also presented and discussed.

How does Instagram shape how we relate to each other online? Are users concerned about privacy when documenting their lives in fine detail? How does Instagram work as a marketing machine? Drawing on three years’ research with Instagram users, Elisa Serafinelli explores how Instagram is changing people’s visual experiences. Instagram is now by far the most popular online photo sharing platform, fuelled by the growth of smart mobile devices, and the management of an online persona is now part of millions of people’s everyday reality. This has not gone unnoticed among commercial actors, with the savviest of these exploiting the social dynamics of sharing that underlie the very logic of Instagram. This book addresses the issue of how mobile media and visual communication permeate people’s daily routines, how marketing influences practice, whether privacy and surveillance concerns are a reality, and how the platform shapes social relationships and identity formation. In its conclusion, the book advances the innovative concept of new mobile visualities to describe the social communication of photography and its huge expansion. Digital Life on Instagram is an online ethnography fit for the modern age of social media.

Digital changes everything. That’s a truth that has played out across industries the world over. And PR is a perfect example of an industry that has been forced to transform. Across every PR discipline, from media relations and content creation through to social media and influencer marketing, digital has changed traditional PR techniques and ushered in a whole new wave of specialisms that previously did not exist. This book acts as a guide to this era of transformation. It’s a manual that summaries the trends affecting our industry. It examines the techniques that have changed and also investigates some of the new approaches that are starting to emerge. It poses the questions that modern PR practitioners need to ask, whether working in-house or in an agency, and will be equally relevant for those studying PR or coming into the industry as it will those who are hardened professionals facing a future that looks significantly different to the tried and tested approaches of the past. This is a book about opportunity. A book that shines a light on how adoption of data, audience planning and creativity, seen through a digital lens, can transform an industry, making it more relevant and necessary that ever before. It’s a celebration of the power of earned media in a world where we are, as consumers of media, increasingly shunning interruptive marketing and looking for connection and true engagement.

The HRM field is entering smart businesses where the human, digital and high-tech dimensions seem to increasingly converge, and HRM needs to anticipate its own smart future. Technological developments and interconnectedness with and through the Internet (often called the “Internet of Things”) set new challenges for the HRM function. Smartness enacted by HRM professionals – notions of “smart industries”, “smart things” and “smart services” – all put new pressures on strategic HRM. Since the 1990s, organisations have increasingly been introducing electronic Human Resource Management (e-HRM), with the expectation of improving the quality of HRM and increasing its contribution to firm performance. These beliefs originate from ideas about the endless possibilities of information technologies (IT) in facilitating HR practices, and about the infinite capacity of HRM to adopt IT. This book focuses on the progression from e-HRM to digital (d-HRM) – towards smart HRM. It also raises several important questions that businesses and scholars are confronted with: What kind of smart solution can and will HRM offer to meet the expectations of the latest business developments? Can HRM become smart and combine digitisation, automation and a network approach? How do businesses futureproof their HRM in the smart era? What competences do employees need to ensure businesses flourish in smart industries? With rapid technological developments and ever-greater automation and information available, the HRM function needs to focus on non-routine and complex, evidence-based and science-inspired, and creative and value-added professionally demanding tasks.

While the metaverse is often marketed as a future utopia, the vision of the metaverse represents an attempt for private corporations to control the code of the real. In the hands of companies that established and maintain the surveillance capitalism model, the ability to build a persistent, all-compassing environment means all activity in that world can be metricized and commodified, making the metaverse worthy of critical examination. Significant parts of life are already conducted in a digital place that combines various aspects of digital culture. Likewise, digital worlds for socializing already exist, and in a form akin to the VR metaverse, just as VR worlds based on play now coexist with online worlds of user generated content. These discreet private “microverses”, as we refer to them, are spaces which can model the tensions that would be inherent in the metaverse. From Microverse to Metaverse: Modelling the Future through Today's Virtual Worlds examines the place attachments, world-feeling and dwelling of several “microverses” to assess the possibilities of the metaverse as a realistic proposition. Critically analyzing the phenomenological feeling of place, the political economy of emerging tech, the mechanisms of identity and self along with the behavioral constraints involved, the authors map what a metaverse might be like, whether it can happen, and just why some companies seem so determined to make it happen.

Amazon's Fire phone. Google Glass. Facebook Home. Quikster. New technologies alone don't always cause industry changes. Future Tech explains how the four forces of technology, policy, business models and social dynamics work together to create industry disruption and how this understanding can help to predict what is coming next. Technology is generally viewed as the single force that disrupts markets. However, history is rife with stories of technologies that have failed to meet such hyped expectations. In Future Tech, the author reveals that true change only results from combining the forces of science and technology, policy and regulation, new business models (i.e. sharing economy) and social dynamics (whether or not people adopt it). Whether these four forces align explains why some technologies, such as AI, blockchain, robotics, synthetic biology and 3D printing, stick and why others fail. With an understanding of these four forces, business executives and policymakers can explain what technology is likely to stick and even anticipate what is coming next.By 2030, the global labor force will be led by an elite set of knowledge workers enabled by robotic AI. To help individuals thrive in this workplace, Future Tech advises readers to develop their human capabilities of creativity and adaptation, develop deep expertise in one domain while being well-versed in dozens more, and develop a personalized approach to acquiring and processing information and deliberating decisions.

The ebook edition of this title is Open Access, thanks to Knowledge Unlatched Funding, and is freely available to read online. Our aging societies have become increasingly digitalized, leading to concerns that older adults (those age 65 and older) will be disenfranchised by the grey digital divide. However, those familiar with the elder population have long noted a diversity of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) use. While some older adults reject digital technologies, others embrace them with an enthusiasm that mirrors some of the youngest members of our society.  Gerontechnology: Understanding Older Adult Information and Communication Technology Use explores, theorizes, and explains this diversity in older adult technology use. Illustrated through interpretive interactionist case studies of 17 older adults and data from their friends, family, and co-workers, the book incorporates perspectives from Gerontology, Communication, and Information Studies in its creation of the ICT User Typology. This typology not only describes the diversity in ICT use, but categorizes older adults' motivations in domesticating technologies into their everyday lives. Focusing not only on technology adoption, it explores the challenges and joys elder users face, and the meanings these technologies come to develop for older adults.  Useful for the researcher interested in older adult technology use, domestication studies, and technology adoption; Gerontechnology also provides valuable guidance to those practitioners and service providers who want to understand how older adults use and view technology. Practical implications for designers and advertisers seeking to engage the growing senior market are included.

Industry X.0 takes an insightful look at the business impact of the Internet of Things movement on the industrial sphere. Eric Schaeffer combines deep analysis with practical strategic guidance, and offers tangible and actionable recommendations on how to realise value in the current digital age. Based on extensive research and insights into the six core competencies that have been identified by Accenture, Industry X.0 explores critical aspects of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), discussing and defining them in an engaging and accessible manner. These include managing smart data, handling digital product development, skilling up the workforce, mastering innovation, making the most of platforms and ecosystems, and much more. Meticulously researched and clearly explained, Industry X.0 makes a stringent case for companies to actively shift mind-sets away from products, towards services, value and outcomes. Complemented by a wealth of case studies and real world examples, this book provides invaluable, practical 'how-to' advice for business organizations as they embark on their journeys into the era of the IIoT.