Digital Freedom: How Much Can You Handle?

by Narain D. Batra

Overview

In Digital Freedom, N. D. Batra explores the tension between the boundlessness of the Internet and the boundaries of the marketplace, as well as the resulting impact on human expression, privacy, and social controls. Digital Freedom is an exploration of and meditation on the question: How much freedom does a person need? The question evokes Tolstoy's parable, 'How much land does a man need?' Is freedom an acquired taste, much like one's love for symphony orchestra? Or, is it a necessity? After all, civilizations in the past have produced monumental works in all fields of human endeavor without as much obsession with individual freedom as we have today. Digital Freedom explores these issues_including surveillance, intellectual property, and copyright_from the perspective of an evolutionary, self-organizing social system. This system both creates and assimilates innovations and, in the process, undergoes reorganization and renewal.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780742577022
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	07/27/2007
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	278
File size:	513 KB

About the Author

N. D. Batra, the author of A Self-Renewing Society and The Hour of Television, is professor of communications at Norwich University, where he teaches media law, ethics, television criticism, and new media and the Internet. He also teaches corporate diplomacy in the graduate program in diplomacy at Norwich University and writes a weekly column, Cyber Age, for The Statesman.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 1 Scanning Digital Horizons
Chapter 3 2 Changing View of Privacy
Chapter 4 3 Surveillance in Cyberspace
Chapter 5 4 How the Marketplace Shapes Creativity
Chapter 6 5 Free Expression in the Digital Age
Chapter 7 6 Conclusion

Editorial Reviews

Recommended.

Vol. 45 No. 6 (February 2008) CHOICE

Digital Freedom is a breath of fresh air in the debate over the Internet as salvation versus doom. N. D. Batra asks the right questions of the digital age by focusing on what it means to be human in a technology-driven global world. The book is highly accessible to people on all levels including neo-Luddites and Techno-utopians.

Susan B. Barnes