Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion

Hal Abelson is Class of 1922 Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT, and an IEEE Fellow. He has helped drive innovative educational technology initiatives such MIT OpenCourseWare, co-founded Creative Commons and Public Knowledge, and was founding director of the Free Software Foundation.Ken Ledeen, Chairman/CEO of Nevo Technologies, is a serial entrepreneur who has served on the boards of numerous technology companies.Harry Lewis, former Dean of Harvard College and of Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, is Gordon McKay Research Professor of Computer Science at Harvard and Faculty Associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. He is author of Excellence Without a Soul: Does Liberal Education Have a Future? and editor of Ideas that Created the Future: Classic Papers of Computer Science.Wendy Seltzer is Counsel and Strategy Lead at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), based at MIT. She founded Lumen Database, the pioneering transparency report for online content removals.

Blown to Bits, Second Edition is the brilliant, plain-English guide to digital technology, how it's changing the world, and what you need to know to survive in tomorrow's digital world. A best-seller when it was first published in 2010, the issues it addresses are more crucial than ever. Now, its expert authors have thoroughly updated Blown to Bits to demystify the social, political, and personal issues everyone is talking about: from social media and big data to fake news, cyberattacks, and privacy. Both authoritative and accessible, this guide doesn't just reveal the workings of the technologies that are central to your life: it also illuminates the policy decisions citizens need to make about these technologies... because you can try to ignore them, but they won't ignore you!

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