Books

My latest book Humanising Technology: Reflections on Design, Ethics and Inclusion (World Scientific, 2025) presents a collection of 50 of my opinion editorials that interrogate the multifaceted social impacts of technology. Drawing from over two decades of research and public engagement, I offer insights into how technology intersects with human values and societal norms. It seeks to be an essential read for anyone interested in understanding how we can navigate the digital age responsibly, ensuring that technological progress aligns with and enhances our shared humanity.

Order via World Scientific

Praise for Humanising Technology

“A set of beguiling essays. In Humanising Technology, Sun Sun Lim teases out today’s social and technological contradictions with remarkable delicacy”.
Anthony Elliott, Distinguished Professor, Adelaide University

“Sun Sun Lim is a keen observer of our technologically mediated worlds. These essays sparkle with insights and wisdom – a must read for anyone interested in how our lives have become entangled with digital technologies.”
Mirca Madianou, Professor, Goldsmiths University of London and author of ‘Technocolonialism: when technology for good is harmful’

“Summarizing two decades of research and public engagement with the local and global implications of AI and other digital technologies, Humanising Technology translates cutting-edge scholarship into actionable insights for designers and policymakers to ensure equitable and inclusive access to technology as a resource for human existence and social coexistence.”
Klaus Bruhn Jensen, Professor, University of Copenhagen

"How can technology truly serve humanity? In Humanising Technology, Professor Sun Sun Lim offers fifty vivid essays that tackle this question head-on. Drawing from years of research and public engagement, she examines how AI, data, and design decisions shape the way we live, learn, and connect. From digital parenting and lifelong learning to inclusion and ethics, Lim shows that our relationship with technology is always a moral one.

With provocative thinking about shadow banning, the post-trust world, and how not to use AI, Lim invites readers to consider scenarios and counterfactuals that motivate us to apply technology in more purposeful, humane ways. Her writing is lucid, empathetic, and grounded in real-world experience—making this book an invaluable companion for anyone navigating the social challenges of the digital era."

Philip N. Howard, Professor, University of Oxford & President, International Panel on the Information Environment

“Through a series of bite-sized reflections and provocations, Sun Sun Lim brings her balanced perspective, grounded in a mix of evidence and good sense, to the heightened anxieties surrounding digital transformation in an uncertain world.”
Sonia Livingstone, Professor, London School of Economics and Political Science

“Sun Sun Lim’s essays are more than observations on the impact of technology on society. They are insights into modern society itself and help us understand who we are and where we are going.”
Peter Ho, Senior Advisor, Centre for Strategic Futures

“In Humanising Technology, Professor Sun Sun Lim powerfully reminds us that technology must serve humanity—not the other way around. Drawing on her rich experience as both scholar and policy advisor, this collection of opinion editorials offers an inspiring roadmap for building a more human-centred digital future and demonstrates convincingly how responsible design and ethical use of technology can enhance human values and growth.”
David De Cremer, Dunton Family Dean of D'Amore-McKim School of Business, Northeastern University

“Globally acclaimed scholar Professor Sun Sun Lim has packaged her most impactful and insightful writing on the promises and perils of AI, big data, social media, and other technological advances into one timely and accessible collection. With its central questions about ethics and inclusion, this book from one of the most trusted voices on media, technology, and society is exactly what we need, exactly when we need it. A must-read for citizens and scholars alike.”
Erica Scharrer, Professor, UMass Amherst

“In a time when technology outpaces our ability to thoughtfully engage with its consequences, Professor Sun Sun Lim’s Humanising Technology provides a beacon of clarity. With clear insights on design, ethics, and inclusion, this book is timely and essential for anyone committed to shaping technology that serves humanity.”
Ran Wei, Chair Professor, Hong Kong Baptist University

"In Humanising Technology, Sun Sun Lim offers a timely exploration of how technology intersects with human values and societal well-being. Drawing on more than two decades of scholarship and public engagement, she provides nuanced and accessible reflections on some of the most pressing issues of our digital age: from AI ethics and datafication to digital parenting, education, and social inclusion. What makes this volume particularly compelling is Lim’s ability to balance rigorous analysis with a deep empathy for the human condition, ensuring that her insights resonate with policymakers, educators, and everyday citizens alike. This collection is not only a testament to her scholarly leadership but also a guide for anyone seeking to navigate the promises and perils of technology in ways that keep people—our needs, our rights, our humanity—at the center."
Jessica Taylor Piotrowski, Professor, University of Amsterdam

“This book marks a milestone. In times of harsh competition on technology, at the aftermath of a new social era, Humanising Technology points to the heart of the matter. The human factor is not a residual last resort in technology-dominated world. It should be rather the whole grammar making tech socially significant and legally acceptable. This book covers the sectors we need to take care of if we want to ensure that tech is ad adiuvandum human development. This latter should be the azymut of our institutional and cultural actions.”
Daniela Piana, Professor, University of Bologna

“Humanising Technology: Reflections on Design, Ethics and Inclusion is an essential read for anyone seeking wisdom and guidance to face the social impact of digital transformation in our lives. Drawing from more than 20 years of academic research and public engagement, Professor Lim brings clarity and depth to topics such as AI ethics, responsible design, digital parenting, education in the digital era, and social inclusion. The collection of 50 commentaries bridges the gap between scholarly research and everyday challenges and offers thought-provoking reflections and actionable insights.”
Ang Peng Hwa, Professor, Nanyang Technological University

“In Humanising Technology, Lim offers actionable steps to navigate the ever-changing, always-connected technological landscape of contemporary society. She applies scholarly research in a usable format for parents, policymakers, and teachers in a thoughtful and compassionate manner. Placing human values at the center, Lim paves a path of inclusive and ethical practices for all users of technology.”
Nancy Jennings, Niehoff Professor of Film & Media Studies, University of Cincinnati

"A leading expert in the field of technology and communication, Professor Sun Sun Lim has been at the forefront of the thinking about the use and implications of technology in our everyday life. Humanising Technology brings together a selection of her prescient media commentaries for readers to consider their relations with pervasive and changing technology, offering practical insights for the present and considerations for the future. A must-read for anyone who designs, uses, works with, or creates policy around technology, in short, everyone."
Associate Professor Loh Chin Ee, Associate Dean (Impact & Partnerships), National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University

"This collection is an accessible and essential read for understanding today’s ethical debates and for navigating technology and its future with responsibility and care. Drawing on her decades of scholarship and sustained public engagement, each piece offers critical and deeply humane perspectives on our relationship with digital technology, making this a valuable resource for a wide readership, from homes to classrooms, and tech design hubs to policy arenas."
Cheryll Soriano, Professor, De La Salle University Manila

“Humanising Technology: Reflections on Design, Ethics and Inclusion is an insightful and timely collection that distils Professor Sun Sun Lim’s work over the past decade into 50 thought-provoking must-read essays. With clarity and conviction, Lim explores the human dimensions of our digital lives, from ethical AI to digital parenting, from skills in the digital age to technology inclusion. Each piece challenges us to reflect on how technology has impacted us and rethink how it can better serve society. This book is essential reading for anyone committed to building a more thoughtful, equitable, and humane digital future.”
Sam Liew, Past President & Fellow, Singapore Computer Society and Deputy CEO, NCS

“Algorithms are opinions embedded in code,” observed Cathy O’Neil in Weapons of Math Destruction. In a similarly compelling manner, Sun Sun Lim urges us to look beyond the technical architecture of digital systems and consider the critical dimensions of design, ethics and inclusion. Her work is a clarion call to humanize technology, to ensure it serves humanity, not subjugate it. A timely and essential read for anyone navigating the complexities of our digital age.”
Raju Chellam, Editor-in-Chief, AI Ethics & Governance Body of Knowledge

“Humanising Technology is a timely collection that reaffirms the importance of keeping people at the heart of digital advancement. Professor Sun Sun Lim’s reflections offer incisive perspectives on how technology can—and must—be designed to serve human values. Her essays on digital parenting, AI ethics, and social inclusion strike a powerful chord, underscoring that equitable access and online safety must be treated as fundamental rights, not optional privileges. A thoughtful read for anyone committed to shaping a digital future that respects diversity, protects the vulnerable, and empowers all.”
Tan Lee Chew, President, Singapore Computer Society Women in Tech Chapter

“At the Media Literacy Council, we have long championed the need for critical engagement with technology – one that empowers individuals to navigate the digital world with discernment, empathy and responsibility. In Humanising Technology, Professor Lim offers a masterful collection of insights that speak directly to this mission. This book is a powerful call to action: for policymakers to formulate policies that can connect with citizenry, for educators to teach with compassion, and for citizens to engage with technology, not just as consumers, but as stewards of a shared digital future”.
Lock Wai Han, Chairman, Media Literacy Council

“Technology has accelerated the speed of change in every facet of life. Sun Sun Lim’s op-eds articulate so clearly the dilemmas facing policymakers, community workers and parents alike: seeking a tenuous balance between opportunities from rapid tech advances, with an effective management of unintended consequences. How we navigate that has a direct bearing on underserved households and vulnerable individuals, who may not have access to support systems. May these questions prompt urgent action — to ethically leverage tech gains, promote better access to resources, and strengthen social inclusion.”
Dr. Alicia Altorfer-Ong, Executive Director, Ray of Hope

“Professor Sun Sun Lim, one of the members of our NTUC Labour Alliance Co-laB has been a prolific writer, researcher and contributor of many pieces of work in the digital and AI space impacting work, workforce, and the workplace including the Singapore society. She has put together a compendium of her writings which has dissected and challenged many crucial and current issues while providing ideas and provoking thought. My heartfelt congratulations and sincere compliments to Sun on this endeavour and for painstakingly putting together and publishing this book which I highly recommend as a reference and a read.”
Patrick Tay, Member of Parliament, Pioneer SMC and Assistant Secretary-General, National Trades Union Congress (NTUC)

My book Digital Parenting Burdens in China (Emerald Publishing, 2024) is the first English language book to explore the impact of digitalisation on family life in China, including the phenomenon of ‘punch-in culture’ and its implications for family wellbeing. Delving into 90 interviews from both before and during the Covid-19 pandemic, we provide rich vignettes of family life in urban Chinese households in Beijing and Hangzhou to demonstrate how parents appropriate technology as they raise their children, steer them towards the social aspirations of academic achievement, and navigate the rocky terrains of children’s home-based learning during the pandemic lockdowns. Empirically grounded and theoretically informed, these vivid accounts serve as valuable insights into understanding how family life around is shifting in the face of digitalisation not only in China, but globally.

Open-access via Emerald.

Praise for Digital Parenting Burdens in China

“Lim & Wang’s book provides us with a rare peek into the world of family life in China, a global technological leader, as it is embracing digitalization in all aspects of its life: Parenting, education, leisure, and social relationships. Their thoughtful empirically based observations in this unique culture are highly valuable for readers worldwide well beyond China as they raise the challenges and opportunities facing all families adjusting to the ever-changing digital advancements in their everyday lives.”
Dafna Lemish, Distinguished Professor of Journalism and Media Studies, Rutgers University

“A definitive volume, this book offers nuanced analysis about children, parenting, and digital media in urban China. The implications are, of course, far beyond China as AI and tech-facilitated practices fundamentally transform parenting itself, wherever you are.”
Jack Linchuan Qiu, Shaw Foundation Professor of Media Technology, Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University

“In this insightful and timely book, Sun Sun Lim and Yang Wang provide a groundbreaking exploration of the burdens Chinese parents face due to the digitalization of family life and intensifying academic pressures. Empirically rich and theoretically nuanced, this book offers invaluable guide to anyone seeking to understand the evolving strains and shifting dynamics of parenting in a digitalizing world.”
Bingchun Meng, Professor, Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics & Political Science

“Parenting and family life are not what they used to be, particularly since COVID. Many of the tasks and events that marked family life have been changed via digitalization, such as online shopping, gaming and social networking. In their book Digital Parenting Burdens in China: Online Homework,
Parent Chats and Punch-in Culture, Lim and Wang walk us through these changes as experienced in urban China. Thanks to the work of Lim and Wang, this book provides us with perhaps the first glimpse into digital parenting in China. A must-read.”
Rich Ling, author of Taken for Grantedness: The Embedding of Mobile Communication into Society (MIT Press, 2012)

“This book gives us unparalleled views into what was a black box until now: everyday digital parenting dilemmas playing out in the households of another technological superpower, China.”
Anne Collier, Founder and Executive Director at The Net Safety Collaborative

“The global rise of China is accompanied by major technological changes, which reveals important challenges for society and family life. Digital Parenting Burdens in China explores one such significant challenge in studying how digital connectivity affects parents in how they navigate their children’s educational journey in a country dominated by a quest for academic excellence. This is an insightful and thought-provoking book which should be essential reading for every parent and government worried about education in an increasingly digital fueled world.”
David De Cremer, Dunton Family Dean of D’Amore-McKim School of Business, Northeastern University

My book Transcendent Parenting: Raising Children in the Digital Age (Oxford University Press, 2020) discusses what I call “transcendent parenting” in many urban societies in Asia today. In the “making” of family, mobile media have come to play a central role, engendering the practice of transcendent parenting throughout every stage of a child’s development. In the wake of mobile media and cloud computing, the scope and scale of parenting obligations have broadened considerably, thereby transcending the physical distance between them and children, transcending every online and offline environment their children transit through, and transcending timeless time as experienced in the apparent ceaselessness of parenting duties.

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Praise for Transcendent Parenting

"Lim is sanguine rather than judgmental. Her approachable and grounded book lays out what is happening, who it impacts, and how it may have unintended consequences on our societies. She reminds us as researchers, parents, social actors, to take care of the unmanaged spaces between interaction and control, the spaces where necessary, human growth happens unseen." Review in Journal of Children and Media
Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, Distinguished Professor of Film, Lincoln University

"Lim gives us something we did not have before: an updated and contextualized demonstration of the omnipresent impact of technology in everyday family life. The book alerts the reader to vivid ways that parents in Asia are required to transcend physical space into a world they can’t keep up with, at all times with no pause, all in order to raise their children to be deemed successful in the cultural contexts that are shaping those parenting practices and pressures. Just because her descriptions are located in Asian urban middle-class family life and in institutional realms where parents and children reside does not mean the processes and practices and pressures are not present in other places and social institutions. The technology is here, and it is defined as necessary for success." Review in Contemporary Sociology
Michelle Janning, Professor of Sociology and The Raymond and Elsie Gipson DeBurgh Chair of Social Science, Whitman College

"This book is a much-needed addition to the robust discourse around parenting in a permanently online and connected world. Although the site of the book is East and Southeast Asia, parallels can be drawn across middle-class families around the globe. While scholars of children and media, parental mediation of children’s practices, childhood studies, sociology of parenting, and other allied disciplines will greatly benefit from reading this book, this volume would also be of interest to non-academics. The narratives that Lim draws on, including her own, paint a vivid picture of life where mothers are mothering offline and online, without and with mobile phones. Parents everywhere would be able to relate to and find insights on how to navigate parenting in this mobile media-saturated world. Review in Asian Journal of Communication
Devina Sarwatay, Senior Research Fellow, University of Hyderabad

“As the world hurtles ever further into an era of perpetual contact with media, Lim offers a fluent and well-informed analysis of the multiple effects of mobile technology on parent-child relationships. She dexterously examines a rich array of parent-child realities across varying social classes and cultures.”
James E. Katz, Feld Professor of Emerging Media, Boston University

“Sun Sun Lim’s social analysis is robust, insightful, and important for anyone studying any field related to mobile communication.”
Sonia Livingstone, Professor of Social Psychology, London School of Economics and Political Science

“With richly detailed stories of parental concerns about mobile media and the strategies they embrace to address them, this volume will be of great interest to parents, educators, and everyone who cares about children and contemporary family life in a digital age.”
Lynn Schofield Clark, Professor and Chair of Media, Film, and Journalism Studies Department, University of Denver

Mobile communication has dramatically changed over the past decade with the diffusion of smartphones. Unlike the basic 2G mobile phones, which "merely" facilitated communication between individuals on the move, smartphones allow individuals to communicate, to entertain and inform themselves, to transact, to navigate, to take photos, and countless other things. Mobile communication has thus transformed society by allowing new forms of coordination, communication, consumption, social interaction, and access to news/entertainment. All of this is regardless of the space in which users are immersed.

Set in the context of the developed and the developing world, The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Communication and Society (co-edited with Rich Ling, Leopoldina Fortunati, Gerard Goggin and Yuling Li) updates current scholarship surrounding mobile media and communication. The 43 chapters in this handbook examine mobile communication and its evolving impact on individuals, institutions, groups, societies, and businesses. Contributors examine the communal benefits, social consequences, theoretical perspectives, organizational potential, and future consequences of mobile communication. Topics covered include, among many other things, trends in the Global South, location-based services, and the "appification" of mobile communication and society.

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While mobile communication diffuses through Asia at a blistering pace, families in the region are also experiencing significant changes in light of unprecedented economic growth, globalisation, urbanisation and demographic shifts. This volume captures the domestication of mobile communication technologies by families in Asia, and its implications for family interactions and relationships against this backdrop. It showcases research on families across a spectrum of socio-economic profiles, from both rural and urban areas, offering insights on children, adolescents, adults, and the elderly. There are chapters on Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Korea, Philippines, Singapore and Vietnam. Read the introductory chapter here.

Praise for Mobile Communication and the Family

"... this is one of the few titles that focuses on how we can reexamine and rethink the use of digital communication technologies among Asian parents and children as a means of fostering and cementing familial bonds. Lim brings a fresh, balanced and nuanced perspective to examining the impact of ubiquitous communicative technologies in the Asian domestic sphere."
Earvin Cabalquinto, Journal of Children and Media

“…the book clarifies the importance of mobile connectivity among a variety of immigrant groups, making the book relevant well beyond Asia…The book’s greatest strengths are that it extends the focus of migration and mobile communication research from North America and Europe to Asia, and that it takes seriously the understudied groups of migrants.”
Sakari Taipale, Asian Journal of Communication

This volume examines digital phenomena and its impact on Asia by drawing on specifically Asian perspectives. Contributors apply a variety of Asian theoretical frameworks including guanxi, face, qing, dharma and karma in chapters focusing on emerging digital trends in China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea, Philippines, Singapore, and Taiwan. The book presents compelling and diverse research on identity and selfhood, spirituality, social networking, corporate image, and national identity as shaped by and articulated through digital communication platforms.

I edit this Book Series that seeks to thoroughly canvas the research community studying the social impact of mobile communication in Asia, to bring to the forefront research that has not attained a sufficiently international profile. The series is now into its fifth volume with the latest titles focusing on gaming, political participation health, and social intimacies. I welcome proposals for new volumes and work closely with volume editors to develop their ideas.