Book reflects on anti-copyright, porn, creative industries, post- punk, Arts and Crafts and constructivism, cooking as contemporary art, Oulipo, post-digitality, mezangelle, Anonymous and 4chan, Fluxus, amateurism, file sharing networks, pop culture, 17th century poetry, electroacoustic music, Neonazi communication guerilla, Rotterdam, romanticism, electronic literature, Mail Art, ontology, Super 8, Rosicrucianism and conceptual art.
A fully updated paperback edition that includes coverage of the key developments of the past two years, including the political controversies that swirled around Facebook with increasing intensity in the Trump era. If you wanted to build a machine that would distribute propaganda to millions of people, distract them from important issues, energize hatred and bigotry, erode social trust, undermine respectable journalism, foster doubts about science, and engage in massive surveillance all at once, you would make something a lot like Facebook. Of course, none of that was part of the plan. In this fully updated paperback edition of Antisocial Media, including a new chapter on the increasing recognition of--and reaction against--Facebook's power in the last couple of years, Siva Vaidhyanathan explains how Facebook devolved from an innocent social site hacked together by Harvard students into a force that, while it may make personal life just a little more pleasurable, makes democracy a lot more challenging. It's an account of the hubris of good intentions, a missionary spirit, and an ideology that sees computer code as the universal solvent for all human problems. And it's an indictment of how "social media" has fostered the deterioration of democratic culture around the world, from facilitating Russian meddling in support of Trump's election to the exploitation of the platform by murderous authoritarians in Burma and the Philippines. Both authoritative and trenchant, Antisocial Media shows how Facebook's mission went so wrong.
Winner of the 1964 Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction Anti-Intellectualism in American Life is a book which throws light on many features of the American character. Its concern is not merely to portray the scorners of intellect in American life, but to say something about what the intellectual is, and can be, as a force in a democratic society. "As Mr. Hofstadter unfolds the fascinating story, it is no crude battle of eggheads and fatheads. It is a rich, complex, shifting picture of the life of the mind in a society dominated by the ideal of practical success." —Robert Peel in the Christian Science Monitor
Tackling one of the most volatile issues in contemporary politics, Martin Gilens's work punctures myths and misconceptions about welfare policy, public opinion, and the role of the media in both. Why Americans Hate Welfare shows that the public's views on welfare are a complex mixture of cynicism and compassion; misinformed and racially charged, they nevertheless reflect both a distrust of welfare recipients and a desire to do more to help the "deserving" poor. "With one out of five children currently living in poverty and more than 100,000 families with children now homeless, Gilens's book is must reading if you want to understand how the mainstream media have helped justify, and even produce, this state of affairs." —Susan Douglas, The Progressive "Gilens's well-written and logically developed argument deserves to be taken seriously." —Choice "A provocative analysis of American attitudes towards 'welfare.'. . . [Gilens] shows how racial stereotypes, not white self-interest or anti-statism, lie at the root of opposition to welfare programs." -Library Journal
No, Anti-Book is not a book about books. Not exactly. And yet it is a must for anyone interested in the future of the book. Presenting what he terms “a communism of textual matter,” Nicholas Thoburn explores the encounter between political thought and experimental writing and publishing, shifting the politics of text from an exclusive concern with content and meaning to the media forms and social relations by which text is produced and consumed. Taking a “post-digital” approach in considering a wide array of textual media forms, Thoburn invites us to challenge the commodity form of books—to stop imagining books as transcendent intellectual, moral, and aesthetic goods unsullied by commerce. His critique is, instead, one immersed in the many materialities of text. Anti-Book engages with an array of writing and publishing projects, including Antonin Artaud’s paper gris-gris, Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, Guy Debord’s sandpaper-bound Mémoires, the collective novelist Wu Ming, and the digital/print hybrid of Mute magazine. Empirically grounded, it is also a major achievement in expressing a political philosophy of writing and publishing, where the materiality of text is interlaced with conceptual production. Each chapter investigates a different form of textual media in concert with a particular concept: the small-press pamphlet as “communist object,” the magazine as “diagrammatic publishing,” political books in the modes of “root” and “rhizome,” the “multiple single” of anonymous authorship, and myth as “unidentified narrative object.” An absorbingly written contribution to contemporary media theory in all its manifestations, Anti-Book will enrich current debates about radical publishing, artists’ books and other new genre and media forms in alternative media, art publishing, media studies, cultural studies, critical theory, and social and political theory.
The debate surrounding the transformation of work at the hands of digital technology and the anxieties brought forth by automation, the sharing economy, and the exploitation of leisure We have been told that digital technology is now threatening the workplace as we know it, that advances in computing and robotics will soon make human labor obsolete, that the sharing economy, exemplified by Uber and Airbnb, will degrade the few jobs that remain, and that the boundaries between work and play are collapsing as Facebook and Instagram infiltrate our free time. In this timely critique, Greg Goldberg examines the fear that work is being eviscerated by digital technology. He argues that it is not actually the degradation or disappearance of work that is so troubling, but rather the underlying notion that society itself is under attack, and more specifically the bonds of responsibility on which social relations depend. Rather than rushing to the defense of the social, however, Goldberg instead imagines the appeal of refusing the hard work of being a responsible and productive member of society.
In this book, Ian Taylor examines how a social movement, the anti-Iraq War movement in the UK, engaged with the media as a part of their campaigning against the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Moving beyond content analysis to draw upon interviews with locally based journalists and activists, Taylor examines how locally based anti-war groups engaged with their local press, as well as how those groups were reported on by the local press in their respective areas. In the process of exploring these ideas, the book takes on questions like: How did local journalists assess the legitimacy of the anti-war movement? How, why, and to what extent did opponents of the war pursue local press coverage? What bearing did the social composition of the movement have on the way they set about engaging with the media? How did the local press handle the controversy surrounding opposition to military action against Iraq? Media Relations of the Anti-War Movement makes a unique contribution to research on the interactions between social movements and the media and plugs a major gap in the literature on the Iraq War and the media.
In the nineteenth century, leading newspapers reported from a Christian perspective. Today, however, print and TV journalists increasingly take an anti-Christian stance while claiming to be neutral. Prodigal Press uncovers the shift to secular humanism that has radically altered what the media cover and how they report it. Issuing a clarion call for Christians to reclaim American journalism, Olasky and Smith examine the influence of worldviews on reporting, objectivity, sensationalism, and crusading; the impact of legal, ethical, and technological changes; and the changes brought about by the 24/7 news cycle, the Internet, and social media. - Back cover.
How do media inform our representations of the Other and how does this influence intercultural / international relations? While officially dialogues between different national societies are conducted by diplomats in bilateral and multilateral settings, in practice journalists also participate every day in such dialogues through the phenomenon of the “international media echo” in which they report on each others’ societies. Until now, media have only been investigated for their potential role in the foreign policy of specific states. In a case study involving media in three national cultures and languages (French, American and Russian), this book presents an interdisciplinary framework that combines quantitative and qualitative analyses for the study of the international media echo in an intercultural / international relations perspective. In particular, the fundamental functioning of “spirals of anti-Other rhetoric”, i.e. media wars, is examined in a Critical Discourse Analysis approach completed with Social Identity Theory and International Relations theories.
From a rising star at The New Yorker comes a deeply immersive chronicle of how the optimistic entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley set out to create a free and democratic internet--and how the cynical propagandists of the alt-right exploited that freedom to propel the extreme into the mainstream.ream.
