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An Internet in Your Head: A New Paradigm for How the Brain Works
by Daniel GrahamWhether we realize it or not, we think of our brains as computers. In neuroscience, the metaphor of the brain as a computer has defined the field for much of the modern era. But as neuroscientists increasingly reevaluate their assumptions about how brains work, we need a new metaphor to help us ask better questions.The computational neuroscientist Daniel Graham offers an innovative paradigm for understanding the brain. He argues that the brain is not like a single computer—it is a communication system, like the internet. Both are networks whose power comes from their flexibility and reliability. The brain and the internet both must route signals throughout their systems, requiring protocols to direct messages from just about any point to any other. But we do not yet understand how the brain manages the dynamic flow of information across its entire network. The internet metaphor can help neuroscience unravel the brain’s routing mechanisms by focusing attention on shared design principles and communication strategies that emerge from parallel challenges. Highlighting similarities between brain connectivity and the architecture of the internet can open new avenues of research and help unlock the brain’s deepest secrets.An Internet in Your Head presents a clear-eyed and engaging tour of brain science as it stands today and where the new paradigm might take it next. It offers anyone with an interest in brains a transformative new way to conceptualize what goes on inside our heads.
Second Time Around: From Art House to DVD
by D. A. MillerThe art houses and cinema clubs of his youth are gone, but the films that D. A. Miller discovered there in the 1960s and ’70s are now at his fingertips. With DVDs and streaming media, technology has turned the old cinematheque’s theatrical offerings into private viewings that anyone can repeat, pause, slow, and otherwise manipulate at will.In Second Time Around, Miller seizes this opportunity; across thirteen essays, he watches digitally restored films by directors from Mizoguchi to Pasolini and from Hitchcock to Honda, looking to find not only what he first saw in them but also what he was then kept from seeing by quick camerawork, normal projection speed, missing frames, or simple censorship. At last he has an unobstructed view of the gay leather scene in Cruising, the expurgated special effects in The H-Man, and the alternative ending to Vertigo. Now he can pursue the finer details of Chabrol’s debt to Hitchcock, Visconti’s mystificatory Marxism, or the unemotive emotion in Godard.Yet this recaptured past is strangely disturbing; the films and the author have changed in too many ways for their reunion to be like old times. The closeness of Miller’s attention clarifies the painful contradictions of youth and decline, damaged prints and flawless restorations.
Artificial Whiteness: Politics and Ideology in Artificial Intelligence
by Yarden KatzDramatic statements about the promise and peril of artificial intelligence for humanity abound, as an industry of experts claims that AI is poised to reshape nearly every sphere of life. Who profits from the idea that the age of AI has arrived? Why do ideas of AI’s transformative potential keep reappearing in social and political discourse, and how are they linked to broader political agendas?Yarden Katz reveals the ideology embedded in the concept of artificial intelligence, contending that it both serves and mimics the logic of white supremacy. He demonstrates that understandings of AI, as a field and a technology, have shifted dramatically over time based on the needs of its funders and the professional class that formed around it. From its origins in the Cold War military-industrial complex through its present-day Silicon Valley proselytizers and eager policy analysts, AI has never been simply a technical project enabled by larger data and better computing. Drawing on intimate familiarity with the field and its practices, Katz instead asks us to see how AI reinforces models of knowledge that assume white male superiority and an imperialist worldview. Only by seeing the connection between artificial intelligence and whiteness can we prioritize alternatives to the conception of AI as an all-encompassing technological force.Bringing together theories of whiteness and race in the humanities and social sciences with a deep understanding of the history and practice of science and computing, Artificial Whiteness is an incisive, urgent critique of the uses of AI as a political tool to uphold social hierarchies.
Startup Myths and Models: What You Won't Learn in Business School
by Rizwan VirkBudding entrepreneurs face a challenging road. The path is not made any easier by all the clichés they hear about how to make a startup succeed—from platitudes and conventional wisdom to downright contradictions.This witty and wise guide to the dilemmas of entrepreneurship debunks widespread misconceptions about how the world of startups works and offers hard-earned advice for every step of the journey. Instead of startup myths—legends spun from a fantasy version of Silicon Valley—Rizwan Virk provides startup models—frameworks that help make thoughtful decisions about starting, growing, managing, and selling a business. Rather than dispensing simplistic rules, he mentors readers in the development of a mental toolkit for approaching challenges based on how startup markets evolve in real life.In snappy prose with savvy pop-culture and real-world examples, Virk recasts entrepreneurship as a grand adventure. He points out the pitfalls that appear along the way and offers insights into how to avoid them, sharing the secrets of founding a startup, raising money, hiring and firing, when to enter a market and when to exit, and how to value a company.Virk combines lessons learned the hard way during his twenty-five years of founding, investing in, and advising startups with reflections from well-known venture capitalists and experts. His candid advice makes Startup Myths and Models an ideal guide for those readers just embarking on the startup life and those looking for their next adventure.
Spaces Mapped and Monstrous: Digital 3D Cinema and Visual Culture (Film and Culture Series)
by Nick JonesDigital 3D has become a core feature of the twenty-first-century visual landscape. Yet 3D cinema is a contradictory media form: producing spaces that are highly regimented and exhaustively detailed, it simultaneously relies upon distortions of vision and space that are inherently strange.Spaces Mapped and Monstrous explores the paradoxical nature of 3D cinema to offer a critical analysis of an inescapable part of contemporary culture. Considering 3D’s distinctive visual qualities and its connections to wider digital systems, Nick Jones situates the production and exhibition of 3D cinema within a web of aesthetic, technological, and historical contexts. He examines 3D’s relationship with computer interfaces, virtual reality, and digital networks as well as tracing its lineage to predigital models of visual organization. Jones emphasizes that 3D is not only a technology used in films but also a tool for producing, controlling, and distorting space within systems of surveillance, corporatization, and militarization. The book features detailed analysis of a wide range of films—including Avatar (2009), Goodbye to Language (2014), Love (2015), and Clash of the Titans (2010)—demonstrating that 3D is not merely an augmentation of 2D cinema but that it has its own unique properties. Spaces Mapped and Monstrous brings together media archaeology, digital theory, and textual analysis to provide a new account of the importance of 3D to visual culture today.
Python for MBAs
by Mattan Griffel Daniel GuettaFrom the ads that track us to the maps that guide us, the twenty-first century runs on code. The business world is no different. Programming has become one of the fastest-growing topics at business schools around the world. An increasing number of MBAs are choosing to pursue careers in tech. For them and other professionals, having some basic coding knowledge is a must.This book is an introduction to programming with Python for MBA students and others in business positions who need a crash course. One of the most popular programming languages, Python is used for tasks such as building and running websites, data analysis, machine learning, and natural-language processing. Drawing on years of experience providing instruction in this material at Columbia Business School as well as extensive backgrounds in technology, entrepreneurship, and consulting, Mattan Griffel and Daniel Guetta teach the basics of programming from scratch. Beginning with fundamentals such as variables, strings, lists, and functions, they build up to data analytics and practical ways to derive value from large and complex datasets. They focus on business use cases throughout, using the real-world example of a major restaurant chain to offer a concrete look at what Python can do. Written for business students with no previous coding experience and those in business roles that include coding or working with coding teams, Python for MBAs is an indispensable introduction to a versatile and powerful programming language.
The Values in Numbers: Reading Japanese Literature in a Global Information Age
by Hoyt LongIdeas about how to study and understand cultural history—particularly literature—are rapidly changing as new digital archives and tools for searching them become available. This is not the first information age, however, to challenge ideas about how and why we value literature and the role numbers might play in this process. The Values in Numbers tells the longer history of this evolving global conversation from the perspective of Japan and maps its potential futures for the study of Japanese literature and world literature more broadly.Hoyt Long offers both a reinterpretation of modern Japanese literature through computational methods and an introduction to the history, theory, and practice of looking at literature through numbers. He weaves explanations of these methods and their application to literature together with critical reflection on the kinds of reasoning such methodologies facilitate. Chapters guide readers through increasingly complex techniques while making novel arguments about topics of fundamental concern, including the role of quantitative thinking in Japanese literary criticism; the canonization of modern literature in print and digital media; the rise of psychological fiction as a genre; the transnational circulation of modernist forms; and discourses of race under empire. Long models how computational methods can be applied outside English-language contexts and to languages written in non-Latin scripts. Drawing from fields as diverse as the history of science, book history, world literature, and critical race theory, this book demonstrates the value of numbers in literary study and the values literary critics can bring to the reading of difference in numbers.
Oath Keepers: Patriotism and the Edge of Violence in a Right-Wing Antigovernment Group
by Professor Sam JacksonSince 2008, the American patriot/militia movement—right-wing antigovernment groups who portray themselves as fighting encroaching tyranny—has grown exponentially. Oath Keepers is among the most visible and vocal of these organizations. Formed in 2009, Oath Keepers gained notoriety for its involvement in the Bundy Ranch standoff of 2014 and the Malheur Refuge occupation of 2016. The group gives voice to a recurrent form of American politics: virulent distrust of the government combined with a valorization of violence.Sam Jackson takes readers inside the world of the most prominent antigovernment group in the United States, examining its extensive online presence to discover how it builds support for its political goals and actions. Through an extensive textual analysis of the group’s publications, Jackson explores how Oath Keepers draws on core American political values and pivotal historical moments of conflict and crisis from the Revolutionary War to Waco to Hurricane Katrina to cast its adherents as defenders of liberty. He details how Oath Keepers makes sense of the contemporary United States, how it provides members with models of political behavior, and how it lobbies the wider American public to join the group. The first book-length investigation of the contemporary patriot/militia movement, Oath Keepers sheds new light on what animates groups that pose a growing threat to American security and political culture.
Information Security Essentials: A Guide for Reporters, Editors, and Newsroom Leaders
by Susan E. McGregorAs technological and legal changes have hollowed out the protections that reporters and news organizations have depended upon for decades, information security concerns facing journalists as they report, produce, and disseminate the news have only intensified. From source prosecutions to physical attacks and online harassment, the last two decades have seen a dramatic increase in the risks faced by journalists at all levels even as the media industry confronts drastic cutbacks in budgets and staff. As a result, few professional or aspiring journalists have a comprehensive understanding of what is required to keep their sources, stories, colleagues, and reputations safe.This book is an essential guide to protecting news writers, sources, and organizations in the digital era. Susan E. McGregor provides a systematic understanding of the key technical, legal, and conceptual issues that anyone teaching, studying, or practicing journalism should know. Bringing together expert insights from both leading academics and security professionals who work at and with news organizations from BuzzFeed to the Associated Press, she lays out key principles and approaches for building information security into journalistic practice. McGregor draws on firsthand experience as a Wall Street Journal staffer, followed by a decade of researching, testing, and developing information security tools and practices. Filled with practical but evergreen advice that can enhance the security and efficacy of everything from daily beat reporting to long-term investigative projects, Information Security Essentials is a vital tool for journalists at all levels.
Newsmakers: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Journalism
by Francesco MarconiWill the use of artificial intelligence (AI), algorithms, and smart machines be the end of journalism as we know it—or its savior? In Newsmakers, Francesco Marconi, who has led the development of the Associated Press and Wall Street Journal’s use of AI in journalism, offers a new perspective on the potential of these technologies. He explains how reporters, editors, and newsrooms of all sizes can take advantage of the possibilities they provide to develop new ways of telling stories and connecting with readers.Marconi analyzes the challenges and opportunities of AI through case studies ranging from financial publications using algorithms to write earnings reports to investigative reporters analyzing large data sets to outlets determining the distribution of news on social media. Newsmakers contends that AI can augment—not automate—the industry, allowing journalists to break more news more quickly while simultaneously freeing up their time for deeper analysis. Marshaling insights drawn from firsthand experience, Marconi maps a media landscape transformed by artificial intelligence for the better. In addition to considering the benefits of these new technologies, Marconi stresses the continuing need for editorial and institutional oversight. Newsmakers outlines the important questions that journalists and media organizations should consider when integrating AI and algorithms into their workflow. For journalism students as well as seasoned media professionals, Marconi’s insights provide much-needed clarity and a practical roadmap for how AI can best serve journalism.
Disrespectful Democracy: The Psychology of Political Incivility
by Professor Emily SydnorThe majority of Americans think that politics has an “incivility problem” and that this problem is only getting worse. Research demonstrates that negativity and rudeness in politics have been increasing for decades. But how does this tide of impolite-to-outrageous language affect our reactions to media coverage and our political behavior?Disrespectful Democracy offers a new account of the relationship between incivility and political behavior based on a key individual predisposition—conflict orientation. Individuals experience conflict in different ways; some enjoy arguments while others are uncomfortable and avoid confrontation. Drawing on a range of original surveys and experiments, Emily Sydnor contends that the rise of incivility in political media has transformed political involvement. Citizens now need to be able to tolerate or even welcome incivility in the public sphere in order to participate in the democratic process. Yet individuals who are turned off by incivility are not brought back in by civil presentation of issues. Sydnor considers the challenges in evaluating incivility’s normative benefits and harms to the political system: despite some detrimental aspects, certain levels of incivility in certain venues can promote political engagement, and confrontational behavior can be a vital tool in the citizen’s democratic arsenal. A rigorous and empirically informed analysis of political rhetoric and behavior, Disrespectful Democracy also proposes strategies to engage citizens across the range of conflict orientations.
Positioning for Advantage: Techniques and Strategies to Grow Brand Value
by Professor Kimberly A. WhitlerMost of us have an intuitive sense of superior branding. We prefer to purchase brands we find distinctive—that deliver on some important, relevant dimension better than other brands. These brands have typically achieved positional advantage. Yet few professionals have had the formal training that goes beyond marketing theory to bridge the “theory-doing gap”—understanding the specific techniques and strategies that can be used to create brands that attain positional advantage in the marketplace.Positioning for Advantage is a comprehensive how-to guide for creating, building, and executing effective brand strategies. Kimberly A. Whitler identifies essential marketing strategy techniques and moves through the major stages of positioning a brand to achieve in-market advantage. Introducing seven tools—from strategic positioning concepts to strategy mapping to influencer maps—Whitler provides templates, frameworks, and step-by-step processes to build and manage growth brands that achieve positional advantage. This book presents real-world scenarios, helping readers activate tools to increase skill in creating brands that achieve positional advantage. Brimming with insights for students and professionals alike, Positioning for Advantage helps aspiring C-level leaders understand not only what superior branding looks like but also how to make it come to life.
Media Capture: How Money, Digital Platforms, and Governments Control the News
by Edited by Anya SchiffrinWho controls the media today? There are many media systems across the globe that claim to be free yet whose independence has been eroded. As demagogues rise, independent voices have been squeezed out. Corporate-owned media companies that act in the service of power increasingly exercise soft censorship. Tech giants such as Facebook and Google have dramatically changed how people access information, with consequences that are only beginning to be felt.This book features pathbreaking analysis from journalists and academics of the changing nature and peril of media capture—how formerly independent institutions fall under the sway of governments, plutocrats, and corporations. Contributors including Emily Bell, Felix Salmon, Joshua Marshall, Joel Simon, and Nikki Usher analyze diverse cases of media capture worldwide—from the United Kingdom to Turkey to India and beyond—many drawn from firsthand experience. They examine the role played by new media companies and funders, showing how the confluence of the growth of big tech and falling revenues for legacy media has led to new forms of control. Contributions also shed light on how the rise of right-wing populists has catalyzed the crisis of global media. They also chart a way forward, exploring the growing need for a policy response and sustainable models for public-interest investigative journalism. Providing valuable insight into today’s urgent threats to media independence, Media Capture is essential reading for anyone concerned with defending press freedom in the digital age.
Show Trial: Hollywood, HUAC, and the Birth of the Blacklist (Film and Culture Series)
by Thomas DohertyIn 1947, the Cold War came to Hollywood. Over nine tumultuous days in October, the House Un-American Activities Committee held a notorious round of hearings into alleged Communist subversion in the movie industry. The blowback was profound: the major studios pledged to never again employ a known Communist or unrepentant fellow traveler. The declaration marked the onset of the blacklist era, a time when political allegiances, real or suspected, determined employment opportunities in the entertainment industry. Hundreds of artists were shown the door—or had it shut in their faces.In Show Trial, Thomas Doherty takes us behind the scenes at the first full-on media-political spectacle of the postwar era. He details the theatrical elements of a proceeding that bridged the realms of entertainment and politics, a courtroom drama starring glamorous actors, colorful moguls, on-the-make congressmen, high-priced lawyers, single-minded investigators, and recalcitrant screenwriters, all recorded by newsreel cameras and broadcast over radio. Doherty tells the story of the Hollywood Ten and the other witnesses, friendly and unfriendly, who testified, and chronicles the implementation of the postwar blacklist. Show Trial is a rich, character-driven inquiry into how the HUAC hearings ignited the anti-Communist crackdown in Hollywood, providing a gripping cultural history of one of the most transformative events of the postwar era.
Morphing Intelligence: From IQ Measurement to Artificial Brains (The Wellek Library Lectures)
by Catherine MalabouWhat is intelligence? The concept crosses and blurs the boundaries between natural and artificial, bridging the human brain and the cybernetic world of AI. In this book, the acclaimed philosopher Catherine Malabou ventures a new approach that emphasizes the intertwined, networked relationships among the biological, the technological, and the symbolic.Malabou traces the modern metamorphoses of intelligence, seeking to understand how neurobiological and neurotechnological advances have transformed our view. She considers three crucial developments: the notion of intelligence as an empirical, genetically based quality measurable by standardized tests; the shift to the epigenetic paradigm, with its emphasis on neural plasticity; and the dawn of artificial intelligence, with its potential to simulate, replicate, and ultimately surpass the workings of the brain. Malabou concludes that a dialogue between human and cybernetic intelligence offers the best if not the only means to build a democratic future. A strikingly original exploration of our changing notions of intelligence and the human and their far-reaching philosophical and political implications, Morphing Intelligence is an essential analysis of the porous border between symbolic and biological life at a time when once-clear distinctions between mind and machine have become uncertain.
Brain Magnet: Research Triangle Park and the Idea of the Idea Economy (Columbia Studies in the History of U.S. Capitalism)
by Alex CummingsBeginning in the 1950s, a group of academics, businesspeople, and politicians set out on an ambitious project to remake North Carolina’s low-wage economy. They pitched the universities of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill as the kernel of a tech hub, Research Triangle Park, which would lure a new class of highly educated workers. In the process, they created a blueprint for what would become known as the knowledge economy: a future built on intellectual labor and the production of intellectual property.In Brain Magnet, Alex Sayf Cummings reveals the significance of Research Triangle Park to the emergence of the high-tech economy in a postindustrial United States. She analyzes the use of ideas of culture and creativity to fuel economic development, how workers experienced life in the Triangle, and the role of the federal government in bringing the modern technology industry into being. As Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill were transformed by high-tech development, the old South gave way to a distinctly new one, which welded the intellectual power of universities to a vision of the suburban good life. Cummings pinpoints how the story of the Research Triangle sheds new light on the origins of today’s urban landscape, in which innovation, as exemplified by the tech industry, is lauded as the engine of economic growth against a backdrop of gentrification and inequality. Placing the knowledge economy in a broader cultural and intellectual context, Brain Magnet offers vital insight into how tech-driven development occurs and the people and places left in its wake.
Contesting Cyberspace in China: Online Expression and Authoritarian Resilience
by Rongbin HanThe Internet was supposed to be an antidote to authoritarianism. It can enable citizens to express themselves freely and organize outside state control. Yet while online activity has helped challenge authoritarian rule in some cases, other regimes have endured: no movement comparable to the Arab Spring has arisen in China. In Contesting Cyberspace in China, Rongbin Han offers a powerful counterintuitive explanation for the survival of the world’s largest authoritarian regime in the digital age.Han reveals the complex internal dynamics of online expression in China, showing how the state, service providers, and netizens negotiate the limits of discourse. He finds that state censorship has conditioned online expression, yet has failed to bring it under control. However, Han also finds that freer expression may work to the advantage of the regime because its critics are not the only ones empowered: the Internet has proved less threatening than expected due to the multiplicity of beliefs, identities, and values online. State-sponsored and spontaneous pro-government commenters have turned out to be a major presence on the Chinese internet, denigrating dissenters and barraging oppositional voices. Han explores the recruitment, training, and behavior of hired commenters, the “fifty-cent army,” as well as group identity formation among nationalistic Internet posters who see themselves as patriots defending China against online saboteurs. Drawing on a rich set of data collected through interviews, participant observation, and long-term online ethnography, as well as official reports and state directives, Contesting Cyberspace in China interrogates our assumptions about authoritarian resilience and the democratizing power of the Internet.
Social Media and the Public Interest: Media Regulation in the Disinformation Age
by Philip M. NapoliFacebook, a platform created by undergraduates in a Harvard dorm room, has transformed the ways millions of people consume news, understand the world, and participate in the political process. Despite taking on many of journalism’s traditional roles, Facebook and other platforms, such as Twitter and Google, have presented themselves as tech companies—and therefore not subject to the same regulations and ethical codes as conventional media organizations. Challenging such superficial distinctions, Philip M. Napoli offers a timely and persuasive case for understanding and governing social media as news media, with a fundamental obligation to serve the public interest.Social Media and the Public Interest explores how and why social media platforms became so central to news consumption and distribution as they met many of the challenges of finding information—and audiences—online. Napoli illustrates the implications of a system in which coders and engineers drive out journalists and editors as the gatekeepers who determine media content. He argues that a social media–driven news ecosystem represents a case of market failure in what he calls the algorithmic marketplace of ideas. To respond, we need to rethink fundamental elements of media governance based on a revitalized concept of the public interest. A compelling examination of the intersection of social media and journalism, Social Media and the Public Interest offers valuable insights for the democratic governance of today’s most influential shapers of news.
Journalism in the Age of Virtual Reality: How Experiential Media Are Transforming News
by John PavlikWith the advent of the internet and handheld or wearable media systems that plunge the user into 360º video, augmented—or virtual reality—technology is changing how stories are told and created. In this book, John V. Pavlik argues that a new form of mediated communication has emerged: experiential news. Experiential media delivers not just news stories but also news experiences, in which the consumer engages news as a participant or virtual eyewitness in immersive, multisensory, and interactive narratives.Pavlik describes and analyzes new tools and approaches that allow journalists to tell stories that go beyond text and image. He delves into developing forms such as virtual reality, haptic technologies, interactive documentaries, and drone media, presenting the principles of how to design and frame a story using these techniques. Pavlik warns that although experiential news can heighten user engagement and increase understanding, it may also fuel the transformation of fake news into artificial realities, and he discusses the standards of ethics and accuracy needed to build public trust in journalism in the age of virtual reality. Journalism in the Age of Virtual Reality offers important lessons for practitioners seeking to produce quality experiential news and those interested in the ethical considerations that experiential media raise for journalism and the public.
Facebook Society: Losing Ourselves in Sharing Ourselves
by Roberto SimanowskiFacebook claims that it is building a “global community.” Whether this sounds utopian, dystopian, or simply self-promotional, there is no denying that social-media platforms have altered social interaction, political life, and outlooks on the world, even for people who do not regularly use them. In this book, Roberto Simanowski takes Facebook as a starting point to investigate our social-media society—and its insidious consequences for our concept of the self.Simanowski contends that while they are often denounced as outlets for narcissism and self-branding, social networks and the practices they cultivate in fact remake the self in their image. Sharing is the outsourcing of one’s experiences, encouraging unreflective self-narration rather than conscious self-determination. Instead of experiencing the present, we are stuck ceaselessly documenting and archiving it. We let our lives become episodic autobiographies whose real author is the algorithm lurking behind the interface. As we go about accumulating more material for the platform to arrange for us, our sense of self becomes diminished—and Facebook shapes a subject who no longer minds. Social-media companies’ relentless pursuit of personal data for advertising purposes presents users with increasingly targeted, customized information, attenuating cultural memory and fracturing collective identity. Presenting a creative, philosophically informed perspective that speaks candidly to a shared reality, Facebook Society asks us to come to terms with the networked world for our own sake and for all those with whom we share it.
Data Love: The Seduction and Betrayal of Digital Technologies
by Roberto SimanowskiIntelligence services, government administrations, businesses, and a growing majority of the population are hooked on the idea that big data can reveal patterns and correlations in everyday life. Initiated by software engineers and carried out through algorithms, the mining of big data has sparked a silent revolution. But algorithmic analysis and data mining are not simply byproducts of media development or the logical consequences of computation. They are the radicalization of the Enlightenment's quest for knowledge and progress. Data Love argues that the "cold civil war" of big data is taking place not among citizens or between the citizen and government but within each of us.Roberto Simanowski elaborates on the changes data love has brought to the human condition while exploring the entanglements of those who—out of stinginess, convenience, ignorance, narcissism, or passion—contribute to the amassing of ever more data about their lives, leading to the statistical evaluation and individual profiling of their selves. Writing from a philosophical standpoint, Simanowski illustrates the social implications of technological development and retrieves the concepts, events, and cultural artifacts of past centuries to help decode the programming of our present.
The Conversational Firm: Rethinking Bureaucracy in the Age of Social Media (The Middle Range Series)
by Catherine TurcoA fast-growing social media marketing company, TechCo encourages all of its employees to speak up. By promoting open dialogue across the corporate hierarchy, the firm has fostered a uniquely engaged workforce and an enviable capacity for change. Yet the path hasn't always been easy. TechCo has confronted a number of challenges, and its experience reveals the essential elements of bureaucracy that remain even when a firm sets out to discard them. Through it all, TechCo serves as a powerful new model for how firms can navigate today's rapidly changing technological and cultural climate.Catherine J. Turco was embedded within TechCo for ten months. The Conversational Firm is her ethnographic analysis of what worked at the company and what didn't. She offers multiple lessons for anyone curious about the effect of social media on the corporate environment and adds depth to debates over the new generation of employees reared on social media: Millennials who carry their technological habits and expectations into the workplace. Marshaling insights from cultural and economic sociology, organizational theory, economics, technology studies, and anthropology, The Conversational Firm offers a nuanced analysis of corporate communication, control, and culture in the social media age.
A Survival Guide to the Misinformation Age: Scientific Habits of Mind
by David J. HelfandLearning how to tell news from fake news from fake fake news: An &“important and timely&” book on protecting ourselves, and society, from the infodemic (Library Journal). We have billions of bytes of data at our fingertips. But how much of it is misinformation—or even disinformation? A lot of it is, and your search engine can&’t tell the difference. As a result, an avalanche of misinformation threatens to overwhelm the discourse we so desperately need to address complex social problems such as climate change, the food and water crises, biodiversity collapse, and emerging threats to public health. This book provides an inoculation against the misinformation epidemic by cultivating scientific habits of mind. Anyone can do it—indeed, everyone must do it if our species is to survive on this crowded and finite planet. This survival guide supplies an essential set of apps for the prefrontal cortex while making science both accessible and entertaining. It will dissolve your fear of numbers, demystify graphs, and elucidate the key concepts of probability, all while celebrating the precise use of language and logic. David Helfand, one of our nation&’s leading astronomers and science educators, has taught scientific habits of mind to generations in the classroom, where he continues to wage a provocative battle against sloppy thinking and the encroachment of misinformation. &“Provides a vital antidote to the ills of misinformation by teaching systematic and rigorous scientific reasoning.&” —The Times Literary Supplement
The End of Cinema?
by Philippe Marion Timothy Barnard André GaudreaultIs a film watched on a video screen still cinema? Have digital compositing, motion capture, and other advanced technologies remade or obliterated the craft? Rooted in their hypothesis of the "double birth of media," André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion take a positive look at cinema's ongoing digital revolution and reaffirm its central place in a rapidly expanding media landscape.The authors begin with an overview of the extreme positions held by opposing camps in the debate over cinema: the "digitalphobes" who lament the implosion of cinema and the "digitalphiles" who celebrate its new, vital incarnation. Throughout, they remind readers that cinema has never been a static medium but a series of processes and transformations powering a dynamic art. From their perspective, the digital revolution is the eighth major crisis in the history of motion pictures, with more disruptions to come. Brokering a peace among all sides, Gaudreault and Marion emphasize the cultural practice of cinema over rigid claims on its identity, moving toward a common conception of cinema to better understand where it is headed next.
Engaged Journalism: Connecting with Digitally Empowered News Audiences
by Jake BatsellExplores the changing relationship between news producers and audiences and the methods journalists can use to secure the attention of news consumers.