Social Media Sociology

IRL, Chris Stedman's personal and searing exploration of authenticity in the digital age, shines a light on how age-old notions of realness - who we are and where we fit in the world - can be freshly understood in our increasingly online lives. Stedman offers a different way of seeing the supposed split between our online and offline selves: the internet and social media are new tools for understanding and expressing ourselves, and the not-always-graceful ways we use these tools can reveal new insights into far older human behaviors and desires.

Whether we need to make better financial choices, find the love of our life, or transform our career, crowdsourcing is the key to making quicker, wiser, more objective decisions. But few of us even come close to tapping the full potential of our online personal networks. Zoref's clients are using his techniques to innovate and problem-solve in record time. Now he reveals how crowdsourcing has the ability to supercharge our thinking and upgrade every aspect of our lives.

Denby has fun snarking the snarkers, expelling the bums and promoting the true wits, but he is also making a serious point: the Internet has put snark on steroids. In politics, snark means the lowest, most insinuating and insulting side can win. For the young, a savage piece of gossip could ruin a reputation and possibly a future career. And for all of us, snark just sucks the humor out of life. Denby defends the right of any of us to be cruel but shows us how the real pros pull it off. Snark, he says, is for the amateurs.

In 2005 Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn, New York, unveiled a new state-of-the-art, multimillion-dollar cancer center. Determined to understand the whole spectrum of factors that determine what kind of medical care people receive in this country, best-selling author Julie Salamon spent one year tracking the progess of the center and getting to know the characters who make the hospital run.

Where the Wild Things Were centers on the exploding, contentious national conversation about the nature of childhood and parenting in the postwar US emblematized by Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care. Renowned scholar Henry Jenkins demonstrates that the language that shaped a growing field of advice literature for parents also informed the period's fictions—in film, television, and elsewhere—produced for and consumed by children.

Many books have been written on the Jesus People movement in the United States, but what about its impact in the United Kingdom? When Jesus Met Hippies explores how this counter-cultural movement of Christians found its own expression in the United Kingdom, reshaping the lives of individuals along with the life and mission of the new and existing churches across the nation.

Facts are and must be the coin of the realm in a democracy. Unfortunately, for citizens in the United States and throughout the world, distinguishing between fact and fiction - always a formidable challenge - is now more difficult than ever, as a constant stream of questionable information pours into media outlets. Lewis argues forcefully that while data points and factoids abound, it is much harder to get to the whole truth of complex issues in time for that truth to guide citizens, voters, and decision makers.

International bestselling author and optimistic internet thinker Jeff Jarvis examines the way the Internet has changed the way we form communities, create identities, engage in commerce, and live our lives. A visionary and optimistic thinker examines the tension between privacy and publicness...

In "La società della performance", Maura Gancitano e Andrea Colamedici proseguono la linea tracciata da Guy Debord con "La società dello spettacolo" e da Byung-Chul Han con "Psicopolitica", rivelando come la condizione dell'uomo contemporaneo sia strutturata per sostituire al mondo l'imitazione del mondo, all'espressione di sé l'esibizione di sé, alla narrazione lo storytelling, alla ricerca del senso della vita la ricerca di un livello sempre maggiore di benessere e visibilità.

In Capital, Commonwealth Prize-winning author Rana Dasgupta examines one of the great trends of our time: The expansion of the global elite. Capital is an intimate portrait of the city of Delhi, which bears witness to the extraordinary transmogrification of India's capital. But it also offers a glimpse of what capitalism will become in the coming, post-Western world. The story of Delhi is a parable for where we are all headed.

In this Very Short Introduction, Philip N. Jefferson explores how the answers to these questions lie in the social, political, economic, educational, and technological processes that impact all of us throughout our lives. The degree of vulnerability is all that differentiates us. He shows how a person's level of vulnerability to adverse changes in their life is very much dependent on the circumstances of their birth, including where their family lived, whether it was peacetime or wartime, whether they had access to clean water, and whether they are male or female.

Excessive comparison and competition sap our energy and steal our joy. Our friends become our audience and judges, and our kids become part of our brand. Add social media's constant invitation to post and peruse, and it's no wonder that we're left exhausted, discontented, and lonely. Thankfully there is another way.

Historian Calvin Schermerhorn traces four hundred years of Black dispossession and decapitalization—what Frederick Douglass called plunder—through the stories of families who have strived to earn and keep the fruits of their toils. Their struggles reveal that the ever-evolving strategies to strip Black income and wealth have been critical to sustaining a structure of racialized disadvantage. These accounts also tell of the quiet heroism of those who worked to overcome obstacles and defy the plunder.

Horrified, saddened, and angered: That was the American people's reaction to the 9/11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, the Virginia Tech shootings, and the 2008 financial crisis. In Consuming Catastrophe, Timothy Recuber presents a unique and provocative look at how these four very different disasters took a similar path through public consciousness. He explores the myriad ways we engage with and negotiate our feelings about disasters and tragedies.

Our ability to understand others and help others understand us is essential to our individual and collective well-being. Yet there are many barriers that keep us from walking in the shoes of others: fear, skepticism, and power structures that separate us from those outside our narrow groups. To progress in a multicultural world and ensure our common good, we need to overcome these obstacles. In Social Empathy, Elizabeth A. Segal explains how we can develop our ability to understand one another and have compassion toward different social groups.

Em sua primeira obra inédita depois do sucesso de A elite do atraso, de 2017, Jessé Souza se dedica a compreender a classe média brasileira. Com o mesmo estilo claro e acessível, mas sem fazer concessões à superficialidade, ele agora apresenta uma visão original e inovadora dessa classe fundamental da sociedade.

Today, the majority of the peoples of the planet live in nation-states, based upon the idea, if never the reality, of a single people, a single culture, a single rule of law, and a single source of sovereign authority. But will they continue to do so in the future? None of the major challenges that confront humanity today—from climate change to disease, from terrorism to mass migration—can be handled effectively by single nation-states, no matter how powerful.

In an increasingly secular, fragmented, and distracted culture, nothing brings Americans together quite like sports. On Sundays in September, more families worship at the altar of the NFL than at any church. This appeal, which cuts across all demographic and ideological lines, makes sports perhaps the last unifying mass ritual of our era, with huge numbers of people all focused on the same thing at the same moment. That timeless, live quality makes sports very powerful, and very lucrative. And the media spectacle around them is only getting bigger, brighter, and noisier.

America's middle class, the driver of so much of our economic success and political stability, is rapidly disappearing, forcing us to confront the fear that we are slipping as a nation - that our children and grandchildren will enjoy fewer opportunities and face a lower standard of living than we did. It's the dark flipside of the American Dream - an American Nightmare of our own making.

Renyi Hong theorizes the notion of being "passionate about your work" as an affective project that encourages people to endure trying situations like unemployment, job change, repetitive and menial labor, and freelancing. Not simply a subject of aspiration, passion has been deployed as a means to build resilience and mend disappointments with our experiences of work. Tracking the rise of passion in nineteenth-century management to trends like gamification, coworking, and unemployment insurance, Hong argues that the ideal of passionate work sustains a condition of cruel optimism.