Social Media Study

Without ice road truckers, people in the coldest regions of the world wouldn't be able to survive. These trucks bring the food, fuel, and other necessary supplies to very isolated communities. Learn about brave journeys across frozen roads, and see how truckers stay safe to deliver the goods.

The Facebook Narcissist is the first book dedicated to exploring the relationship between narcissism and social media. Lena Derhally, a licensed psychotherapist certified in Imago therapy, delves into how social media enhances individual and cultural narcissism and how it may create or exacerbate toxic narcissistic tendencies in people who use it. Social media is here to stay, but with education and awareness on how it makes us and the world more narcissistic, we can change the narrative and focus on the ways in which social media can be positive, and even improve the world.

Almost everyone is doing it. Aimlessly scrolling through their social media feeds. From presidents to the postmen, most people you know and probably even yourself. Mindlessly, your fingers move across the screen, and content, from selfies to memes, flickers by at a blistering pace. Why is it that the screen sometimes seems more important than looking up and being present in real life? And what does it mean that more and more people are turning into so-called "Scroll Zombies"? Sven Rollenhagen thoughtfully discusses social media use and how it affects us both psychologically and physically.

Joshua Myers considers the work of thinkers who broke with the racial and colonial logic of academic disciplinarity and how the ideas of Black intellectuals created different ways of thinking and knowing in their pursuit of conceptual and epistemological freedom. Bookended by meditations with June Jordan and Toni Cade Bambara, Of Black Study focuses on how W.E.B. Du Bois, Sylvia Wynter, Jacob Carruthers, and Cedric Robinson contributed to Black Studies approaches to knowledge production within and beyond Western structures of knowledge.

Modern presidents engage in public leadership through national television addresses, routine speechmaking, and by speaking to local audiences. With these strategies, presidents tend to influence the media's agenda. In fact, presidential leadership of the news media provides an important avenue for indirect presidential leadership of the public, the president's ultimate target audience. Although frequently left out of sophisticated treatments of the public presidency, the media are directly incorporated into this book's theoretical approach and analysis.

How did we get from an age of dignified nightly news broadcasts on three national networks to the age of 24-hour channels and constantly breaking news? The answer - thanks to Ted Turner and an oddball cast of cable TV visionaries, big league rejects, and nonunion newbies - can be found in the basement of an abandoned country club in Atlanta. Because it was there, in 1980, that this motley crew somehow, against all odds, launched CNN. Up All Night is an inside look at the founding of the upstart network that set out to change the way news was delivered and consumed.

The public intellectual, as a person and ideal, has a long and storied history. Writing in venues like the New Republic and Commentary, such intellectuals were always expected to opine on a broad array of topics, from foreign policy to literature to economics. Yet in recent years a new kind of thinker has supplanted that archetype: the thought leader. Equipped with one big idea, thought leaders focus their energies on TED talks rather than highbrow periodicals.

Just as Susan Sontag did for photography and Marshall McLuhan did for television, Virginia Heffernan (called one of the "best living writers of English prose") reveals the logic and aesthetics behind the Internet. Since its inception, the Internet has morphed from merely an extension of traditional media into its own full-fledged civilization. It is among mankind's great masterpieces - a massive work of art. As an idea, it rivals monotheism.

A field guide to the visionaries and the fans who are reinventing the art of storytelling. Not long ago we were spectators, passive consumers of mass media. Now, on YouTube and blogs and Facebook and Twitter, we are media. And while we watch more television than ever before, how we watch it is changing in ways we have barely slowed down to register. No longer content in our traditional role as couch potatoes, we approach media as experiences to immerse ourselves in at will.

Almost as soon as it appeared, the crossword puzzle became indispensable to our lives. Invented practically by accident in 1913, when a newspaper editor at the New York World was casting around for something to fill empty column space, it became a roaring commercial success almost overnight. Ever since then, the humble puzzle has been an essential ingredient of any newspaper worth its salt. But why, exactly, are the crossword’s satisfactions so sweet.

As consumers of art, and especially as fans, we have a host of tricky moral question to navigate: do the moral lives of artists affect the aesthetic quality of their work? In Drawing the Line, Erich Hatala Matthes argues that it doesn't matter whether we can separate the art from the artist, because we shouldn't. Matthes argues both that the lives of artists can play an important role in shaping our moral and aesthetic relationship to the artworks that we love and that these same artworks offer us powerful resources for grappling with the immorality of their creators.

True Christians have been persecuted throughout the Church Age, and in some parts of the world continue in great trials. But the Savior is always there providing comfort and strength. No marvel, for Christ warned his followers that this would happen. Here, in Martyr of the Catacombs, we get a glimpse of the heinous persecutions in Ancient Rome and look inside the lives of those Christians whose very lives depended upon the place of refuge beneath the city of Rome.

Award-winning historian Amrita Chakrabarti Myers has recovered the riveting, troubling, and complicated story of Julia Ann Chinn (ca. 1796–1833), the enslaved wife of Richard Mentor Johnson, owner of Blue Spring Farm, veteran of the War of 1812, and US vice president under Martin Van Buren. Johnson never freed Chinn, but during his frequent absences from his estate, he delegated to her the management of his property, including Choctaw Academy, a boarding school for Indigenous men and boys on the grounds of the estate.

In October 1993, a tiny start-up called the Food Network debuted to little notice. Twenty years later, it is in 100 million homes, approaches a billion dollars a year in revenue, and features a galaxy of stars whose faces and names are as familiar to us as our own family's. But what we don't know about them, and the people behind them, could fill a book.

The founders of FactCheck.org teach you how to identify and debunk spin, hype, and fake news in this essential guide to informed citizenship in an age of misinformation.

Nev Schulman is the host of the wildly popular TV series Catfish which investigates online relationships to determine whether they are based on truth or fiction (spoiler: it's almost always fiction).

Combining ancient epic and myth with analogies from biology and the natural world, Joel P. Christensen explores the creative process and how narratives develop. This bold work urges listeners to treat narratives as living things with their own agency in the world.

Wonderfully narrated by Karen Chilton, Afrofuturism is an engaging, hip, and accessible primer to the music, literature, and art of Afrofuturism. Author Ytasha Womack introduces listeners to the burgeoning community of artists creating Afrofuturist works.

Army Wives goes beyond the sound bites and photo ops of military life to bring listeners into the hearts and homes of today's military wives. Biank tells the story of four typical Army wives who, in a flash, find themselves in extraordinary circumstances that ultimately force them to redefine who they are as women and wives.

Women have made up roughly half of the college-educated workforce for years, and before the onset of the economic crisis of 2020, the gap between the percentage of women and the percentage of men in the labor force was the lowest on record. But women remain underrepresented in positions of power and status. The endurance of these inequalities begs the question: Why haven't we made more progress? Ammerman and Groysberg focus on the pervasive organizational obstacles and managerial actions that create gender imbalance.