Social Media Study

Movies matter—that is the message of Reel to Real, bell hooks' classic collection of essays on film. They matter on a personal level, providing us with unforgettable moments, even life-changing experiences, and they can confront us, too, with the most profound social issues of race, sex and class. Here bell hooks—one of America's most celebrated and thrilling cultural critics—talks back to films that have moved and provoked her, from Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction to the work of Spike Lee.

Disinformation: The Nature of Facts and Lies in the Post-Truth Era cannot cure all the ills of a post-truth world, but by demonstrating how the emergence of digital technology into everyday life has knitted together a number of seemingly loosely related forces-historical, psychological, economic, and cultural-to create the post-truth culture, Disinformation will help you better understand how we got to where we now are, see how we can move beyond a culture in which facts are too easily dismissed, and develop a few highly practical skills for separating truth from lies.

Nous nous croyons rationnels et informés. Pourtant, nous nous trompons systématiquement, y compris – peut-être même plus – sur les sujets que nous croyons bien connaître. Mais, comme le met au jour Hans Rosling, statisticien de génie et star des conférences TED, les raisons pour lesquelles nous nous trompons sont toujours les mêmes! Hérité d'un ancestral instinct de survie, c'est le fonctionnement même de notre cerveau qui nous induit en erreur : En nous incitant à chercher un coupable à tout phénomène ; En résumant la plupart des problèmes en une stérile opposition binaire.

Merchants of Truth is the groundbreaking and gripping story of the precarious state of the news business told by one of our most eminent journalists. Jill Abramson follows four companies: The New York Times, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, and Vice Media over a decade of disruption and radical adjustment. The new digital reality nearly kills two venerable newspapers with an aging readership while creating two media behemoths with a ballooning and fickle audience of millennials.

As a young girl in a working-class neighborhood of Sydney, Australia, Geraldine Brooks longed to discover the places where history happens and culture comes from, so she enlisted pen pals who offered her a window on adolescence in the Middle East, Europe, and America. Twenty years later, Brooks, an award-winning foreign correspondent, embarked on a human treasure hunt to find her pen friends. She found men and women whose lives had been shaped by war and hatred, by fame and notoriety, and by the ravages of mental illness.

With security scares like the Heartbleed bug (which compromised even supposedly safe internet behemoths like Google and Yahoo!) becoming more commonplace, this book is a must-listen for anybody who values their privacy in a wired world.

To understand how we got here, we have rewind the VHS tape. 90s Bitch tells the real story of women and girls in the 1990s, exploring how they were maligned by the media, vilified by popular culture, and objectified in the marketplace. Trailblazing women like Hillary Clinton, Anita Hill, Marcia Clark, and Roseanne Barr were undermined. Newsmakers like Monica Lewinsky, Tonya Harding, and Lorena Bobbitt were shamed and misunderstood. The advent of the 24-hour news cycle reinforced society's deeply entrenched sexism.

Humanity is on an astronomical trajectory and according to aerospace professional and popular science communicator Kellie Gerardi, that future doesn’t rest solely on the shoulders of rocket scientists. Gerardi’s non-traditional path in the space industry shows us that humanity’s next giant leap will require the contributions of artists, engineers, and everyone in between. Gerardi takes us on a tour of this unique window in history and offers encouragement and advice for anyone who has ever dreamed of the stars and galaxies far, far away.

Women have played a key role in these protests, refusing to wear a hijab and cutting their hair in public to chants of 'Woman, Life, Freedom'. In Farhad Khosrokhavar's account, these protests represent the first truly feminist movement in Iran, and one of the first in the Muslim world, where women have been in the vanguard. There have been many movements in the Muslim world in which women have taken part, but rarely have women—and especially young women—been the driving force.

We have reached a state of utter absurdity, where journalism schools teach students that their own personal truth or chosen narratives matter more than reality. In Slanted, Attkisson digs into the language of propagandists, the persistence of false media narratives, the driving forces behind today's dangerous blend of facts and opinion, the abandonment of journalism ethics, and the new, Orwellian definition of what it means to report the news.

Gary Webb had an inborn journalistic tendency to track down corruption and expose it. For over thirty-four years, he wrote stories about corruption from county, state, and federal levels. He had an almost magnetic effect to these kinds of stories, and it was almost as if the stories found him. It was his gift, and, ultimately, it was his downfall.

Ferguson might be the worst, but it is not the first. Ferguson is just the latest of hundreds of examples of Black mob violence around the country. White Girl Bleed a Lot: The Return of Racial Violence to America and How the Media Ignore It was written for the deniers: reporters and public officials and others who deny Black mob violence has reached epidemic levels.

Nancy Sorel’s portrait pays homage to these unsung heroes. They came from Boston, New York, Milwaukee, and St. Louis; from Yakima, Washington; Austin, Texas; and Sioux City, Iowa; from San Francisco and all points east. They left comfortable homes and safe surroundings for combat-zone duty. As women war correspondents, they brought to the battlefields of World War II a fresh optic, and reported back home what they witnessed with a new sensibility.

In the tradition of Neil Postman's masterpiece Amusing Ourselves to Death, Audience of One shows how American media have shaped American society and politics, by interweaving two crucial stories. The first story follows the evolution of television from the three-network era of the 20th century, which joined millions of Americans in a shared monoculture, into today's zillion-channel, internet-atomized universe, which sliced and diced them into fractious, alienated subcultures. The second story is a cultural critique of Donald Trump.

What kind of fossils will we leave, as relics into the far future? A blizzard of new objects has suddenly appeared on Earth: plastic bottles, ballpoint pens, concrete flyways, chicken bones, cans, teabags, phones, shirts. They're produced for our comfort and pleasure then quickly discarded. This new-made treasure chest underpins our lives. But it is also giving a completely new style of fossilization to our planet. Designed to resist corrosion and decay, many will remain, petrified, as future geology.

In the early 20th century, World War I was the most devastating event humanity had yet experienced. New machines of war left tens of millions killed or wounded in the most grotesque of ways. The Great War remade the world's map, created new global powers, and brought forth some of the biggest problems still facing us today. But it also birthed a new art form: the horror film, made from the fears of a generation ruined by war. From Nosferatu to Frankenstein's monster and the Wolf Man, the touchstones of horror can all trace their roots to the bloodshed of the First World War.

Delving into speculation about the assassination of JFK, chemtrails, the emergence of the 'New World Order', the sinister experiments at CERN, possible cover-ups regarding Area 51, and the so-called 'Clinton Body Count', this collection provides an essential reference for everyone interested in learning more about the secret forces that may be controlling our world. Taking a balanced and measured approach, it explores why these theories have taken hold, and how much truth lies at their foundations. Do you believe them? Listen to find out.

In the years between World War II and the emergence of television as a mass medium, American popular culture as we know it was first created in the bold, pulpy pages of comic books. The Ten-Cent Plague explores this cultural emergence and its fierce backlash while challenging common notions of the divide between "high" and "low" art.

The adviser to Senator Hillary Clinton, Bill Gates, and President Bill Clinton proves that small is big by identifying 75 hidden-in-plain-sight trends that are moving America, revealing that the nation is no longer a melting pot but a collection of communities with many individual tastes and lifestyles. In 2000, The Tipping Point entered the lexicon. Now, in Microtrends, one of the most respected and sought-after analysts in the world articulates a new way of understanding how we live.

The year is 2393, and the world is almost unrecognizable. Clear warnings of climate catastrophe went ignored for decades, leading to soaring temperatures, rising sea levels, widespread drought, and the disaster now known as the Great Collapse of 2093. Dramatizing science in ways traditional nonfiction cannot, The Collapse of Western Civilization reasserts the importance of scientists and the work they do, providing a welcome moment of clarity amid the cacophony of climate-change literature.