Social Media Study

In this provocative and captivating dialogue, bell hooks and Cornel West come together to discuss the dilemmas, contradictions, and joys of Black intellectual life. The two friends and comrades in struggle talk, argue, and disagree about everything from community to capitalism in a series of intimate conversations that range from playful to probing to revelatory. In evoking the act of breaking bread, the book calls upon the various traditions of sharing that take place in domestic, secular, and sacred life.

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.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the landscape of television began an unprecedented transformation. While the networks continued to chase the lowest common denominator, a wave of new shows, first on premium cable channels like HBO and then basic cable networks like FX and AMC, dramatically stretched television’s narrative inventiveness, emotional resonance, and artistic ambition. Just as the Big Novel had in the 1960s and the subversive films of New Hollywood had in 1970s, television shows became the place to go to see stories of the triumph and betrayals of the American Dream.

This extraordinary book explains the engine that has catapulted the Internet from backwater to ubiquity—and reveals that it is sputtering precisely because of its runaway success. With the unwitting help of its users, the generative Internet is on a path to a lockdown, ending its cycle of innovation—and facilitating unsettling new kinds of control.

Over her four decades of working in newsrooms big and small, Margaret Sullivan has become a trusted champion and critic of the American news media. In this bracing memoir, Sullivan traces her life in journalism and how trust in the mainstream press has steadily eroded.

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.

Like the authors' classic book The Elements of Journalism, Blur is a unique and understandable discourse on how information culture is changing. Yes, old authorities are being dismantled and new ones created, and the way we obtain knowledge has changed. But seeking true and reliable information remains the most important purpose of journalism - and the object for those who consume it.

Media and law enforcement work at cross-purposes. Law enforcement want to solve a case as fast as possible and put the guilty behind bars. The media want a case to drag on as long as humanly possible and do all they can to extricate every last bit of drama, drop by bloody drop, in order to hold the attention of the millions of viewers who have gotten hooked. Law enforcement must abide by rules. The media make their own rules, and even then break them or find ways to work loopholes into them.

Our media environment is in crisis. Polarization is rampant. Polluted information floods social media. Even our best efforts to help clean up can backfire, sending toxins roaring across the landscape. In You Are Here, Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner offer strategies for navigating increasingly treacherous information flows. Using ecological metaphors, they emphasize how our individual me is entwined within a much larger we, and how everyone fits within an ever-shifting network map.

In True or False, former CIA analyst Cindy Otis takes listeners through the history and impact of misinformation over the centuries, sharing stories from the past and insights that listeners today can gain from them. Then, she shares lessons learned in over a decade working for the CIA, including actionable tips on how to spot fake news, how to make sense of the information we receive each day, and, most importantly, how to understand and see past our own information biases so that we can think critically about important issues and put events happening around us into context.

At a time when Steve Jobs was only a teenager and Mark Zuckerberg wasn't even born, a group of visionary engineers and designers - some of them only high school students - in the late 1960s and 1970s created a computer system called PLATO, which was not only years but light-years ahead in experimenting with how people would learn, engage, communicate, and play through connected computers.

The Einstein Intersection won the Nebula Award for best science fiction novel of 1967. The surface story tells of the problems a member of an alien race, Lo Lobey, has assimilating the mythology of Earth, where his kind have settled among the leftover artifacts of humanity. The deeper tale concerns, however, the way those who are "different" must deal with the dominant cultural ideology. The tale follows Lobey's mythic quest for his lost love, Friza. In luminous and hallucinated language, it explores what new myths might emerge from the detritus of the human world....

On the night of October 6, 1998, 21-year-old Matthew Shepard left a bar with two alleged “strangers”, Aaron McKin­ney and Russell Henderson. Eighteen hours later, Matthew was found tied to a log fence on the outskirts of town, unconscious and barely alive. Overnight, a politically expedient myth took the place of important facts. By the time Matthew died a few days later, his name was synonymous with anti-gay hate. The Book of Matt, first published in 2013, demonstrated that the truth was in fact far more complicated - and daunting.

Franklin Foer reveals the existential threat posed by big tech, and in his brilliant polemic gives us the toolkit to fight their pervasive influence. Over the past few decades there has been a revolution in terms of who controls knowledge and information. This rapid change has imperiled the way we think. Without pausing to consider the cost, the world has rushed to embrace the products and services of four titanic corporations. We shop with Amazon, socialize on Facebook, turn to Apple for entertainment, and rely on Google for information.

From the start of Barack Obama's presidency in 2009, conservative populist groups began fomenting political fractiousness, dissent, and surprising electoral success. The Tea Party was one of the major characters driving this story. But, as Khadijah Costley White argues in this book, the Tea Party's ascent to major political phenomenon can be attributed to the way in which partisan and non-partisan news outlets "branded" the Party as a pot-stirrer in political conflicts over race, class, and gender.

Krys Malcolm Belc has thought a lot about the interplay between parenthood and gender. As a nonbinary, transmasculine parent, giving birth to his son Samson clarified his gender identity. And yet, when his partner Anna adopted Samson, the legal documents listed Belc as "the natural mother of the child." The Natural Mother of the Child journeys both toward and through common perceptions of what it means to have a body and how that body can influence the perception of a family.

A new audiobook based on a groundbreaking cross-generational study reveals both greater freedom and new constraints for men and women in their work and family lives. Stew Friedman, founding director of The Wharton School's Work/Life Integration Project, studied two generations of Wharton college students as they graduated: Gen Xers in 1992 and Millennials in 2012.

Derrière ce titre ironique, Roxane Gay développe une réflexion révolutionnaire et bienvenue sur l'état actuel du féminisme. Lassée des prises de position parfois trop clivantes de certaines organisations féministes, elle rappelle que la défense de l'égalité des sexes ne dispense pas d'assumer ses contradictions. On peut aimer la télé-réalité, se peindre les ongles en rose et revendiquer le fait d'être féministe.

The Unreality of Memory collects provocative, searching essays on disaster culture, climate anxiety, and our mounting collective sense of doom. In this new collection, acclaimed poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert explores our obsessions with disasters past and future, from the sinking of the Titanic to Chernobyl, from witch hunts to the plague. These deeply researched, prophetic meditations question how the world will end - if indeed it will - and why we can't stop fantasizing about it.

Communication professor and CNN Opinion contributor Kara Alaimo reveals how social media is affecting every aspect of the lives of women and girls—from our relationships and our parenting to our physical and mental well-being. Over the Influence is an audiobook about what it means to live in the world social media has wrought—whether you’re constantly connected or have deleted your accounts forever.