Social Sciences Media Studies

Is Twitter a place for sociability and conversation, a platform for public broadcasting, or a network for discussion? Digital platforms have become influential in every sphere of communication, from the intimate and everyday to the public, professional, and political. Since the scrappy start-up days of social media in the mid-2000s, not only has the worldwide importance of platforms grown exponentially, but also their cultures have shifted dramatically, in a variety of directions.

A fascinating look at the evolution of behavioral science, the revolutionary way it's changing the way we live, and how nurturing environments can increase people's well-being in virtually every aspect of our society, from early childhood education to corporate practices. If you want to know how you can help create a better world, listen to this book.

Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife charts the lives and times of four medieval women writers—Marie de France, a poet; Julian of Norwich, a mystic and anchoress; Christine de Pizan, a widow and court writer; and Margery Kempe, a no-good wife—who all bucked convention and forged their own paths. Largely forgotten by modern readers, these women have an astonishing amount to teach us about love, marriage, motherhood, friendship, and earning a living.

Have you logged into Facebook recently? Searched for something on Google? Chosen a movie on Netflix? If so, you've probably been an unwitting participant in a variety of experiments - also known as randomized controlled trials - designed to test the impact of different online experiences. In this book, Michael Luca and Max Bazerman explain the importance of experiments for decision making in a data-driven world.

In Losing the News, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Alex S. Jones offers a probing look at the epochal changes sweeping the media, changes which are eroding the core news that has been the essential food supply of our democracy. Losing the News depicts an unsettling situation in which the American birthright of fact-based, reported news is in danger. But it is also a call to arms to fight to keep the core of news intact.

The perfect book for all student journalists, this young learners adaptation of Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters' Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey's New York Times best-selling She Said will inspire a new generation of investigative journalists.

Family Guy and Philosophy brings together low-brow, potty-mouthed, cartoon humor and high-brow philosophical reflection to deliver an outrageously hilarious and clever exploration of one of TVs most unrelenting families. (Okay, its not that high-brow.)

What is new about how teenagers communicate through services such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram? Do social media affect the quality of teens' lives? In this eye-opening book, youth culture and technology expert Danah Boyd uncovers some of the major myths regarding teens' use of social media. She explores tropes about identity, privacy, safety, danger, and bullying. Ultimately, Boyd argues that society fails young people when paternalism and protectionism hinder teenagers' ability to become informed, thoughtful, and engaged citizens through their online interactions.

In recent decades, we have witnessed an explosion in the number of visual images we encounter, as our lives have become increasingly saturated with screens. From Google Images to Instagram, video games to installation art, this transformation is confusing, liberating and worrying all at once, since observing the new visuality of culture is not the same as understanding it.

For decades, women battered the walls of the male fortress of television journalism. After fierce struggles, three women - Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, and Christiane Amanpour - broke into the newsroom’s once impenetrable “boys’ club”. These women were not simply pathbreakers, but wildly gifted journalists whose unique talents enabled them to climb to the top of the corporate ladder and transform the way Americans received their news.

Who gets to control the media we consume? Can we intervene, or at least mitigate the influence of constant content? Mixing personal anecdotes with historical and political criticism, Image Control explores art, social media, photography, and other visual mediums to understand how our culture and our actions are manipulated, all the while building toward the idea that if fascism emerges as aesthetics, then so too can anti-fascism.

Sady Doyle, hailed as "smart, funny, and fearless" by the Boston Globe, takes listeners on a tour of the female dark side, from the biblical Lilith to Dracula's Lucy Westenra, from the T-Rex in Jurassic Park to the teen witches of The Craft. She illuminates the women who have shaped our nightmares: Serial killer Ed Gein's "domineering" mother Augusta; exorcism casualty Anneliese Michel, starving herself to death to quell her demons; author Mary Shelley, dreaming her dead child back to life.

Twenty-seven years ago, Matthieu Ricard gave up a promising career as a scientist to study Tibetan Buddhism - not as a detached observer but by immersing himself in its practice under the guidance of its greatest living masters. Years later, this project was born, and Richard met with his father, Jean-Francois Revel - a French philosopher who became world famous for his challenges to both Communism and Christianity. At an inn, these two profoundly thoughtful men explored questions that have occupied humankind throughout its history.

In 2014, on the side of a Los Angeles freeway, a One Direction fan erected a shrine in the spot where, a few hours earlier, Harry Styles had vomited. “It’s interesting for sure,” Styles said later, adding, “a little niche, maybe.” But what seemed niche to Styles was actually an irreverent signpost to an unfathomably large, interconnected, and influential multiverse: stan culture. In this book, Kaitlyn Tiffany, a staff writer at the Atlantic and proud superfan herself, guides us through the nebulous online world of fans, stans, and boybands.

The navy created by the people of Athens in ancient Greece was one of the finest fighting forces in the history of the world and the model for all other national navies to come. The Athenian navy built a civilization, empowered the world's first democracy, and led a band of ordinary citizens on a voyage of discovery that altered the course of history.

A sharecropper, a warrior, and a truth-telling prophet, Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977) stands as a powerful symbol not only of the 1960s Black freedom movement, but also of the enduring human struggle against oppression. This is a rhetorical biography that tells the story of Hamer's life by focusing on how she employed symbols - images, words, and even material objects such as the ballot, food, and clothing - to construct persuasive public personae, to influence audiences, and to effect social change.

Seeking ways to understand video games beyond their imperial logics, Patterson turns to erotics to re-invigorate the potential passions and pleasures of play. Video games vastly outpace all other mediums of entertainment in revenue and in global reach. On the surface, games do not appear ideological, nor are they categorized as national products. Instead, they seem to reflect the open and uncontaminated reputation of information technology. Like literature and film before it, video games have become the main artistic expression of empire today.

A great script is only as good as the effort you put into your career, but there is little information for the aspiring screenwriter about how to break in. Even those who study TV or film in college are taught to simply “get a production assistant job.” But then what? Anton Schettini provides a rare insider’s glimpse of the modern-day network and streaming TV writers’ room. Here, you will find practical advice, career path strategies, and first-hand accounts for how to establish your network, grow within it, and acquire the necessary tools to become a TV writer.

Cary Poarch started working at CNN in the summer of 2017 as a die-hard Bernie Sanders supporter. But on his first location shoot during the Charlottesville riots, he quickly became disillusioned with how the network created the “fine people” hoax. This began a political odyssey as he documented numerous incidents of outright bias, eventually leading him to contact James O’Keefe of Project Veritas. For months, Cary Poarch documented CNN’s rampant political bias for Project Veritas, and saw how the network was dividing the country.

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.