Social Sciences Media Studies

In The Social Organism, Luckett and Casey offer a revolutionary theory: social networks - to an astonishing degree - mimic the rules and functions of biological life. In sharing and replicating packets of information known as memes, the world's social media users are facilitating an evolutionary process just like the transfer of genetic information in living things. Memes are the basic building blocks of our culture, our social DNA. To master social media - and to make online content that impacts the world - you must start with the Social Organism.

The author of the acclaimed Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them) brings “her singular sensibility, her genius for language, her love of our deeply imperfect world” (Karen Karbo, author of In Praise of Difficult Women) to this insightful exploration of reality TV and the shifting definitions of truth in America.

Learning from Strangers is the definitive work on qualitative research interviewing. It draws on Robert Weiss's 30 years of experience in interviewing and teaching others how to do it. The most effective interviews, says Weiss, rely on creating cooperation - an open and trusting alliance between interviewer and respondent, dedicated to specific and honest accounts of both internal and external events.

Today's computers are composing music that sounds "more Bach than Bach", turning photographs into paintings in the style of Van Gogh's Starry Night, and even writing screenplays. But are computers truly creative - or are they merely tools to be used by musicians, artists, and writers? Miller, an authority on creativity, identifies the key factors essential to the creative process, from "the need for introspection" to "the ability to discover the key problem." He talks to people on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence and explores the riches of computer-created art.

The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass was Douglass' third autobiography. In it he was able to go into greater detail about his life as a slave and his escape from slavery, as he and his family were no longer in any danger from the reception of his work. In this engrossing narrative he recounts early years of abuse; his dramatic escape to the North and eventual freedom, abolitionist campaigns, and his crusade for full civil rights for former slaves.

Mab Segrest explores her singular experience as a white lesbian organizing against a virulent Far Right movement in North Carolina in this best-selling political memoir.

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.

Award-winning journalist and Fortune 500 consultant Jeff Ansell provides a how-to guide for leaders, executives, and other professionals whose high-visibility requires frequent contact with the media. Drawing on nearly four decades of media experience, Ansell presents tested techniques for responding to challenging questions and delivering effective messages. In addition, he reveals lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid by referencing recent news events from around the world.

Without a doubt, Schopenhauer is one of the giants of Western philosophy. He represents a turning point from the quest to define the external world as something apart from our experience to a recognition of our experience as the medium of our world. Philosophy is a discourse, a conversation spread out over centuries that explores and develops different lines of thought. Schopenhauer embodies the moment in Western philosophy where the snake begins to eat its own tail, where the unreasoning insistence upon an external world is finally examined with due criticism and care.

To his successful examinations of some of the most powerful forces in modern life - envy, ambition, snobbery, friendship - the keen observer and critic Joseph Epstein now adds Gossip. No trivial matter, despite its reputation, gossip, he argues, is an eternal and necessary human enterprise. Proving that he himself is a master of the art, Epstein serves up delightful mini-biographies of the Great Gossips of the Western World along with many choice bits from his own experience. He also makes a powerful case that gossip has morphed into a corrosive new-school version.

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.

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.

A behind-the-scenes look at how conservatives - and even iconoclasts who don't consider themselves conservative - are overthrowing the liberal media and political correctness. From the bloggers who demolished Dan Rather, to the Swift Boat veterans who sank John Kerry, to the gleeful anti-political correctness of such comedic send-ups as South Park and Team America, the American media landscape has suffered an earthquake.

In this most original examination of America's post-9/11 culture, Susan Faludi shines a light on the country's psychological response to the attacks on that terrible day. Turning her observational powers on the media, popular culture, and political life, Faludi unearths a barely acknowledged but bedrock societal drama shot through with baffling contradictions. Why, she asks, did our culture respond to an assault against American global dominance with a frenzied summons to restore "traditional" manhood, marriage, and maternity?

Advances in information technology have made it easier for shadowy groups to organize collective action. Using military-grade encryption, rerouting software, and cryptocurrencies, they move through cyberspace like digital nomads, often with law enforcement and other powerful actors on their tails. This book reveals how the same technology enables these groups to communicate and collaborate in public and semipublic spaces, making them both open and secret at the same time—and efforts to stop these groups provoke countermeasures with unintended, far-reaching consequences.

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.

A provocative look at what it means to be Black today. This audiobook includes excerpts from over 100 interviews with Rev. Jesse Jackson, Cornel West, Skip Gates, Melissa Harris-Perry, Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley, Glenn Ligon, Malcolm Gladwell, Paul Mooney, NY Gov. David Paterson, Harold Ford, Jr., Soledad O'Brien, Kamala Harris, Chuck D, Questlove, and others.

What’s coming next for today’s workforce, and the companies behind them? For those eager and willing to adapt, the possibilities are nearly endless, says author Gerard Szatvanyi. Recent advances in technology have led to new trends, and this global transformation holds tremendous potential. Nearly every industry will be impacted, and organizations that set the right vision could benefit from breaking into new markets and creating specialized niches.

In this raw and redemptive debut memoir, Ellen O'Connell Whittet explores the silent suffering of the ballerina - and finds it emblematic of the violence that women quietly shoulder every day. For O'Connell Whittet, letting go of one meant confronting the other - only then was it possible to truly take flight.

In Just Faith, progressive Christian activist and writer Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons explains how a strong religious left has accompanied every major progressive advance in our society, and he resurrects the long but forgotten history of progressive Christianity in the United States that can and must link arms with progressive Muslims and Jews to make the moral case for pluralism, human dignity, and the common good. Graves-Fitzsimmons provides a blueprint for this type of resurrection based on his advocacy work at the intersection of religion and American politics.