Podd: New Books in Technology

Victor P. Petrov, "Balkan Cyberia: Cold War Computing, Bulgarian Modernization, and the Information Age Behind the Iron Curtain" (MIT Press, 2023)

18 november 2024 | 58 min

Lizhi Liu, "From Click to Boom: The Political Economy of E-Commerce in China" (Princeton UP, 2024)

16 november 2024 | 57 min

How do states build vital institutions for market development? Too often, governments confront technical or political barriers to providing the rule of law, contract enforcement, and loan access. In From Click to Boom: The Political Economy of E-Commerce in China (Princeton, 2024) Lizhi Liu suggests a digital solution: governments strategically outsourcing tasks of institutional development and enforcement to digital platforms—a process she calls “institutional outsourcing.”

China’s e-commerce boom showcases this digital path to development. In merely two decades, China built from scratch a two-trillion-dollar e-commerce market, with 800 million users, seventy million jobs, and nearly fifty percent of global online retail sales. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Liu argues, this market boom occurred because of weak government institutions, not despite them. Gaps in government institutions compelled e-commerce platforms to build powerful private institutions for contract enforcement, fraud detection, and dispute resolution. For a surprisingly long period, the authoritarian government acquiesced, endorsed, and even partnered with this private institutional building despite its disruptive nature. Drawing on a plethora of interviews, original surveys, proprietary data, and a field experiment, Liu shows that the resulting e-commerce boom had far-reaching effects on China.

Institutional outsourcing nonetheless harbors its own challenges. With inadequate regulation, platforms may abuse market power, while excessive regulation stifles institutional innovation. China’s regulatory oscillations toward platforms—from laissez-faire to crackdown and back to support—underscore the struggle to strike the right balance.

Lizhi Liu is assistant professor at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University, where she is also a faculty affiliate of the Department of Government. Her work has been published by American Economic Review: Insights, Studies in Comparative International Development, Minnesota Law Review, Oxford University Press, and Princeton University Press. She was also listed as a Poets&Quants Top 50 Undergraduate Business Professor of 2021. She holds degrees in Political Science (PhD), Statistics (MS), and International Policy Studies (MA) from Stanford University and in International Relations (LLB) from Renmin University of China.

Interviewer Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of San Francisco, a nonresident scholar at the UCSD 21st Century China Center, an alumnus of the Public Intellectuals Program of the National Committee on US-China Relations, and is currently a visiting scholar at the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions. His research focuses on the economics of information, incentives, and institutions, primarily as applied to the development and governance of China. He created the unique Master’s of Science in Applied Economics at the University of San Francisco, which teaches the conceptual frameworks and practical data analytics skills needed to succeed in the digital economy.

Lorentzen’s other NBN interviews relating to China’s tech sector include Trafficking Data, on how Chinese and American firms exploit user data, The Tao of Alibaba, on Alibaba’s business model and organizational culture, Surveillance State, on China’s digital surveillance, Prototype Nation, on the culture and politics of China’s innovation economy.

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Tim Harris, "In Pursuit of Unicorns: A Journey Through 50 Years of Biotechnology" (Cold Springs Harbor, 2024)

11 november 2024 | 69 min

Modern biotechnology--genetic engineering and cell manipulation--originated with the 1973 demonstration that genes from different organisms could be recombined and propagated in Escherichia coli. More than 50 years on, biotech is now a science that defines the 21st century.

While still a young scientist, Tim Harris committed himself to this emerging industry. Now an accomplished investigator who became an astute, seasoned, and successful biotech business executive, he has written a captivating memoir chronicling the birth and maturation of the industry that now touches everyone's lives. He combines accounts of scientific successes and failures with a personal story of ambition, challenge, and discovery. From the pioneering early days of gene cloning and monoclonal antibodies to the current cutting-edge advancements in cell therapy, gene editing, and personalized medicine, Harris provides a candidly honest insider's view of biotech's remarkable evolution and its profound impact on health care.

In Pursuit of Unicorns: A Journey Through 50 Years of Biotechnology (Cold Springs Harbor, 2024) is rich in detail about the accomplishments, struggles, and triumphs played out in the laboratories and boardrooms of the many different companies set up to exploit the technology, and the often colourful personalities involved. It is a fascinating blend of science, business, and ethics. Harris's reflections on the complexities that come with rapid technological progress, and the responsibilities of scientists in shaping the future, are thought-provoking and timely.

Tim Harris's story is one of passion, resilience, and an unwavering commitment from those involved to making a difference. His book is a compelling read for working scientists (especially early- and mid-career academic and industry researchers wondering how to apply their research to human health), biotechnology entrepreneurs and investors, and anyone fascinated by how profoundly biotechnology has changed our world and where it is leading us in the future.

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Libuse Hannah Veprek, "At the Edge of AI: Human Computation Systems and Their Intraverting Relations" (Transcript, 2024)

8 november 2024 | 25 min

Jerry Brotton, "Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction" (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2024)

5 november 2024 | 54 min

Salem Elzway and Jason Resnikoff on Automation

4 november 2024 | 81 min

Thinking Machines: The First AI Takeover Story

2 november 2024 | 34 min

Jamie Hakim, "Digital Intimacies: Queer Men and Smartphones in Times of Crisis" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

31 oktober 2024 | 56 min

When We Prioritize Data and Metrics, What Happens to Human Connections?

31 oktober 2024 | 55 min

Today’s book is: The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World (Princeton University Press, 2024), by Dr. Allison Pugh, which explores the human connections that underlie our work, arguing that what people do for each other is valuable and worth preserving. Drawing on in-depth interviews and observations with people in a broad range of professions—from physicians, teachers, and coaches to chaplains, therapists, caregivers, and hairdressers—Dr. Pugh develops the concept of “connective labor,” a kind of work that relies on empathy, the spontaneity of human contact, and a mutual recognition of each other’s humanity. The threats to connective labor are not only those posed by advances in AI or apps; Dr. Pugh demonstrates how profit-driven campaigns imposing industrial logic shrink the time for workers to connect, enforce new priorities of data and metrics, and introduce standardized practices that hinder our ability to truly see each other. She concludes with profiles of organizations where connective labor thrives, offering practical steps for building a social architecture that works. Vividly illustrating how connective labor enriches the lives of individuals and binds our communities together, The Last Human Job is a compelling argument for us to recognize, value, and protect humane work in an increasingly automated and disconnected world.

Our guest is: Dr. Allison Pugh, who is Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, and the 2024-25 Vice President of the American Sociological Association. She writes about how people forge connections and find meaning and dignity at work and at home. She is the author of The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity and Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture. Her writing has appeared in leading publications such as The New Yorker, the New York Times, and the New Republic.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Playlist for listeners:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 225+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here.

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Greg Epstein, "Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World's Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation" (MIT Press, 2024)

30 oktober 2024 | 90 min

Ian Milligan, "Averting the Digital Dark Age: How Archivists, Librarians, and Technologists Built the Web a Memory" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024)

26 oktober 2024 | 49 min

In early 1996, the web was ephemeral. But by 2001, the internet was forever. How did websites transform from having a brief life to becoming long-lasting? Drawing on archival material from the Internet Archive and exclusive interviews, Ian Milligan's Averting the Digital Dark Age (John Hopkins University Press, December 2024) explores how Western society evolved from fearing a digital dark age to building the robust digital memory we rely on today.

By the mid-1990s, the specter of a "digital dark age" haunted libraries, portending a bleak future with no historical record that threatened cyber obsolescence, deletion, and apathy. People around the world worked to solve this impending problem. In San Francisco, technology entrepreneur Brewster Kahle launched his scrappy nonprofit, Internet Archive, filling tape drives with internet content. Elsewhere, in Washington, Canberra, Ottawa, and Stockholm, librarians developed innovative new programs to safeguard digital heritage.

Cataloging worries among librarians, technologists, futurists, and writers from WWII onward, through early practitioners, to an extended case study of how September 11 prompted institutions to preserve thousands of digital artifacts related to the attacks, Averting the Digital Dark Age explores how the web gained a long-lasting memory. By understanding this history, we can equip our society to better grapple with future internet shifts.

Ian Milligan is a professor of history at the University of Waterloo, where he also serves as an associate vice president in the Office of Research. Milligan is the author of The Transformation of Historical Research in the Digital Age and History in the Age of Abundance? How the Web Is Transforming Historical Research.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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Thinking Machines: The Turing Test at 75

23 oktober 2024 | 29 min

Thinking Machines: The Turing Test at 75

23 oktober 2024 | 29 min

Bob Frishman, "Edward Duffield: Philadelphia Clockmaker, Citizen, Gentleman, 1730-1803" (APS Press, 2024)

23 oktober 2024 | 47 min

Edward Duffield (1730–1803) was a colonial Philadelphia clockmaker, whose elegant brass, mahogany, and walnut timekeepers stand proudly in major American museums and collections. Duffield, unlike other leather-apron ‘mechanics,’ was born rich and owned a country estate, Benfield, and many more properties. He was deeply involved in civic and church affairs during crucial years in American history—his lifelong close friend, Benjamin Franklin, was staying at Duffield’s Benfield estate when Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams first discussed the Declaration of Independence. Sally, Franklin’s daughter, brought her family there for extended periods during the Revolution and Franklin’s wife, Deborah, was best friends for fifty years with Duffield’s mother-in-law. Duffield was even one of three executors of Franklin’s will.

In Edward Duffield: Philadelphia Clockmaker, Citizen, Gentleman, 1730-1803 (American Philosophical Society Press, 2024), Bob Frishman catalogs and describes seventy-one known Duffield clocks and instruments and reveals how, during the mid-eighteenth century, they largely were not fabricated from scratch by isolated individuals. He contends that Duffield and his fellow clockmakers were not furniture-makers; they were mechanical artisans whose complex metal machines rang the hours and steadily ticked inside wooden cases made by others. Existing books on Philadelphia clocks have focused on these artifacts as furniture, including their woodwork, cabinetmakers, and decorative aspects. However, Frishman, a professional horologist for nearly four decades, brings his vast expertise to bear on this first comprehensive study of Duffield’s life and work.

Far more than a treatise on pre-industrial horological timekeeping, this book tells the compelling stories of a man, a city, and an era, while deepening our appreciation for Duffield’s stately sentinels—often a colonial American family’s most valuable possession—and the times and places in which their makers lived.

Bob Frishman has professionally repaired nearly 8,000 timepieces and sold more than 1,700 vintage clocks and watches. As a scholar of horology, and assisted by a personal library of 900 books on the subject, he has published more than 100 articles and reviews in Maine Antique Digest, Watch & Clock Bulletin, and elsewhere. Learn more at his website.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

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Anto Mohsin, "Electrifying Indonesia: Technology and Social Justice in National Development" (U Wisconsin Press, 2023)

21 oktober 2024 | 68 min

Emotional Rescue

21 oktober 2024 | 36 min

What can sound technologies tell us about our relationship to media as a whole? This is one of the central questions in the research of Phantom Power‘s host, Mack Hagood. To find its answer, he studies devices that get little attention from media scholars: noise-cancelling headphones, white noise machines, apps that make nature sounds, tinnitus maskers–even musical pillows. The story these media tell is rather different from the standard narrative, in which media are conveyors of information and entertainment. In his book Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control, Mack argues that media are the way we control how–and how much–we let the world affect us.

On Phantom Power, Mack has always focused on presenting the ideas of other scholars and sound artists. However, during our summer break we thought we’d share a piece by Mack that appeared in another podcast, the audio edition of Real Life, a razor-sharp magazine on digital culture. “Emotional Rescue” begins with the odd example of pillow-based audio technology to make the point that media are really about something more intimate than information:

The cozy conflation of content and comfort… is not a recent digital development. Nor is it, I would argue, a quirky edge case of media use. In fact, this is what media are: tools for altering how the body feels and what it perceives, controlling our relationship to others and the world, enveloping ourselves, and even disappearing ourselves.

Misunderstanding the true nature of our media use isn’t merely of academic concern–it has had disastrous effects on our politics and social cohesion.

The article was written for the Real Life website, then subsequently dropped in podcast form. Writing for the eye is quite different from writing for the ear, but podcast producer and narrator Britney Gil is amazing at elucidating written prose for the listener. If you listen to nonfiction audiobooks and/or want to hear a great narrator reading insightful takes on digital life, be sure to subscribe to Real Life: Audio Edition.

“Emotional Rescue” by Mack Hagood.

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Kids Across the Spectrums: Growing Up Autistic in the Digital Age

21 oktober 2024 | 76 min

Marietje Schaake, "The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley" (Princeton UP, 2024)

15 oktober 2024 | 29 min

John Withington, "A History of Fireworks from: Their Origins to the Present Day" (Reaktion, 2024)

8 oktober 2024 | 60 min

Pamela O. Long on the Long, Long, Long History of Technology

7 oktober 2024 | 72 min

Marco Bastos, "Brexit, Tweeted: Polarization and Social Media Manipulation" (Bristol UP, 2024)

6 oktober 2024 | 53 min

Jeffrey Ding, "Technology and the Rise of Great Powers: How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition" (Princeton UP, 2024)

5 oktober 2024 | 35 min

When scholars and policymakers consider how technological advances affect the rise and fall of great powers, they draw on theories that center the moment of innovation—the eureka moment that sparks astonishing technological feats. In Technology and the Rise of Great Powers: How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition (Princeton UP, 2024), Jeffrey Ding offers a different explanation of how technological revolutions affect competition among great powers. Rather than focusing on which state first introduced major innovations, he investigates why some states were more successful than others at adapting and embracing new technologies at scale. Drawing on historical case studies of past industrial revolutions as well as statistical analysis, Ding develops a theory that emphasizes institutional adaptations oriented around diffusing technological advances throughout the entire economy.

Examining Britain’s rise to preeminence in the First Industrial Revolution, America and Germany’s overtaking of Britain in the Second Industrial Revolution, and Japan’s challenge to America’s technological dominance in the Third Industrial Revolution (also known as the “information revolution”), Ding illuminates the pathway by which these technological revolutions influenced the global distribution of power and explores the generalizability of his theory beyond the given set of great powers. His findings bear directly on current concerns about how emerging technologies such as AI could influence the US-China power balance.

Our guest today is: Jeffrey Ding, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Georgetown University.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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Gerald Sim, "Screening Big Data: Films That Shape Our Algorithmic Literacy" (Routledge, 2024)

3 oktober 2024 | 68 min

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World

26 september 2024 | 50 min

Why do we assume that computers always get it right?

Today’s book is: Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World (MIT Press, 2019), in which Professor Meredith Broussard argues that our collective enthusiasm for applying computer technology to every aspect of life has resulted in a tremendous amount of poorly designed systems. We are so eager to do everything digitally—hiring, driving, paying bills, even choosing romantic partners—that we have stopped demanding that our technology actually work. Broussard, a software developer and journalist, reminds us that there are fundamental limits to what we can (and should) do with technology. With this book, she offers a guide to understanding the inner workings and outer limits of technology—and issues a warning that we should never assume that computers always get things right. Making a case against technochauvinism—the belief that technology is always the solution—Broussard argues that it's just not true that social problems would inevitably retreat before a digitally enabled Utopia. To prove her point, she undertakes a series of adventures in computer programming. She goes for an alarming ride in a driverless car, concluding “the cyborg future is not coming any time soon”; uses artificial intelligence to investigate why students can't pass standardized tests; deploys machine learning to predict which passengers survived the Titanic disaster; and attempts to repair the U.S. campaign finance system by building AI software. If we understand the limits of what we can do with technology, Broussard tells us, we can make better choices about what we should do with it to make the world better for everyone.

Our guest is: Professor Meredith Broussard, who is Associate Professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University and Research Director at the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Technology. She is the author of Artificial Unintelligence, and of More Than A Glitch. Her work has been featured in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Economist, and more. She appears in the 2020 documentary Coded Bias and serves on the advisory board for the Center for

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell (and why) and what happens to those we never tell.

For listeners who want to learn more:

More Than A Glitch

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 200+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here.

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Jordan Minor, "Video Game of the Year: A Year-By-Year Guide to the Best, Boldest, and Most Bizarre Games from Every Year Since 1977" (Abrams, 2023)

26 september 2024 | 17 min

Pong. The Legend of Zelda. Final Fantasy VII. Rock Band. Fortnite. Animal Crossing: New Horizons. For each of the 40 years of video game history, there is a defining game, a game that captured the zeitgeist and left a legacy for all games that followed. Through a series of entertaining, informative, and opinionated critical essays, author and tech journalist Jordan Minor investigates, in chronological order, the most innovative, genre-bending, and earth-shattering games from 1977 through 2022. Exploring development stories, critical reception, and legacy, Minor also looks at how gaming intersects with and eventually influences society at large while reveling in how uniquely and delightfully bizarre even the most famous games tend to be.

From portly plumbers to armor-clad space marines and the speedy rodents in between, Video Game of the Year: A Year-By-Year Guide to the Best, Boldest, and Most Bizarre Games from Every Year Since 1977 (Abrams, 2023) paints individual portraits that, as a whole, give readers a stronger appreciation for the vibrant variety and long-lasting impact of this fresh, exciting, and massively popular art form. Illustrated throughout with retro-inspired imagery and featuring contributions from dozens of leading industry voices, including New York Times bestselling author Jason Schreier, Max Scoville, Rebekah Valentine, Blessing Adeoye Jr., and Devindra Hardawar, this year-by-year anthology is a loving reflection on the world’s most popular art form.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, department lead for Games at Swiss culture magazine Nahaufnahmen.ch, editor of “DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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Ethical Machines: A Conversation with Reid Blackman

25 september 2024 | 53 min

Emily M. Bender on AI Hype

23 september 2024 | 72 min

Gergely Gosztonyi, "Censorship from Plato to Social Media: The Complexity of Social Media’s Content Regulation and Moderation Practices" (Springer, 2023)

22 september 2024 | 50 min

In many countries, censorship, blocking of internet access and internet content for political purposes are still part of everyday life. Will filtering, blocking, and hacking replace scissors and black ink? This book argues that only a broader understanding of censorship can effectively protect freedom of expression.

For centuries, church and state controlled the content available to the public through political, moral and religious censorship. As technology evolved, the legal and political tools were refined, but the classic censorship system continued until the end of the 20th century. However, the myth of total freedom of communication and a law-free space that had been expected with the advent of the internet was soon challenged. The new rulers of the digital world, tech companies, emerged and gained enormous power over free speech and content management. All this happened alongside cautious regulation attempts on the part of various states, either by granting platforms near-totalimmunity (US) or by setting up new rules that were not fully developed (EU). China has established the Great Firewall and the Golden Shield as a third way.

In Censorship from Plato to Social Media: The Complexity of Social Media’s Content Regulation and Moderation Practices (Springer, 2023), particular attention is paid to developments since the 2010s, when Internet-related problems began to multiply. The state’s solutions have mostly pointed in one direction: towards greater control of platforms and the content they host. Similarities can be found in the US debates, the Chinese and Russian positions on internet sovereignty, and the new European digital regulations (DSA-DMA). The book addresses them all.

This book will be of interest to anyone who wants to understand the complexities of social media’s content regulation and moderation practices. It makes a valuable contribution to the field of freedom of expression and the internet, showing that, with different kinds of censorship, this essentially free form of communication has come – almost by default – under legal regulation and the original freedom may have been lost in too many countries in recent years.

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Hey, Robot!

16 september 2024 | 29 min

Trevor Boffone, "TikTok Broadway: Musical Theatre Fandom in the Digital Age" (Oxford UP, 2024)

8 september 2024 | 62 min

Sarah Malanowski and Nicholas R. Baima, "Why It's Ok to Be a Gamer" (Routledge, 2024)

3 september 2024 | 25 min

Andy Clarno et al., "Imperial Policing: Weaponized Data in Carceral Chicago" (U Minnesota Press, 2024)

3 september 2024 | 79 min

Chicago is a city with extreme concentrations of racialized poverty and inequity, one that relies on an extensive network of repressive agencies to police the poor and suppress struggles for social justice. Imperial Policing: Weaponized Data in Carceral Chicago (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) examines the role of local law enforcement, federal immigration authorities, and national security agencies in upholding the city’s highly unequal social order.

Collaboratively authored by the Policing in Chicago Research Group (PCRG), Imperial Policing was developed in dialogue with movements on the front lines of struggles against racist policing in Black, Latinx, and Arab/Muslim communities. The members of PCRG are Andy Clarno, Enrique Alvear Moreno, Janaé Bonsu-Love, Lydia Dana, Michael De Anda Muñiz, Ilā Ravichandran, and Haley Volpintesta. Imperial Policing analyzes the connections between three police “wars”—on crime, terror, and immigrants—focusing on the weaponization of data and the coordination between local and national agencies to suppress communities of color and undermine social movements. Topics include high-tech, data-based tools of policing; the racialized archetypes that ground the police wars; the manufacturing of criminals and terrorists; the subversion of sanctuary city protections; and abolitionist responses to policing, such as the Erase the Database campaign.

Andy Clarno is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Black Studies and coordinator of the Policing in Chicago Research Group at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research examines racism, capitalism, colonialism, and empire in the early 21st century, with a focus on racialized policing and struggles for social justice in contexts of extreme inequality.

Michael De Anda Muñiz is an Assistant Professor in the Latina/Latino Studies Department at San Francisco State University. His research interests include culture, art, community engagement, space, and resistance.

Ilā Ravichandran is an assistant professor of legal studies at the University of Washington, Tacoma. Dr. Ravichandran’s research interests include science, knowledge, technology, biopolitics, policing, surveillance, counterinsurgency, state, queerness & Black studies.

Timi Koyejo is a graduate student in urban studies at the University of Vienna. He has worked professionally as a researcher at the University of Chicago and as an urban policy advisor for the City of Chicago.

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Henry H. Work, "Wood, Whiskey and Wine: A History of Barrels"(Reaktion Books, 2024)

1 september 2024 | 47 min

John V. Pavlik, "Journalism and the Metaverse" (Anthem Press, 2024)

30 augusti 2024 | 41 min

Journalism has been in a state of disruption since the development of the Internet. The Metaverse, or what some describe as the future of the Internet, is likely to fuel even further disruption in journalism. Digital platforms and journalism enterprises are already investing substantial resources into the Metaverse, or its likely components of artificial intelligence, augmented reality and virtual reality. Although research shows most of the public has little knowledge of the Metaverse, many are keenly interested in what it or its components may bring.

Journalism and the Metaverse (Anthem Press, 2024) by Dr. John Pavlik critically examines the nature of the Metaverse and its implications for journalism. In particular, the book will examine how the advance of a broadband, interactive and immersive Internet called the Metaverse may change the content and format of news, the nature of journalistic work, who or what is a journalist, the nature and structure of the new industry and how it is funded, as well as the fundamental role of journalism in a digital society.

In particular, this book builds on a vision of the Metaverse as an immersive and interactive virtual world, a key development in the next generation of the broadband, publicly accessible Internet. Broadband means high-speed, high-bandwidth Internet connectivity, especially wirelessly. Immersive refers to enveloping, 3D forms of media and communication. Today, we often see immersive media in the form of augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR) or other forms of what are labeled extended Reality (XR). Fueled by artificial intelligence, these forms are three dimensional (3D), they have depth and they surround the user in a 360 virtual world visually and aurally (and potentially via other senses, including the haptic). Interactive means both user-to-user engagement (e.g., social media) as well as an exchange between the user and the enveloping content experience of a virtual world. This book examines the implications of the Metaverse for journalism in four broad domains, including content, how journalists work, structural and systemic considerations, and user and public engagement with news.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Tarryn Li-Min Chun, "Revolutionary Stagecraft: Theater, Technology, and Politics in Modern China" (U Michigan Press, 2024), "Revolutionary Stagecraft: Theater, Technology, and Politics in Modern China" (U Michigan Press, 2024)

30 augusti 2024 | 68 min

The Human Advantage: A Conversation with Jay Richards

28 augusti 2024 | 55 min

In this episode, we explore the insights of Jay Richards, author of The Human Advantage: The Future of American Work in an Age of Smart Machines (Forum, 2019). Richards wrote this book during a time when automation and technology were beginning to redefine the boundaries of human work and creativity. His core argument is that, despite the rise of machines, there are certain uniquely human qualities—such as creativity, moral judgment, and entrepreneurial spirit—that cannot be replicated by technology. These traits, he suggests, are what give us a distinct edge in the face of automation.

As we look at today's world, where artificial intelligence and machine learning have advanced at an unprecedented pace, we must ask: Do Richards' ideas still hold true? In an era where AI can perform tasks once thought to be the exclusive domain of humans, from creative endeavors to complex decision-making, is there still a clear-cut human advantage? Richards' book offers a lens through which to examine these questions, urging us to consider how we can harness our inherent strengths to adapt and thrive in this new landscape.

In our conversation, we dive deep into these questions, exploring the relevance of The Human Advantage in today's rapidly evolving technological environment. How can we, as individuals and as a society, ensure that we maintain and even enhance our human edge? What role do creativity, ethics, and entrepreneurship play in a world increasingly driven by algorithms and automation? This episode offers valuable insights for anyone grappling with the implications of modern technology on our work, lives, and future.

Jay Richards is an American analytical philosopher who focuses on the intersection of politics, philosophy, and religion. He is the William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow in Heritage’s DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at The Heritage Foundation

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions

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Directions of Peer Review in Software Engineering

27 augusti 2024 | 71 min

Cyrus Mody on the Importance of Square (as in NOT COOL) Scientists and Engineers

26 augusti 2024 | 72 min

Phil Haun, "Tactical Air Power and the Vietnam War: Explaining Effectiveness in Modern Air Warfare" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

25 augusti 2024 | 43 min

Craig Gent, "Cyberboss: The Rise of Algorithmic Management and the New Struggle for Control at Work" (Verso, 2024)

13 augusti 2024 | 56 min

Andrew Denning, "Automotive Empire: How Cars and Roads Fueled European Colonialism in Africa" (Cornell UP, 2024)

7 augusti 2024 | 73 min

In Automotive Empire: How Cars and Roads Fueled European Colonialism in Africa (Cornell University Press, 2024), Dr. Andrew Denning uncovers how roads and vehicles began to transform colonial societies across Africa but rarely in the manner Europeans expected. Like seafaring ships and railroads, automobiles and roads were more than a mode of transport—they organised colonial spaces and structured the political, economic, and social relations of empire, both within African colonies and between colonies and the European metropole.

European officials in French, Italian, British, German, Belgian, and Portuguese territories in Africa shared a common challenge—the transport problem. While they imagined that roads would radiate commerce and political hegemony by collapsing space, the pressures of constructing and maintaining roads rendered colonial administration thin, ineffective, and capricious. Automotive empire emerged as the European solution to the transport problem, but revealed weakness as much as it extended power.

As Automotive Empire reveals, motor vehicles and roads seemed the ideal solution to the colonial transport problem. They were cheaper and quicker to construct than railroads, overcame the environmental limitations of rivers, and did not depend on the recruitment and supervision of African porters. At this pivotal moment of African colonialism, when European powers transitioned from claiming territories to administering and exploiting them, automotive empire defined colonial states and societies, along with the brutal and capricious nature of European colonialism itself.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Mark Walker, "Hitler's Atomic Bomb: History, Legend, and the Twin Legacies of Auschwitz and Hiroshima" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

5 augusti 2024 | 61 min

Tim Sweijs and Jeffrey H. Michaels, "Beyond Ukraine: Debating the Future of War" (Oxford UP, 2024)

26 juli 2024 | 74 min

War in the 21st century will remain a chameleon that takes on different forms and guises. Beyond Ukraine: Debating the Future of War (Oxford University Press, 2024) edited by Tim Sweijs and Jeffrey H. Michaels offers the first comprehensive update and revision of ideas about the future of war since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. It argues that the war has fundamentally shifted our perspective on the nature and character of future war, but also cautions against marginalising many other parallel trends, types of war, and ways of waging them.

World-renowned international experts from the War Studies field consider the impact of the war in Ukraine on the broader social phenomenon of war: they analyse visions of future war; examine the impact of technological innovation on its conduct; assess our ability to anticipate its future; and consider lessons learned for leaders, soldiers, strategists, scholars and concerned citizens.

Beyond Ukraine features contributions from Azar Gat, Beatrice Heuser, Antulio Echevarria, Audrey Cronin, T.X. Hammes, Kenneth Payne, Frank Hoffman, David Betz, Jan Willem Honig, and many other pre-eminent thinkers on the past, present and future of war—including an afterword by the late Christopher Coker.

Tim Sweijs is the Director of Research at The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies (HCSS) and a Senior Research Fellow at the Netherlands’ War Studies Research Centre of the Netherlands Defence Academy.

Jeffrey H. Michaels PhD is the IEN Senior Fellow in American Foreign Policy and International Security at the Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals.

Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history.

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Thomas Zeller, "Consuming Landscapes: What We See When We Drive and Why It Matters" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022)

17 juli 2024 | 76 min

What we see through our windshields reflects ideas about our national identity, consumerism, and infrastructure.

For better or worse, windshields have become a major frame for viewing the nonhuman world. The view from the road is one of the main ways in which we experience our environments. These vistas are the result of deliberate historical forces, and humans have shaped them as they simultaneously sought to be transformed by them. In Consuming Landscapes: What We See When We Drive and Why It Matters (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022), Thomas Zeller explores how what we see while driving reflects how we view our societies and ourselves, the role that consumerism plays in our infrastructure, and ideas about reshaping the environment in the twentieth century.

Zeller breaks new ground by comparing the driving experience and the history of landscaped roads in the United States and Germany, two major automotive countries. He focuses specifically on the Blue Ridge Parkway in the United States and the German Alpine Road as case studies. When the automobile was still young, an early twentieth-century group of designers―landscape architects, civil engineers, and planners―sought to build scenic infrastructures, or roads that would immerse drivers in the landscapes that they were traversing. As more Americans and Europeans owned cars and drove them, however, they became less interested in enchanted views; safety became more important than beauty.

Clashes between designers and drivers resulted in different visions of landscapes made for automobiles. As strange as it may seem to twenty-first-century readers, many professionals in the early twentieth century envisioned cars and roads, if properly managed, as saviors of the environment. Consuming Landscapes illustrates how the meaning of infrastructures changed as a result of use and consumption. Such changes indicate a deep ambivalence toward the automobile and roads, prompting the question: can cars and roads bring us closer to nature while deeply altering it at the same time?”

Eric Grube is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Boston College. He also received his PhD from Boston College in the summer of 2022. He studies modern German and Austrian history, with a special interest in right-wing paramilitary organizations across interwar Bavaria and Austria. His publications include:

"Making Austria German Again: Austrofascist ‘Home Guards’ against ‘Austrian Legionaries’, 1933-1934," Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies, 2024
"Borderland Brothers: Austrofascist Competition and Cooperation with National Socialists, 1936–1938," Journal of Austrian Studies, 2023, Winner of Austrian Studies Association’s Max Kade Prize, 2024
"Casualties of War? Refining the Civilian-Military Dichotomy in World War I", Madison Historical Review, 2019
"Racist Limitations on Violence: The Nazi Occupation of Denmark", Essays in History, 2017.

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Paula Bialski on Middletech, Software Work, and the Culture of Good Enough

15 juli 2024 | 72 min

Carl Öhman, "The Afterlife of Data: What Happens to Your Information When You Die and Why You Should Care" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

14 juli 2024 | 41 min

A short, thought-provoking book about what happens to our online identities after we die.

These days, so much of our lives takes place online—but what about our afterlives? Thanks to the digital trails that we leave behind, our identities can now be reconstructed after our death. In fact, AI technology is already enabling us to “interact” with the departed. Sooner than we think, the dead will outnumber the living on Facebook. In this thought-provoking book, Carl Öhman explores the increasingly urgent question of what we should do with all this data and whether our digital afterlives are really our own—and if not, who should have the right to decide what happens to our data.

The stakes could hardly be higher. In the next thirty years alone, about two billion people will die. Those of us who remain will inherit the digital remains of an entire generation of humanity—the first digital citizens. Whoever ends up controlling these archives will also effectively control future access to our collective digital past, and this power will have vast political consequences. The fate of our digital remains should be of concern to everyone—past, present, and future. Rising to these challenges, Öhman explains, will require a collective reshaping of our economic and technical systems to reflect more than just the monetary value of digital remains.

As we stand before a period of deep civilizational change, The Afterlife of Data: What Happens to Your Information When You Die and Why You Should Care (U Chicago Press, 2024) will be an essential guide to understanding why and how we as a human race must gain control of our collective digital past—before it is too late.

Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student and law student at the University of Chicago. Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Jake’s work has been published in top venues such as ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

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AI and Music: The Future is Here (featuring "There I Ruined It")

13 juli 2024 | 61 min

Shannon Vallor, "The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking" (Oxford UP, 2024)

10 juli 2024 | 67 min

Aram Sinnreich and Jesse Gilbert, "The Secret Life of Data: Navigating Hype and Uncertainty in the Age of Algorithmic Surveillance" (MIT Press, 2024)

10 juli 2024 | 39 min

Jeremy Black, "A World History of Rail: From the Steam Regime to Today" (Amberley Publishing, 2023)

6 juli 2024 | 22 min

Tara Ward, "Appreciation Post: Towards an Art History of Instagram" (U California Press, 2024)

5 juli 2024 | 42 min

Eve Herold, "Robots and the People Who Love Them: Holding on to Our Humanity in an Age of Social Robots" (St. Martin's Press, 2024)

4 juli 2024 | 51 min

The latest developments in robotics and artificial intelligence and a preview of the coming decades, based on research and interviews with the world's foremost experts. If there’s one universal trait among humans, it’s our social nature. The craving to connect is universal, compelling, and frequently irresistible.

This concept is central to Robots and the People Who Love Them: Holding on to Our Humanity in an Age of Social Robots (St. Martin's Press, 2024). Socially interactive robots will soon transform friendship, work, home life, love, warfare, education, and nearly every nook and cranny of modern life. This book is an exploration of how we, the most gregarious creatures in the food chain, could be changed by social robots. On the other hand, it considers how we will remain the same, and asks how human nature will express itself when confronted by a new class of beings created in our own image. Drawing upon recent research in the development of social robots, including how people react to them, how in our minds the boundaries between the real and the unreal are routinely blurred when we interact with them, and how their feigned emotions evoke our real ones, science writer Eve Herold takes readers through the gamut of what it will be like to live with social robots and still hold on to our humanity. This is the perfect book for anyone interested in the latest developments in social robots and the intersection of human nature and artificial intelligence and robotics, and what it means for our future.

Sophia the Robot Tries to Convince the Experts

Eve Herold is an award-winning science writer and consultant in the scientific and medical nonprofit space. A longtime communications and policy executive for scientific organizations, she currently serves as Director of Policy Research and Education for the Healthspan Action Coalition.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

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Jason Hannan, "Trolling Ourselves to Death: Democracy in the Age of Social Media" (Oxford UP, 2023)

2 juli 2024 | 47 min

We commonly think of trolls as anonymous online pranksters who hide behind clever avatars and screen names. In Trolling Ourselves to Death: Democracy in the Age of Social Media (Oxford UP, 2024), Jason Hannan reveals how the trolls have emerged from the cave and now walk in the clear light of day. Once limited to the darker corners of the internet, trolls have since gone mainstream, invading our politics and eroding our civic culture. Trolls are changing the norms of democratic politics and shaping how we communicate in the public sphere. Adding a twist to Neil Postman's classic thesis, this book argues that we are not so much amusing as trolling ourselves to death. But how did this come to be? Is this transformation attributable solely to digital technology? Or are there deeper political, economic, and cultural roots?

This book moves beyond the familiar picture of trolls by recasting trolling in a broader historical light. It shows how trolling is the logical expression of widespread alienation, cynicism, and paranoia deeply rooted in a culture of possessive individualism. Drawing from Postman, Alasdair MacIntyre, Karl Marx, and Hannah Arendt, this book explores the disturbing rise of political unreason in the form of mass trolling. It explains the proliferation of disinformation, conspiracy theory, "cancel culture," and public shaming. Taking inspiration from G. F. W. Hegel, Paulo F reire, and bell hooks, this book makes a case for building a spirit of trust to counter the culture of mass distrust that feeds the epidemic of political trolling.

Dr. Jason Hannan is Professor in the Department of Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications at the University of Winnipeg. He is the author of Trolling Ourselves to Death: Democracy in the Age of Social Media (Oxford University Press, 2023) and the editor of Meatsplaining: The Animal Agriculture Industry and the Rhetoric of Denial (Sydney University Press, 2020). His current book project is Reactionary Speech: Conservatism and the Rhetoric of Denial.

Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College.

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Ann Johnson and Johannes Lenhard, "Cultures of Prediction: How Engineering and Science Evolve with Mathematical Tools" (MIT Press, 2024)

24 juni 2024 | 62 min

A probing examination of the dynamic history of predictive methods and values in science and engineering that helps us better understand today's cultures of prediction.

The ability to make reliable predictions based on robust and replicable methods is a defining feature of the scientific endeavor, allowing engineers to determine whether a building will stand up or where a cannonball will strike. Cultures of Prediction: How Engineering and Science Evolve with Mathematical Tools (MIT Press, 2024), which bridges history and philosophy, uncovers the dynamic history of prediction in science and engineering over four centuries. Ann Johnson and Johannes Lenhard identify four different cultures, or modes, of prediction in the history of science and engineering: rational, empirical, iterative-numerical, and exploratory-iterative. They show how all four develop together and interact with one another while emphasizing that mathematization is not a single unitary process but one that has taken many forms.

The story is not one of the triumph of abstract mathematics or technology but of how different modes of prediction, complementary concepts of mathematization, and technology coevolved, building what the authors call “cultures of prediction.” The first part of the book examines prediction from early modernity up to the computer age. The second part probes computer-related cultures of prediction, which focus on making things and testing their performance, often in computer simulations. This new orientation challenges basic tenets of the philosophy of science, in which scientific theories and models are predominantly seen as explanatory rather than predictive. It also influences the types of research projects that scientists and engineers undertake, as well as which ones receive support from funding agencies.

Nikki Stevens, PhD is a critical technology researcher and software engineer. Find more of their work here.

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Living with Digital Surveillance in China

24 juni 2024 | 31 min

Siobhan Angus, "Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography" (Duke UP, 2024)

21 juni 2024 | 52 min

Paulina Rowinska, "Mapmatics: How We Navigate the World Through Numbers" (Pan Macmillan, 2024)

19 juni 2024 | 57 min

danah boyd on Digital Technology and Everyday Life

17 juni 2024 | 76 min

Allison J. Pugh, "The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World" (Princeton UP, 2024)

15 juni 2024 | 31 min

More Than A Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech

13 juni 2024 | 47 min

Today’s book is: More Than A Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech (MIT Press, 2024), by Meredith Broussard. When technology reinforces inequality, it's not just a glitch—it's a signal that we need to redesign our systems to create a more equitable world. The word “glitch” implies an incidental error, as easy to patch up as it is to identify. But what if racism, sexism, and ableism aren't just bugs in mostly functional machinery? What if they're coded into the system itself?

Meredith Broussard demonstrates in More Than a Glitch how neutrality in tech is a myth and why algorithms need to be held accountable. Broussard, a data scientist and one of the few Black female researchers in artificial intelligence, masterfully synthesizes concepts from computer science and sociology. She explores a range of examples: from facial recognition technology trained only to recognize lighter skin tones, to mortgage-approval algorithms that encourage discriminatory lending, to the dangerous feedback loops that arise when medical diagnostic algorithms are trained on insufficiently diverse data. Even when such technologies are designed with good intentions, Broussard shows, fallible humans develop programs that can result in devastating consequences. Broussard argues that the solution isn't to make omnipresent tech more inclusive, but to root out the algorithms that target certain demographics as “other” to begin with. With sweeping implications for fields ranging from jurisprudence to medicine, the ground-breaking insights of More Than a Glitch are essential reading for anyone invested in building a more equitable future.

Our guest is: Meredith Broussard, who is an associate professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University, research director at the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Technology, and the author of several books, including More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech, and Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World. Her academic research focuses on artificial intelligence in investigative reporting and ethical AI, with a particular interest in using data analysis for social good.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. You can help support the show by downloading, sharing, posting about, or assigning any of our 200+ episodes.

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Cameron J. Buckner, "From Deep Learning to Rational Machines" (Oxford UP, 2023)

10 juni 2024 | 71 min

AI and the Humanities: Nina Beguš DIscusses "Artificial Humanities"

3 juni 2024 | 49 min

Gretchen McCulloch, "Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language" (Riverhead Books, 2020)

1 juni 2024 | 52 min

Joanna Guldi, "The Dangerous Art of Text Mining: A Methodology for Digital History" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

28 maj 2024 | 68 min

Daniel P. Ott, "Harvesting History: McCormick's Reaper, Heritage Branding, and Historical Forgery" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)

20 maj 2024 | 64 min

Rob Drew, "Unspooled: How the Cassette Made Music Shareable" (Duke UP, 2023)

20 maj 2024 | 45 min

Constantin Ardeleanu, "Steamboat Modernity: Travel, Transport, and Social Transformation on the Lower Danube, 1830–1860" (CEU Press, 2024)

18 maj 2024 | 72 min

Priya Satia, "Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution" (Bloomsbury, 2019)

18 maj 2024 | 54 min

From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution transformed Britain from an agricultural and artisanal economy to one dominated by industry, ushering in unprecedented growth in technology and trade and putting the country at the center of the global economy. But the commonly accepted story of the industrial revolution, anchored in images of cotton factories and steam engines invented by unfettered geniuses, overlooks the true root of economic and industrial expansion: the lucrative military contracting that enabled the country's near-constant state of war in the eighteenth century. Demand for the guns and other war materiel that allowed British armies, navies, mercenaries, traders, settlers, and adventurers to conquer an immense share of the globe in turn drove the rise of innumerable associated industries, from metalworking to banking.

Bookended by the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution (Bloomsbury, 2019) traces the social and material life of British guns over a century of near-constant war and violence at home and abroad. Priya Satia develops this story through the life of prominent British gun-maker and Quaker Samuel Galton Jr., who was asked to answer for the moral defensibility of producing guns as new uses like anonymous mass violence rose. Reconciling the pacifist tenet of his faith with his perception of the economic realities of the time, Galton argued that war was driving the industrial economy, making everyone inescapably complicit in it. Through his story, Satia illuminates Britain's emergence as a global superpower, the roots of the government's role in economic development, and the origins of our own era's debates over gun control and military contracting.

Priya Satia is the Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History and Professor of British History at Stanford University. She is the author of Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East (2009), and her writing has appeared in Slate, the Financial Times, the Nation, and the Huffington Post, among other publications.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Catherine D'Ignazio, "Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action" (MIT Press, 2024)

17 maj 2024 | 54 min

Douglas L. Reside, "Fixing the Musical: How Technologies Shaped the Broadway Repertory" (Oxford UP, 2023)

15 maj 2024 | 56 min

Per Högselius and Achim Klüppelberg, "The Soviet Nuclear Archipelago: A Historical Geography of Atomic-Powered Communism" (CEU Press, 2023)

12 maj 2024 | 24 min

In this episode of the CEU Press Podcast, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press/CEU Review of Books) sat down with Per Högselius and Achim Klüppelberg to discuss their new book with CEU Press entitled, The Soviet Nuclear Archipelago: A Historical Geography of Atomic-Powered Communism (CEU Press, 2023).

The book is available Open Access, click here to download.

The war in Ukraine, with the exposure of nuclear power stations and the danger of atomic warfare, has made the legacy of the Soviet nuclear sector of critical importance.

The two authors map the Soviet nuclear industry in a shifting historical context, making sense of a complex socio-technical and environmental history. Taking an innovative approach, this book explores the history of atomic power in the former Soviet Union using the spatial dimensions of the nuclear industry as a point of departure.

Per and Achim’s book is part of our new series, CEU Press Perspectives. The series offers the latest viewpoints on both new and perennial issues, these books address a wide range of topics of critical importance today. The new series, originating from an international collection of leading authors, encourages us to look at issues from a different viewpoint, to think outside the box, and to stimulate debate.

You can learn more about the series here.

The CEU Press Podcast delves into various aspects of the publishing process: from crafting a book proposal, finding a publisher, responding to peer review feedback on the manuscript, to the subsequent distribution, promotion and marketing of academic books. We will also talk to series editors and authors, who will share their experiences of getting published and talk about their series or books.

Interested in CEU Press’s publications? Click here to find out more here.

Stay tuned for future episodes and subscribe to our podcast to be the first to be notified.

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Gina Sipley, "Just Here for the Comments: Lurking as Digital Literacy Practice" (Bristol UP, 2024)

11 maj 2024 | 57 min

We all sometimes ‘lurk’ in online spaces without posting or engaging, just reading the posts and comments. But neither reading nor lurking are ever passive acts. In fact, readers of social media are making decisions and taking grassroots actions on multiple dimensions. Unpacking this understudied phenomenon, Just Here for the Comments: Lurking as Digital Literacy Practice (Bristol UP, 2024) by Gina Sipley challenges the conventional perspective of what counts as participatory online culture. Presenting lurking as a communication and literacy practice that resists dominant power structures, it offers an innovative approach to digital qualitative methods. Unique and original in its subject, this is a call for internet researchers to broaden their methods to include lurkers’ participation and presence.

Just Here for the Comments will be released on May 28th by Bristol University Press. Pre-orders are now open here. Readers can also get a 25% discount on ALL Bristol University Press and Policy Press books by signing up to their newsletter.

A portion of the proceeds from this book will benefit The Children’s Greenhouse, which provides high-quality, low-cost childcare to the children of SUNY Nassau Community College students, faculty, and staff. The Greenhouse is the reason many of our student parents persist and graduate with their degrees. Many of these students are first generation, too. You can learn more about this organization and how to donate, here.

Dr. Gina Sipley is an Associate Professor of English at SUNY Nassau Community College. Dr Sipley is in the process of developing with Bristol University Press free resources for academics, K-12 teachers, and book clubs interested in teaching and researching the social and economic effects of lurker literacies. Anyone interested in receiving these materials when they become available can hit subscribe on her website.

Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College.

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"Did You Miss My Comment or What?": Understanding Toxicity in Open Source Discussions

11 maj 2024 | 63 min

Tiziano Bonini and Emiliano Trere, "Algorithms of Resistance: The Everyday Fight against Platform Power" (MIT Press, 2024)

10 maj 2024 | 40 min

MC Forelle on Cars, Chipification, and Repair

6 maj 2024 | 74 min

John Powers, "Technology and the Making of Experimental Film Culture" (Oxford UP, 2023)

4 maj 2024 | 55 min

The Bolex camera, 16mm reversal film stocks, commercial film laboratories, and low-budget optical printers were the small-gauge media technologies that provided the infrastructure for experimental filmmaking at the height of its cultural impact. Technology and the Making of Experimental Film Culture (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. John Powers examines how the avant-garde embraced these material resources and invested them with meanings and values adjacent to those of semiprofessional film culture.

By reasserting the physicality of the body in making time-lapse and kinesthetic sequences with the Bolex, filmmakers conversed with other art forms and integrated broader spheres of humanistic and scientific inquiry into their artistic process. Drawing from the photographic qualities of stocks such as Tri-X and Kodachrome, they discovered pliant metaphors that allowed them to connect their artistic practice to metaphysics, spiritualism, and Hollywood excess. By framing film labs as mystical or adversarial, they cultivated an oppositionality that valorized control over the artistic process. And by using the optical printer as a tool for excavating latent meaning out of found footage, they posited the reworking of images as fundamental to the exploration of personal and cultural identity.

Providing a wealth of new detail about the making of canonised avant-garde classics by such luminaries as Carolee Schneemann, Jack Smith, and Stan Brakhage, as well as rediscovering works from overlooked artists such as Chick Strand, Amy Halpern, and Gunvor Nelson, Technology and the Making of Experimental Film Culture uses technology as a lens for examining the process of making: where ideas come from, how they are put into practice, and how arguments about those ideas foster cultural and artistic commitments and communities.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Natalia Grincheva and Elizabeth Stainforth, "Geopolitics of Digital Heritage" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

27 april 2024 | 57 min

Anu Bradford, "Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology" (Oxford UP, 2023)

24 april 2024 | 20 min

The global battle among the three dominant digital powers―the United States, China, and the European Union―is intensifying. All three regimes are racing to regulate tech companies, with each advancing a competing vision for the digital economy while attempting to expand its sphere of influence in the digital world. In Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology (Oxford UP, 2023), her provocative follow-up to The Brussels Effect, Anu Bradford explores a rivalry that will shape the world in the decades to come.

Across the globe, people dependent on digital technologies have become increasingly alarmed that their rapid adoption and transformation have ushered in an exceedingly concentrated economy where a few powerful companies control vast economic wealth and political power, undermine data privacy, and widen the gap between economic winners and losers. In response, world leaders are variously embracing the idea of reining in the most dominant tech companies. Bradford examines three competing regulatory approaches―the American market-driven model, the Chinese state-driven model, and the European rights-driven regulatory model―and discusses how governments and tech companies navigate the inevitable conflicts that arise when these regulatory approaches collide in the international domain. Which digital empire will prevail in the contest for global influence remains an open question, yet their contrasting strategies are increasingly clear.

Digital societies are at an inflection point. In the midst of these unfolding regulatory battles, governments, tech companies, and digital citizens are making important choices that will shape the future ethos of the digital society. Digital Empires lays bare the choices we face as societies and individuals, explains the forces that shape those choices, and illuminates the immense stakes involved for everyone who uses digital technologies.

Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student and law student at the University of Chicago. Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Jake’s work has been published in top venues such as ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

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Asif Siddiqi on Rockets, Prisons, Pop Songs, and So Much More

22 april 2024 | 68 min

Héctor Beltrán, "Code Work: Hacking Across the US/México Techno-Borderlands" (Princeton UP, 2023)

21 april 2024 | 30 min

In Code Work: Hacking Across the US/México Techno-Borderlands (Princeton UP, 2023), Héctor Beltrán examines Mexican and Latinx coders’ personal strategies of self-making as they navigate a transnational economy of tech work. Beltrán shows how these hackers apply concepts from the code worlds to their lived experiences, deploying batches, loose coupling, iterative processing (looping), hacking, prototyping, and full-stack development in their daily social interactions—at home, in the workplace, on the dating scene, and in their understanding of the economy, culture, and geopolitics. Merging ethnographic analysis with systems thinking, he draws on his eight years of research in México and the United States—during which he participated in and observed hackathons, hacker schools, and tech entrepreneurship conferences—to unpack the conundrums faced by workers in a tech economy that stretches from villages in rural México to Silicon Valley.

Beltrán chronicles the tension between the transformative promise of hacking—the idea that coding will reconfigure the boundaries of race, ethnicity, class, and gender—and the reality of a neoliberal capitalist economy divided and structured by the US/México border. Young hackers, many of whom approach coding in a spirit of playfulness and exploration, are encouraged to appropriate the discourses of flexibility and self-management even as they remain outside formal employment. Beltrán explores the ways that “innovative culture” is seen as central in curing México’s social ills, showing that when innovation is linked to technological development, other kinds of development are neglected. Beltrán’s highly original, wide-ranging analysis uniquely connects technology studies, the anthropology of capitalism, and Latinx and Latin American studies.

Mentioned in this episode, among others:

Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books.
Hong, G. K., & Ferguson, R. A. (Eds.). (2011). Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization. Duke University Press.
Coleman, E. G. (2012). Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking. Princeton University Press.

Héctor Beltrán is Class of 1957 Career Development Assistant Professor of Anthropology at MIT, where he teaches “Cultures of Computing,” “Hacking from the South,” and “Latin American Migrations.”

Liliana Gil is Assistant Professor of Comparative Studies (STS) at the Ohio State University.

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Coreen McGuire, "Measuring Difference, Numbering Normal: Setting the Standards for Disability in the Interwar Period" (Manchester UP, 2020)

20 april 2024 | 29 min

Heather Parry, "Electric Dreams: Sex Robots and Failed Promises of Capitalism" (404 Ink, 2024)

20 april 2024 | 39 min

Stephen Morillo, "War and Conflict in the Middle Ages" (Polity Press, 2022)

20 april 2024 | 67 min

Stewart Lawrence Sinclair, "Space Rover" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

13 april 2024 | 44 min

Tina Sikka, "Health Apps, Genetic Diets and Superfoods: When Biopolitics Meets Neoliberalism" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

5 april 2024 | 19 min

Marc Masters, "High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape" (UNC Press, 2023)

3 april 2024 | 55 min

Guru Madhavan on Wicked Problems and Engineering a Better World

2 april 2024 | 69 min

Max Bennett, "A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, Ai, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains" (Mariner Books, 2023)

1 april 2024 | 69 min

A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, Ai, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains (Mariner Books, 2023) tells two fascinating stories. One is the evolution of nervous systems. It started 600 million years ago, when the first brains evolved in tiny worms. The other one is humans' quest to create more and more intelligent systems. This story begins in 1951 with the first reinforcement learning algorithm trying to mimic neural networks.

Max Bennett is an AI entrepreneur and neuroscience researcher. His work combines insights from evolutionary neuroscience, comparative psychology, and AI. As each chapter describes how a skill evolved, it also explains whether(!) and how an AI system has managed to implement something similar. A recurring theme is how human brains and neural circuits have influenced AI architecture. The other side of this bi-directional connection is also intriguing. AI has often served as a litmus test, giving a clue how a not well understood neurobiological phenomenon might work, how plausible a hypothesis is.

The organzining principle of this book is a framework of five breakthroughs, which compares evolution to technological innovation. Like a new technology enables several innovative products, a new brain capability enables several new skills. For example, mammals show several new intelligent behaviors compared to their ancestors: vicarious trial and error, episodic memory, and planning. The foundation of all these novelties, is probably the same capability: simulation.

The five breakthroughs are:

steering in bilaterians
learning from trial and error in vertebrates
simulating in mammals
mentalizing in primates
speaking in humans

This framework guides the readers through a time travel of 600 million years. We learn about the environment in which these capabilities evolved: Who were the first mammals and why did planning benefit them? We see what contemporary animals can and can't do: Fish aren't as dumb as folklore suggests. And we take a look at AI's baffling achievements and limitations: Why can AI write decent essays but not load a dishwasher?

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Robert Willim, "Mundania: How and Where Technologies Are Made Ordinary" (Bristol UP, 2024)

30 mars 2024 | 40 min

Matthew H. Hersch, "Dark Star: A New History of the Space Shuttle" (MIT Press, 2023)

30 mars 2024 | 37 min

Thomas S. Mullaney, "The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age" (MIT Press, 2024)

29 mars 2024 | 103 min

The fascinating, untold story of how the Chinese language overcame unparalleled challenges and revolutionized the world of computing. A standard QWERTY keyboard has a few dozen keys. How can Chinese—a language with tens of thousands of characters and no alphabet—be input on such a device?

In The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age (MIT Press, 2024), Thomas Mullaney sets out to resolve this paradox, and in doing so, discovers that the key to this seemingly impossible riddle has given rise to a new epoch in the history of writing—a form of writing he calls “hypography.” Based on fifteen years of research, this pathbreaking history of the Chinese language charts the beginnings of electronic Chinese technology in the wake of World War II up through to its many iterations in the present day. Mullaney takes the reader back through the history and evolution of Chinese language computing technology, showing the development of electronic Chinese input methods—software programs that enable Chinese characters to be produced using alphanumeric symbols—and the profound impact they have had on the way Chinese is written. Along the way, Mullaney introduces a cast of brilliant and eccentric personalities drawn from the ranks of IBM, MIT, the CIA, the Pentagon, the Taiwanese military, and the highest rungs of mainland Chinese establishment, to name a few, and the unexpected roles they played in developing Chinese language computing. Finally, he shows how China and the non-Western world—because of the hypographic technologies they had to invent in order to join the personal computing revolution—“saved” the Western computer from its deep biases, enabling it to achieve a meaningful presence in markets outside of the Americas and Europe. An eminently engaging and artfully told history, The Chinese Computer is a must-read for anyone interested in how culture informs computing and how computing, in turn, shapes culture.

Thomas S. Mullaney is Professor of Chinese History at Stanford University and a Guggenheim Fellow.

Caleb Zakarin is Editor at the New Books Network.

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Ignacio Cofone, "The Privacy Fallacy: Harm and Power in the Information Economy" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

28 mars 2024 | 27 min

Anita R. Gohdes, "Repression in the Digital Age: Surveillance, Censorship, and the Dynamics of State Violence" (Oxford UP, 2023)

26 mars 2024 | 35 min

Global adoption of the Internet has exploded, yet we are only beginning to understand the Internet's profound political consequences. Authoritarian states are digitally catching up with their democratic counterparts, and both are showing a growing interest in the use of cyber controls--online censorship and surveillance technologies--that allow governments to exercise control over the Internet. Under what conditions does a digitally connected society actually help states target their enemies? Why do repressive governments sometimes shut down the Internet when faced with uprisings? And how have cyber controls become a dependable tool in the weapons arsenal that states use in civil conflict?

In Repression in the Digital Age: Surveillance, Censorship, and the Dynamics of State Violence (Oxford University Press, 2023), Dr. Anita R. Gohdes addresses these questions, and provides an original and in-depth look into the relationship between digital technologies and state violence. Drawing on large-scale analyses of fine-grained data on the Syrian conflict, qualitative case evidence from Iran, and the first global comparative analysis on Internet outages and state repression, Dr. Gohdes makes the case that digital infrastructure supports security forces in their use of violent state repression. More specifically, she argues that mass access to the Internet presents governments who fear for their political survival with a set of response options. When faced with a political threat, they can either temporarily restrict or block online public access or they can expand mass access to online information and monitor it to their own advantage. Surveillance allows security forces to target opponents of the state more selectively, while extreme forms of censorship or shutdowns of the Internet occur in conjunction with larger and more indiscriminate repression. As digital communication has become a bedrock of modern opposition and protest movements, Repression in the Digital Age breaks new ground in examining state repression in the information age.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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John Warner on Teaching Writing in the Age of Generative AI

25 mars 2024 | 86 min

How Can We Reach International Consensus on AI Regulation?

25 mars 2024 | 43 min

On Bloomsbury's "Object Lessons" Series: A Discussion with Christopher Schaberg

25 mars 2024 | 38 min

George S. Takach, "Cold War 2.0: Artificial Intelligence in the New Battle between China, Russia, and America" (Pegasus Book, 2024)

24 mars 2024 | 68 min

A vivid, thoughtful examination of how technological innovation—especially AI—is shaping the tensions between democracy and autocracy during the new Cold War.

So much of what we hear about China and Russia today likens the relationship between these two autocracies and the West to a “rivalry” or a “great-power competition.” Some might consider it alarmist to say we are in the midst of a second Cold War, but that may be the only responsible way to describe today’s state of affairs. What’s more, we have come a long way from Mao Zedong’s infamous observation that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Now we live in an age more aptly described by Vladimir Putin’s cryptic prophecy that “artificial intelligence is the future not only of Russia, but of all mankind, and whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become ruler of the world.”

George S. Takach’s incisive and meticulously researched new volume, Cold War 2.0: Artificial Intelligence in the New Battle between China, Russia, and America (Pegasus Book, 2024), is the book we need to thoroughly understand these frightening and perilous times. In the geopolitical sphere, there are no more pressing issues than the appalling mechanizations of a surveillance state in China, Russia’s brazen attempt to assert its autocratic model in Ukraine, and China’s increasingly likely plans to do the same in Taiwan. But the key here, Takach argues, is that our new Cold War is not only ideological but technological: the side that prevails in Cold War 2.0 will be the one that bests the other in mastering the greatest innovations of our time. Artificial intelligence sits in our pockets every day—but what about AI that coordinates military operations and missile defense systems? Or the highly sophisticated semiconductor chips and quantum computers that power those missiles and a host of other weapons? And, where recently we have seen remarkable feats of bio-engineering to produce vaccines at record speed, shouldn’t we be concerned how catastrophic it would be if bio-engineering were co-opted for nefarious purposes? Takach thoroughly examines how each of these innovations will shape the tension between democracy and autocracy, and how each will play a central role in this second Cold War. Finally, he crafts a precise blueprint for how Western democracies should handle these innovations to respond to the looming threat of autocracy—and ultimately prevail over it.

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

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Tonia Sutherland, "Resurrecting the Black Body: Race and the Digital Afterlife" (U California Press, 2023)

22 mars 2024 | 59 min

Lisa Messeri, "In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles" (Duke UP, 2024)

16 mars 2024 | 70 min

Once More--What Does It Even Mean for a Machine to be Generative?

16 mars 2024 | 61 min

Peter D. McDonald, "Run and Jump: The Meaning of the 2D Platformer" (MIT Press, 2024)

15 mars 2024 | 22 min

Nick Jones, "Gooey Media: Screen Entertainment and the Graphic User Interface" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)

15 mars 2024 | 61 min

Zachary Loeb on the History of the End of the World

11 mars 2024 | 91 min

Brian Merchant, "Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech" (LIttle, Brown, 2023)

10 mars 2024 | 103 min

"Luddite" has become an insult and Brain Merchant wants to change that. Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech (Little, Brown, 2023) tells the story of when machines starting taking human jobs, when an underground network of 19th century rebels, the Luddites, took up arms against the industrialists that were automating their work--and how it explains the power, threat, and toll of big tech today. Two hundred years ago in rural England, working men and women rose up en masse rather than starve at the hands of the factory owners who were using machines to erase and degrade their livelihoods. Under the banner of a mythical General Loud, they organized guerrilla raids, smashed specific machines, and threatened wealthy machine owners. Luddites won the support of Lord Byron, inspired Mary Shelley, and enraged the louche Prince Regent and his bloodthirsty government. Before it was over, much blood would be spilled--of rich and poor, of the invisible and of the powerful. This deeply misunderstood class struggle nearly brought 19th century England to its knees. Currently many fear that big tech is dominating our lives and machines replacing human labor run high. We worry that technology imperils millions of jobs, robots are ousting workers from factories, and artificial intelligence will soon remove drivers from cars. Saving the movement from what E. P. Thompson called "the enormous condescension of posterity", Merchant finds inspiration in Luddism for our current crises.

Brian Merchant is the author of The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone (2017, Little, Brown). His work has appeared in a variety of places including Wired and The Atlantic. He is a founder of VICE’s speculative fiction outlet Terraform and was the technology columnist at the Los Angeles Times.

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Hsuan L. Hsu, "Air Conditioning" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

8 mars 2024 | 44 min

Robert Charette on Researching the Material World

4 mars 2024 | 74 min

Verity Harding, "AI Needs You: How We Can Change AI's Future and Save Our Own" (Princeton UP, 2024)

1 mars 2024 | 31 min

Carol Beggy, "Pencil" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

28 februari 2024 | 58 min

Yanis Varoufakis, "Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism" (Melville House, 2023)

26 februari 2024 | 53 min

Paul Scharre, "Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence" (Norton, 2023)

24 februari 2024 | 33 min

An award-winning defense expert tells the story of today’s great power rivalry―the struggle to control artificial intelligence.

A new industrial revolution has begun. Like mechanization or electricity before it, artificial intelligence will touch every aspect of our lives―and cause profound disruptions in the balance of global power, especially among the AI superpowers: China, the United States, and Europe. Autonomous weapons expert Paul Scharre takes readers inside the fierce competition to develop and implement this game-changing technology and dominate the future.

Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (Norton, 2023) argues that four key elements define this struggle: data, computing power, talent, and institutions. Data is a vital resource like coal or oil, but it must be collected and refined. Advanced computer chips are the essence of computing power―control over chip supply chains grants leverage over rivals. Talent is about people: which country attracts the best researchers and most advanced technology companies? The fourth “battlefield” is maybe the most critical: the ultimate global leader in AI will have institutions that effectively incorporate AI into their economy, society, and especially their military.

Scharre’s account surges with futuristic technology. He explores the ways AI systems are already discovering new strategies via millions of war-game simulations, developing combat tactics better than any human, tracking billions of people using biometrics, and subtly controlling information with secret algorithms. He visits China’s “National Team” of leading AI companies to show the chilling synergy between China’s government, private sector, and surveillance state. He interviews Pentagon leadership and tours U.S. Defense Department offices in Silicon Valley, revealing deep tensions between the military and tech giants who control data, chips, and talent. Yet he concludes that those tensions, inherent to our democratic system, create resilience and resistance to autocracy in the face of overwhelmingly powerful technology.

Engaging and direct, Four Battlegrounds offers a vivid picture of how AI is transforming warfare, global security, and the future of human freedom―and what it will take for democracies to remain at the forefront of the world order.

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What Does It Even Mean for a Machine to Generate?

24 februari 2024 | 58 min

Jacob Ward, "Visions of a Digital Nation: Market and Monopoly in British Telecommunications" (MIT Press, 2024)

23 februari 2024 | 49 min

In Visions of a Digital Nation: Market and Monopoly in British Telecommunications (MIT Press, 2024), Jacob Ward explains why the privatization of British Telecom signaled a pivotal moment in the rise of neoliberalism, and how it was shaped by the longer development and digitalization of Britain’s telecommunications infrastructure.

When Margaret Thatcher sold British Telecom for £3.6 billion in 1984, it became not only, at the time, the largest stock flotation in history, but also a watershed moment in the rise of neoliberalism and deregulation. In Visions of a Digital Nation, Ward offers an incisive interdisciplinary perspective on how technology prefigured this pivot. Giving due consideration to the politicians, engineers, and managers who paved the way for this historic moment, Ward illustrates how the decision validated the privatization of public utilities and tied digital technology to free market rationales. In this examination of the national and, at times, global history of technology, Ward’s approach is sweeping. Utilizing infrastructure studies, environmental history, and urban and local history, Ward explores Britain’s nationalist and welfarist plans for a digital information utility and shows how these projects contested and adapted to the “market turn” under Margaret Thatcher. Ultimately, Visions of a Digital Nation compellingly argues that politicians did not impose neoliberalism top-down, but that technology, engineers, and managers shaped these politics from the bottom up.

Jacob Ward is Assistant Professor in the History Department and Science, Technology and Society Studies Research Program at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University. He is coeditor of Histories of Technology, the Environment and Modern Britain.

Filippo De Chirico is a PhD student in History and Politics of Energy at Roma Tre University (Italy).

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Neil Lee, "Innovation for the Masses: How to Share the Benefits of the High-Tech Economy" (U California Press, 2024)

21 februari 2024 | 37 min

Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson, "American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15" (FSG, 2023)

20 februari 2024 | 67 min

In the 1950s, an obsessive firearms designer named Eugene Stoner invented the AR-15 rifle in a California garage. High-minded and patriotic, Stoner sought to devise a lightweight, easy-to-use weapon that could replace the M1s touted by soldiers in World War II. What he did create was a lethal handheld icon of the American century.

In American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15 (FSG, 2023), the veteran Wall Street Journal reporters Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson track the AR-15 from inception to ubiquity. How did the same gun represent the essence of freedom to millions of Americans and the essence of evil to millions more? To answer this question, McWhirter and Elinson follow Stoner--the American Kalashnikov--as he struggled mightily to win support for his invention, which under the name M16 would become standard equipment in Vietnam. Shunned by gun owners at first, the rifle's popularity would take off thanks to a renegade band of small-time gun makers. And in the 2000s, it would become the weapon of choice for mass shooters, prompting widespread calls for proscription even as the gun industry embraced it as a financial savior. Writing with fairness and compassion, McWhirter and Elinson explore America's gun culture, revealing the deep appeal of the AR-15, the awful havoc it wreaks, and the politics of reducing its toll. The result is a moral history of contemporary America's love affair with technology, freedom, and weaponry.

Cameron McWhirter is a national reporter for The Wall Street Journal, based in Atlanta. He has covered mass shootings, violent protests and natural disasters across the South. He is also the author of Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America. Previously, he reported for other publications in the U.S., as well as Bosnia, Iraq, and Ethiopia.

Zusha Elinson is a national reporter, writing about guns and violence for the Wall Street Journal. Based in California, he has also written for the Center for Investigative Reporting and the New York Times Bay Area section.

Recommended Books:

Robert Caro, The Path to Power
William Shawcross, Sideshow
Dexter Filkins, The Forever War
Adam Winkler, Gun Fight
Tim Mak, Misfire
Doug Stanton, Horse Solidiers

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.

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Nate Klemp, "Open: Living with an Expansive Mind in a Distracted World" (Sounds True, 2024)

19 februari 2024 | 55 min

Jenna Ng, "The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections: Where Screen Boundaries Lie" (Amsterdam UP, 2021)

14 februari 2024 | 53 min

Screens are ubiquitous today. Yet contemporary screen media eliminate the presence of the screen and diminish the visibility of its boundaries. As the image becomes indistinguishable from the viewer’s surroundings, this unsettling prompts re.examination of how screen boundaries demarcate.

Through readings of three media forms – Virtual Reality; holograms; and light projections – The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections: Where Screen Boundaries Lie (University of Amsterdam Press, 2021) by Dr. Jenna Ng develops new theories of the surfaces on and spaces in which images are displayed. Interrogating contemporary contestations of reality against illusion, this open-access book argues that the disappearance of difference reflects shifted conditions of actuality and virtuality in understanding the human condition. These shifts further connect to the current state of politics by way of their distorted truth values, corrupted terms of information, and internalizations of difference.

The Post.Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections thus thinks anew the image’s borders and delineations, evoking the screen boundary as an instrumentation of today’s intense virtualizations which do not tell the truth. In the process, a new imagination for images emerges for a gluttony of the virtual; for new conceptualizations of object and representation, materiality and energies, media and histories, real and unreal; for new understandings of appearances, dis-appearances, replacement and re.placement – the post-screen.

This book is available open access here.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Markus Krajewski, "The Server: A Media History from the Present to the Baroque" (Yale UP, 2018)

11 februari 2024 | 63 min

The Server: A Media History from the Present to the Baroque (Yale UP, 2018) is a cutting–edge media history on a perennially fascinating topic that attempts to answer the crucial question: Who is in charge, the servant or the master?

Though classic servants like the butler or the governess have largely vanished, the Internet is filled with servers: web, ftp, mail, and others perform their daily drudgery, going about their business noiselessly and unnoticed. Why then are current–day digital drudges called servers? Markus Krajewski explores this question by going from the present back to the Baroque to study historical aspects of service through various perspectives, be it the servants’ relationship to architecture or their function in literary or scientific contexts. At the intersection of media studies, cultural history, and literature, this work recounts the gradual transition of agency from human to nonhuman actors to show how the concept of the digital server stems from the classic role of the servant.

Markus Krajewski is professor of media history at the University of Basel, Switzerland. He is the author of numerous articles and several books, including Paper Machines: About Cards and Catalogs, 1548–1929 and World Projects: Global Information Before World War I, which was awarded the 2007 Prize of the German Society for the History of Medicine, Science and Technology. He also works as a software developer and maintainer of his bibliography software Synapsen: A Hypertextual Card Index (www.synapsen.ch). Ilinca Iurascu is assistant professor of German at the University of British Columbia, specializing in nineteenth-century cultural studies and media theory.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Chen-Pang Yeang, "Transforming Noise. A History of Its Science and Technology from Disturbing Sounds to Informational Errors, 1900-1955" (2023)

30 januari 2024 | 55 min

Today, the concept of noise is employed to characterize random fluctuations in general. Before the twentieth century, however, noise only meant disturbing sounds. In the 1900s-50s, noise underwent a conceptual transformation from unwanted sounds that needed to be domesticated into a synonym for errors and deviations to be now used as all kinds of signals and information. Transforming Noise examines the historical origin of modern attempts to understand, control, and use noise. Its history sheds light on the interactions between physics, mathematics, mechanical technology, electrical engineering, and information and data sciences in the twentieth century.

This book explores the process of engineers and physicists turning noise into an informational concept, starting from the rise of sound reproduction technologies such as the phonograph, telephone, and radio in the 1900s-20s until the theory of Brownian motions for random fluctuations and its application in thermionic tubes of telecommunication systems. These processes produced different theoretical treatments of noise in the 1920s-30s, such as statistical physicists' studies of Brownian fluctuations' temporal evolution, radio engineers' spectral analysis of atmospheric disturbances, and mathematicians' measure-theoretic formulation. Finally, it discusses the period during and after World War II and how researchers have worked on military projects of radar, gunfire control, and secret communications and converted the interwar theoretical studies of noise into tools for statistical detection, estimation, prediction, and information transmission.

To physicists, mathematicians, electrical engineers, and computer scientists, this book offers a historical perspective on themes highly relevant in today's science and technology, ranging from Wi-Fi and big data to quantum information and self-organization. This book also appeals to environmental and art historians to modern music scholars as the history of noise constitutes a unique angle to study sound and society. Finally, to researchers in media studies and digital cultures, Transforming Noise demonstrates the deep technoscientific historicity of certain notions - information, channel, noise, equivocation - they have invoked to understand modern media and communication.

Interview by Pamela Fuentes historian and editor of New Books Network en español Communications officer- Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto

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Paddy Walker and Peter Roberts, "War's Changed Landscape?: A Primer on Conflict's Forms and Norms" (Howgate, 2023)

27 januari 2024 | 89 min

Hartmut Koenitz, "Understanding Interactive Digital Narrative: Immersive Expressions for a Complex Time" (Routledge, 2023)

19 januari 2024 | 22 min

What Decision Means

19 januari 2024 | 60 min

Paul Gowder, "The Networked Leviathan: For Democratic Platforms" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

17 januari 2024 | 65 min

James C. Goodall, "Nautilus to Columbia: 70 Years of the US Navy's Nuclear Submarines" (Osprey, 2023)

15 januari 2024 | 55 min

Can A.I. Mean?

13 januari 2024 | 52 min

Listen to Episode No.4 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is whether A.I. can mean.

The short answer is yes, A.I. can mean... whatever we make it mean.

For instance, ChatGPT does has access to text on certain kinds of subject matter, like, for example, the assembly of explosives or specifications on suicide. This kind of stuff is on the web, so ChatGPT has “read it” these subjects into its corpus. However, human programmers have applied filters telling the A.I. not to speak about these things. Nonetheless, you may be able to get to what it “thinks” about these things with some clever prompts, called “jailbreaks” in the hacker trade.

But does the A.I. really think, as we humans would associate with the act of thinking? Not really, because an A.I. like ChatGPT does not think about bombs or self-destruction. It just has words about these subjects which it doesn’t itself “understand.” And on top of that, its human-programmer masters have told it not to repeat them.

But whose purpose is meant to be served here, the A.I.'s or our own? In our discussion in this instalment of All We Mean, we argue, of course, for the A.I. serving the purposes of us humans. But there the questions immediately arises, which of us humans will be served? It may be that only the big stakeholders in the large Internet companies get served, and who knows what purposes they have. Perhaps they're quite content to see A.I. create the illusion of fact and consciousness, if for no other reason than to increase profits.

We, on the opposite side of that, say that the technology has tremendous potential for everyone, if used in everyone's interests. For example, people who want to learn can use A.I. technologies to improve their own performance, just as people who want to discover can use A.I. technologies to communicate their findings more effectively. These are the sorts of purpose we believe A.I. can be used to accomplish, by anyone, for everyone. But, we wonder, will purposes such as these also count when the technology rests firmly in the hands of the very few, because what if they don't really care what the rest of us want?

Read Bill's and Mary's multimodal grammar of A.I.

And read their work on using A.I. in education.

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Roland Allen, "The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper" (Profile Books, 2023)

6 januari 2024 | 61 min

We see notebooks everywhere we go. But where did this simple invention come from? How did they revolutionise our lives, and why are they such powerful tools for creativity? And how can using a notebook help you change the way you think?

In The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (Profile Books, 2023), Roland Allen reveals all the answers. Ranging from the bustling markets of mediaeval Florence to the quiet studies of our greatest thinkers, he follows a trail of dazzling ideas, revealing how the notebook became our most dependable and versatile tool for creative thinking. He tells the notebook stories of artists like Leonardo and Frida Kahlo, scientists from Isaac Newton to Marie Curie, and writers from Chaucer to Henry James. We watch Darwin developing his theory of evolution in tiny pocketbooks, see Agatha Christie plotting a hundred murders in scrappy exercise books, and learn how Bruce Chatwin unwittingly inspired the creation of the Moleskine.

On the way we meet a host of cooks, kings, sailors, fishermen, musicians, engineers, politicians, adventurers and mathematicians, who all used their notebooks as a space for thinking and to shape the modern world.

In an age of AI and digital overload, the humble notebook is more relevant than ever. Allen shows how bullet points can combat ADHD, journals can ease PTSD, and patient diaries soften the trauma of reawakening from coma. The everyday act of moving a pen across paper can have profound consequences, changing the way we think and feel: making us more creative, more productive - and happier.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Carolyn Birdsall, "Radiophilia" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

31 december 2023 | 46 min

Ben Jacobsen and David Beer, "Social Media and the Automatic Production of Memory: Classification, Ranking and the Sorting of the Past" (Bristol UP, 2023)

24 december 2023 | 46 min

André Jansson, "Rethinking Communication Geographies: Geomedia, Digital Logistics and the Human Condition" (Edward Elgar, 2022)

23 december 2023 | 29 min

How are geographies of communication changing with contemporary digital media and data infrastructure? What is ‘geomedia’ and ‘transmedia’? Where are the possibilities for human agency to emerge in the increasingly digitally mediated world? André Jansson, Professor at the Department of Geography, Media and Communication, Karlstad University, Sweden, introduces his latest book, Rethinking Communication Geographies: Geomedia, Digital Logistics and the Human Condition (Edward Elgar, 2022).

In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, André speaks about how he uses a humanistic and interdisciplinary approach to the study of communication geographies, introducing the framework for understanding ‘geomedia’ as an environmental regime that shapes human subjectivity. The book explores the human condition under digital capitalism, depicting an environment in which digital logistics have taken centre stage in day-to-day life. It argues that human activities are accommodated to sustain the circulation of digital data.

André Jansson is director of the Centre for Geomedia Studies. His research is oriented towards questions of media use, identity and power from an interdisciplinary perspective. His work links various theoretical strands from social phenomenology, human geography and sociology of culture. A particular interest regards the relationship between mediatization processes and the production of social space. He is currently leading the project Hot Desks in Cool Places: Coworking Spaces as Post-Digital Industry and Movement (with Karin Fast), which studies the ‘future of work’ and struggles over this future in relation to so-called coworking spaces in urban settings.

Joanne Kuai is a PhD Candidate at Karlstad University, Sweden, with a research project on Journalism as an Institution in the Age of AI. She is also an affiliated PhD student with the Graduate School of Asian Studies at Lund University and with the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Her research interests center around data and AI for media, computational journalism, and the social implications of automation and algorithms. Find her on LinkedIn or on X @JoanneKuai.

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Howie Singer and Bill Rosenblatt, "Key Changes: The Ten Times Technology Transformed the Music Industry" (Oxford UP, 2023)

23 december 2023 | 91 min

Key Changes: The Ten Times Technology Transformed the Music Industry (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Howie Singer and Bill Rosenblatt tells a new story about the history of the music business and the ten technological advances that disrupted it over the last century.

In recent years, narratives about the music industry tend to hew to a common theme: it was humming along for decades until the Internet and Napster came along and disrupted it. Key Changes shows that this view is incorrect: the industry was actually shaken up not once in the 1990s, but ten times over more than 100 years. These ten disruptions came with the introduction of new formats for enjoying recorded music: starting with the cylinders and discs played on early phonographs; then moving through radio, LPs, tapes, CDs, television, digital downloads, streaming, and streaming video; and then into Artificial Intelligence (AI), which enables a wide range of new capabilities with profound impacts upon the business. This book devotes a chapter to each of these formats, illustrating how such innovations beget shifts in creativity, consumer behavior, economics, and law.

Each of the technological innovations covered in this book not only disrupted the music business, but also fundamentally altered the industry's character. And while the technologies themselves have evolved in unique and varied ways over the decades, the changes within the business follow a clear pattern. Veteran music industry professionals and music technology experts Howie Singer and Bill Rosenblatt illuminate this pattern through a framework they term "the 6 Cs": cutting edge technology, channels of distribution, creators, consumers, cash, copyright. This framework provides insight into how such disparate innovations similarly disrupted and transformed the music business in each era. Extensively researched and supplemented by interviews with Grammy-winning artists, producers and executives, the book provides an insightful perspective on the ways technology has fundamentally altered the music industry, throughout history and into the present era.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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John D. Hosler, "Seven Myths of Military History" (Hackett Publishing, 2022)

23 december 2023 | 67 min

Joanna Zylinska, "The Perception Machine: Our Photographic Future between the Eye and AI" (MIT Press, 2023)

22 december 2023 | 62 min

A provocative investigation of the future of photography and human perception in the age of AI.

We are constantly photographing and being photographed while feeding machine learning databases with our data, which in turn is used to generate new images. Analyzing the transformation of photography by computation—and the transformation of human perception by algorithmically driven images, from CGI to AI—The Perception Machine: Our Photographic Future between the Eye and AI (MIT Press, 2023) investigates what it means for us to live surrounded by image flows and machine eyes. In an astute and engaging argument, Joanna Zylinska brings together media theory and neuroscience in a Vilém Flusser–Paul Virilio remix. Her “perception machine” names a technical universe of images and their infrastructures. But it also refers to a sociopolitical condition resulting from today's automation of vision, imaging—and imagination.

Written by a theorist-practitioner, the book incorporates Zylinska's own art projects, some of which have been co-created with AI. The photographs, collages, films, and installations available as part of the book (and its companion website) provide a different mode of thinking about our technological futures, at a local as well as a planetary level. Offering provocative concepts such as eco-eco-punk, AUTO-FOTO-KINO, planetary micro-vision, loser images, and sensography, the book outlines an existential philosophy of messy media for a time when our practices of imaging and self-imaging are being radically redesigned. Importantly, it also offers a new vision of our future.

Joanna Zylinska is Professor of Media Philosophy + Critical Digital Practice at King's College London. The author of Nonhuman Photography (MIT Press) and many other books on art, technology, and ethics, she is also an artist and curator.

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Laila Shereen Sakr, "Arabic Glitch: Technoculture, Data Bodies, and Archives" (Stanford UP, 2023)

18 december 2023 | 33 min

Mark Munsterhjelm, "Forensic Colonialism: Genetics and the Capture of Indigenous Peoples" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2023)

10 december 2023 | 33 min

Forensic genetic technologies are popularly conceptualized and revered as important tools of justice. The research and development of these technologies, however, has been accomplished through the capture of various Indigenous Peoples' genetic material and a subsequent ongoing genetic servitude.

In Forensic Colonialism: Genetics and the Capture of Indigenous Peoples (McGill-Queen's UP, 2023), Mark Munsterhjelm explores how controversial studies of Indigenous Peoples have been used to develop racializing forensic technologies. Making moral and political claims about defending the public from criminals and terrorists, international networks of scientists, police, and security agencies have developed forensic genetic technologies firmly embedded in hierarchies that target and exploit many Indigenous Peoples without their consent. Collections began under the guise of the highly controversial Human Genome Diversity Project and related efforts, including the 1987 sampling of Brazilian Indigenous Peoples as they recovered from near genocide. After 9/11, War on Terror rhetoric began to be used to justify research on ancestry estimation and physical appearance (phenotyping) markers, and since 2019, international research cooperation networks' use of genetic data from thousands of Uyghurs and other Indigenous Peoples from Xinjiang and Tibet has contributed to a series of controversies.

Munsterhjelm concludes that technologies produced by forensic genetics advance the biopolitical security only of privileged populations, and that this depends on imposing race-based divisions between who lives and who dies. Meticulously researched, Forensic Colonialism adds to growing debates over racial categories, their roots in colonialism, and the political hierarchies inherent to forensic genetics.

Melek Firat Altay is a neuroscientist, biologist and musician. Her research focuses on deciphering the molecular and cellular mechanisms of neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders.

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The Future of Predictions: A Discussion with Christopher E. Mason

9 december 2023 | 31 min

Using History For User Research (UX): A Discussion with Larry McGrath

7 december 2023 | 46 min

Hidden No More: A Conversation with Space Suit Technician Sharon McDougle

7 december 2023 | 45 min

Who dresses the astronauts for flight? Why are the suits orange? And how are they cared for? Sharon Caples McDougle joins us to talk about her work as a modern day hidden figure, a space suit technician responsible for processing the orange launch and re-entry pressure suit assemblies worn by all NASA space shuttle astronauts. She explains how she became one of only two women CEE Suit Technicians, led the first and only all-female suit tech crew, and how she made history when she suited up Dr. Mae Jemison.

Our guest is: Sharon Caples McDougle, who began her aerospace career in the Air Force where she served proudly as an Aerospace Physiology Specialist at Beale Air Force Base, in California. She was the first female and first Black Crew Chief in CEE. As Crew Chief she had the honor of leading the first and only all-female suit tech crew. McDougle went on to become the first, and only female, and Black person, to become the Manager of the CEE Processing Department. She managed the team of more than twenty-five employees responsible for the equipment worn by the astronaut crews aboard the space shuttle. This team suited up the astronauts, tested the equipment, strapped the astronauts into the space shuttle before launch, and recovered the crew upon landing. McDougle is a United States Air Force (USAF) veteran, and the author of Suit Up for Launch with Shay.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the host and producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Listeners may also be interested in:

Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, by Margot Lee Shetterly
The 100 Year Starship, by Mae Jemison and Dana Meachen Rau
Suit Up for Launch with Shay, by Sharon Caples McDougle
NASA.gov

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 175+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here.

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Andrew C. McKevitt, "Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America" (UNC Press, 2023)

4 december 2023 | 59 min

Monica Huerta, "The Unintended: Photography, Property, and the Aesthetics of Racial Capitalism" (NYU Press, 2023)

4 december 2023 | 74 min

Daniel Jütte, "Transparency: The Material History of an Idea" (Yale UP, 2023)

1 december 2023 | 63 min

Jeff Jarvis, "The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

1 december 2023 | 63 min

Andrea L. Guzman et al., "The SAGE Handbook of Human–Machine Communication" (SAGE, 2023)

28 november 2023 | 29 min

Peter Bellerby, "The Globemakers: The Curious Story of an Ancient Craft" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

27 november 2023 | 40 min

Peter Samsonov, "IS-2: Development, Design, and Production of Stalin's Warhammer" (Military History Group, 2022)

26 november 2023 | 37 min

Dirk Van Laak, "Lifelines of Our Society: A Global History of Infrastructure" (MIT Press, 2023)

26 november 2023 | 39 min

Infrastructure is essential to defining how the public functions, yet there is little public knowledge regarding why and how it became today's strongest global force over government and individual lives. Who should build and maintain infrastructures? How are they to be protected? And why are they all in such bad shape?

In Lifelines of our Society: A Global History of Infrastructure (MIT Press, 2023), Dr. Dirk van Laak offers broad audiences a history of global infrastructures—focused on Western societies, over the past two hundred years—that considers all their many paradoxes. He illustrates three aspects of infrastructure: their development, their influence on nation building and colonialism, and finally, how individuals internalise infrastructure and increasingly become not only its user but regulator.

Beginning with public works, infrastructure in the nineteenth century carried the hope that it would facilitate world peace. Dr. van Laak shows how, instead, it transformed to promote consumerism's individual freedoms and our notions of work, leisure, and fulfilment. Lifelines of Our Society reveals how today's infrastructure is both a source and a reflection of concentrated power and economic growth, which takes the form of cities under permanent construction. Symbols of power, Dr. van Laak describes, come with vulnerability, and this book illustrates the dual nature of infrastructure's potential to hold nostalgia and inspire fear, to ease movement and govern ideas, and to bring independence to the nuclear family and control governments of the Global South.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Jason Puskar, "The Switch: An Off and On History of Digital Humans" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)

18 november 2023 | 85 min

Florentine Koppenborg, "Japan's Nuclear Disaster and the Politics of Safety Governance" (Cornell UP, 2023)

18 november 2023 | 43 min

Matthew F. Jordan, "Danger Sound Klaxon!: The Horn That Changed History" (U Virginia Press, 2023)

17 november 2023 | 55 min

Technology, AI, Political Economy, and Economic Development

14 november 2023 | 38 min

Can You Fall in Love with ChatGPT?

10 november 2023 | 59 min

A.I. and Practice with Stuart Baldwin

10 november 2023 | 133 min

Xaq Frohlich, "From Label to Table: Regulating Food in America in the Information Age" (U California Press, 2023)

10 november 2023 | 47 min

The Future of Crucial Materials: A Discussion with Ed Conway

9 november 2023 | 48 min

Jordan Frith, "Barcode" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

7 november 2023 | 77 min

Wendy H. Wong, "We, the Data: Human Rights in the Digital Age" (MIT Press, 2023)

2 november 2023 | 57 min

Tom Burbage et al., "F-35: The Inside Story of the Lightning II" (Skyhorse, 2023)

29 oktober 2023 | 72 min

William B. Eimicke et al., "Leveling the Learning Curve: Creating a More Inclusive and Connected University" (Columbia UP, 2023)

26 oktober 2023 | 50 min

Diana Kamin, "Picture-Work: How Libraries, Museums, and Stock Agencies Launched a New Image Economy" (MIT Press, 2023)

25 oktober 2023 | 55 min

How the image collection, organized and made available for public consumption, came to define a key feature of contemporary visual culture. The origins of today’s kaleidoscopic digital visual culture are many. In Picture-Work: How Libraries, Museums, and Stock Agencies Launched a New Image Economy (MIT Press, 2023), Diana Kamin traces the sharing of photographs to an image economy developed throughout the twentieth century by major institutions. Picture-Work examines how three of these institutions—the New York Public Library, the Museum of Modern Art, and the stock agency H. Armstrong Roberts Inc.—defined the public’s understanding of what the photographic image is, while building vast collections with universalizing ambitions.

Highlighting underexplored figures, such as the first rights and reproduction manager at MoMA Pearl Moeller and visionary NYPL librarian Romana Javitz, and underexplored professional practices, Diana Kamin demonstrates how bureaucratic work communicates ideas about images to the public. Kamin artfully shows how the public interfaces with these image collections through systems of classification and protocols of search and retrieval. These interactions, in turn, shape contemporary image culture, including concepts of authorship, art, property, and value, as well as logics of indexing, tagging, and hyperlinking. Together, these interactions have forged a concept of the image as alienable content, which has intensified with the advent of digital techniques for managing image collections. To survey the complicated process of digitization in the nineties and early aughts, Kamin also includes interviews with photographers, digital asset management system designers, librarians, and artists on their working practices.

Links Mentioned in the Episode

"Working With the Whitney's Replication Committee," Ben Lerner, The New Yorker, 2016
Invocation of Beauty: The Life and Photography of Soichi Sunami, Cascadia Art Museum, 2018
Soichi Sunami's manuscript autobiography, Museum of Modern Art Library
The New York Public Library: A Universe of Knowledge, Phyllis Dain (Scala Books and The New York Public Library, 2000)
What Photographs Do: The Making and Remaking of Museum Cultures, eds. Elizabeth Edwards and Ella Ravilious (UCL Press, 2022).

Hallel Yadin is an archivist and special projects manager at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

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The Future of Paying Attention: A Discussion with Carolyn Dicey Jennings

24 oktober 2023 | 41 min

Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer" (Vintage, 2006)

21 oktober 2023 | 71 min

Stephen Robert Miller, "Over the Seawall: Tsunamis, Cyclones, Drought, and the Delusion of Controlling Nature" (Island Press, 2023)

20 oktober 2023 | 38 min

In March 2011, people in a coastal Japanese city stood atop a seawall watching the approach of the tsunami that would kill them. They believed—naively—that the huge concrete barrier would save them. Instead they perished, betrayed by the very thing built to protect them. Erratic weather, blistering drought, rising seas, and ecosystem collapse now affect every inch of the globe. Increasingly, we no longer look to stop climate change, choosing instead to adapt to it.

Never have so many undertaken such a widespread, hurried attempt to remake the world. Predictably, our hubris has led to unintended—and sometimes disastrous—consequences. Academics call it maladaptation; in simple terms, it’s about solutions that backfire. Over the Seawall: Tsunamis, Cyclones, Drought, and the Delusion of Controlling Nature (Island Press, 2023) by Stephen Robert Miller tells us the stories behind these unintended consequences and about the fixes that can do more harm than good. From seawalls in coastal Japan, to the reengineered waters in the Ganges River Delta, to the artificial ribbon of water supporting both farms and urban centres in parched Arizona, Miller traces the histories of engineering marvels that were once deemed too smart and too big to fail. In each he takes us into the land and culture, seeking out locals and experts to better understand how complicated, grandiose schemes led instead to failure, and to find answers to the technologic holes we’ve dug ourselves into.

Over the Seawall urges us to take a hard look at the fortifications we build and how they’ve fared in the past. It embraces humanity’s penchant for problem-solving, but argues that if we are to adapt successfully to climate change, we must recognize that working with nature is not surrender but the only way to assure a secure future.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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AI, Post-Truth, and Cultural Transformation

16 oktober 2023 | 42 min

Smith Mehta, "The New Screen Ecology in India: Digital Transformation of Media" (British Film Institute, 2023)

15 oktober 2023 | 63 min

Txt

13 oktober 2023 | 20 min

Twenty Years After “The New Economy”: A Conversation with Doug Henwood

2 oktober 2023 | 69 min

Michael D. Smith, "The Abundant University: Remaking Higher Education for a Digital World" (MIT Press, 2023)

29 september 2023 | 61 min

For too long, our system of higher education has been defined by scarcity: scarcity in enrollment, scarcity in instruction, and scarcity in credentials. In addition to failing students professionally, this system has exacerbated social injustice and socioeconomic stratification across the globe. In The Abundant University, Michael D. Smith argues that the only way to create a financially and morally sustainable higher education system is by embracing digital technologies for enrolling, instructing, and credentialing students—the same technologies that we have seen create abundance in access to resources in industry after industry.

The Abundant University: Remaking Higher Education for a Digital World (MIT Press, 2023) explains how we got our current system, why it’s such an expensive, inefficient mess, and how a system based on exclusivity cannot foster inclusivity. Smith challenges the resistance to digital technologies that we have already seen among numerous institutions, citing the examples of faculty resistance toward digital learning platforms. While acknowledging the understandable self-preservation instinct of our current system of residential education, Smith makes a case for how technology can engender greater educational opportunity and create changes that will benefit students, employers, and society as a whole.

Smith, the J. Erik Johnson Chaired Professor of Information Technology and Marketing at Carnegie Mellon University, argues that American higher education is subject to market forces just like any other industry. Forbes says, “With a straightforward, conversational style, Smith succeeds in portraying the current problems bearing down on higher education and offering a set of bold solutions for a future where he envisions a college education becoming ‘more open, flexible, inclusive, and lower-priced.’ The Abundant University is a provocative book that should be read by higher ed insiders as well as those in the general public who care about expanding the reach and the impact of higher education.”

John Emrich has worked for decades in corporate finance, investment management, and corporate strategy. He has a podcast about the investment advisory industry called Kick the Dogma.

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Kashmir Hill, "Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It" (Random House, 2023)

28 september 2023 | 38 min

New York Times tech reporter Kashmir Hill was skeptical when she got a tip about a mysterious app called Clearview AI that claimed it could, with 99 percent accuracy, identify anyone based on just one snapshot of their face. The app could supposedly scan a face and, in just seconds, surface every detail of a person’s online life: their name, social media profiles, friends and family members, home address, and photos that they might not have even known existed. If it was everything it claimed to be, it would be the ultimate surveillance tool, and it would open the door to everything from stalking to totalitarian state control. Could it be true?

In this riveting account, Hill tracks the improbable rise of Clearview AI, helmed by Hoan Ton-That, an Australian computer engineer, and Richard Schwartz, a former Rudy Giuliani advisor, and its astounding collection of billions of faces from the internet. The company was boosted by a cast of controversial characters, including conservative provocateur Charles C. Johnson and billionaire Donald Trump backer Peter Thiel—who all seemed eager to release this society-altering technology on the public. Google and Facebook decided that a tool to identify strangers was too radical to release, but Clearview forged ahead, sharing the app with private investors, pitching it to businesses, and offering it to thousands of law enforcement agencies around the world.

Facial recognition technology has been quietly growing more powerful for decades. This technology has already been used in wrongful arrests in the United States. Unregulated, it could expand the reach of policing, as it has in China and Russia, to a terrifying, dystopian level.

Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It (Random House, 2023) is a gripping true story about the rise of a technological superpower and an urgent warning that, in the absence of vigilance and government regulation, Clearview AI is one of many new technologies that challenge what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once called “the right to be let alone.”

Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago. Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Jake’s work has been published in top venues such as ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

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Aditi Surie and Ursula Huws, "Platformization and Informality: Pathways of Change, Alteration, and Transformation" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023)

27 september 2023 | 66 min

Karen Weingarten, "Pregnancy Test" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

27 september 2023 | 40 min

Lee Mcguigan, "Selling the American People: Advertising, Optimization, and the Origins of Adtech" (MIT Press, 2023)

26 september 2023 | 59 min

Forty Years of Technology Studies

18 september 2023 | 117 min

Avery Dame-Griff, "The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet" (NYU Press, 2023)

17 september 2023 | 53 min

Catherine Coveney et al., "Technosleep: Frontiers, Fictions, Futures" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)

14 september 2023 | 33 min

Technosleep: Frontiers, Fictions, Futures (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) draws on a variety of substantive examples from science, technology, medicine, literature, and popular culture to highlight how a new technoscientifically mediated and modified phase and form of technosleep is now in the making – in the global north at least; and to discuss the consequences for our relationships to sleep, the values we accord sleep and the very nature and normativities of sleep itself.

The authors discuss how technosleep, at its simplest denotes the ‘coming together’ or ‘entanglements’ of sleep and technology and sensitizes us to various shifts in sleep–technology relations through culture, time and place. In doing so, it pays close attention to the salience and significance of these trends and transformations to date in everyday/night life, their implications for sleep inequalities and the related issues of sleep and social justice they suggest.

Katie Coveney, Ph.D. is a medical sociologist with expertise in social and ethical aspects of medicine and health care. She has particular research interests in the sociology of sleep, medical technology, and disability. Katie is the School of Social Sciences and Humanities Ethics Lead and Criminology, Sociology and Social Policy Lead Admissions officer.

Katie has been a senior lecturer in Sociology at Loughborough since 2018. She was co-convener of the British Sociological Association Medical Sociology Group (2019 – 2021). Before this she worked as a research fellow in the Centre for Reproduction Research at De Montfort University (2017-8), the Centre for Global Health Policy at the University of Sussex (2014-7), the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick (2010-2014) and the School of Nursing, Midwifery and Physiotherapy at the University of Nottingham (2009 -2010).

Eric L. Hsu, Ph.D. is a Lecturer in Sociology at the Justice & Society Academic Unit at the University of South Australia, where he also serves as a Research Platform Leader at the UniSA Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence. With Dr Louis Everuss, Dr Hsu hosts and produces the Sociology of Everything podcast. This podcast aims to stimulate interest in sociological ideas by offering a sideways and engaging look at the wonders of sociology. More information can be found on his website: www.ericlhsu.com.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is about the construction of identity and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at emotional labor performed by employees and passengers at airports. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected].

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A Better Way to Buy Books

12 september 2023 | 33 min

Race and Electrical Infrastructure in the Jim Crow South

11 september 2023 | 53 min

Marc Bonners, "Open World Structures: Architecture, Urban and Natural landscape in the Computer Game" (Büchner-Verlag, 2023)

7 september 2023 | 47 min

What role do algorithms play in the construction of images and the representation of the world and weather in computer games? How does the design of rooms, levels and topographies influence the decisions and behavior of the players? Is Brutalism the first genuine architectural style of computer games? What is the importance of landscape gardens and national parks in structuring game worlds? How is nature represented in times of climate change?

Particularly in the last 20 years, digital game worlds are adapting features of the physical real world more meticulously than ever before. Through elaborate production processes and complex visualization strategies, the adaptation to the rest of our everyday world is always created in dependence on game mechanics and worldliness. As can be seen at the latest in the example of open-world games, the adoption of certain worldviews and visual traditions leads to ideological implications that go far beyond the narrative conventions transferred from other media formats that have been the focus of research so far.

With his theory of architecture as a medial hinge, Marc Bonner reveals that digital game worlds exhibit media-specific properties that were previously out of reach and awaited exploration. By interweaving concepts from media studies, game studies, philosophy, architectural theory, human geography, landscape theory, and art history, among others, Bonner develops a transdisciplinary theoretical model and, using the analytical methods developed from it, makes it possible for the first time to understand and name the complex structure of today's computer games - from indie games to AAA open worlds.

Open World Structures (Offene-Welt-Strukturen (Büchner-Verlag, 2023)) makes the architectonics of digital game worlds comprehensively accessible.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design at the IU International University of Applied Science.

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Kenneth J. Saltman, "The Alienation of Fact: Digital Educational Privatization, AI, and the False Promise of Bodies and Numbers" (MIT Press, 2022)

6 september 2023 | 39 min

Today, conspiracy theories run rampant, attacks on facts have become commonplace, and systemic inequities are on the rise as individual and collective agency unravels. The Alienation of Fact: Digital Educational Privatization, AI, and the False Promise of Bodies and Numbers (MIT Press, 2022) explains the educational, technological, and ideological preconditions for these contemporary crises of truth and agency and explores the contradictions and competing visions for the future of education that lie at the center of the problem.

Schools are increasingly reimagined as businesses, and high-stakes standardized testing and curricula, for-profit charter schools, and the rise of educational AI put capital and technology at the center of education. Yet even as our society demands measure, data, and facts, politicians and news outlets regularly make unfounded assertions. How should we make sense of the contradictions between the demand for radical data-driven empiricism and the flight from evidence, argument, or theoretical justification?

In this critical investigation of the new digital directions of educational privatization—AI education, adaptive learning technology, biometrics, the quantification of play and social emotional learning—and the politics of the body, Saltman shows how the false certainty of bodies and numbers replaces deliberative and thoughtful agency in a time of increasing precarity. A distinctive contribution to scholarship on public school privatization and educational technology, politics, policy, pedagogy, and theory, The Alienation of Fact is a spirited call for democratic education that values creating a society of “thinking people” over capitalistic gains.

This book is available open access here.

Joao Souto-Maior is a postdoc at the New York University’s Institute of Human Development and Social Change.

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Stephen Ramsay, "On the Digital Humanities: Essays and Provocations" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)

6 september 2023 | 53 min

Stephen Ramsey's On the Digital Humanities: Essays and Provocations (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) is a witty and incisive exploration of the philosophical conundrums that animate the digital humanities. Since its inception, the digital humanities has been repeatedly attacked as a threat to the humanities: warnings from literary and cultural theorists of technology overtaking English departments and the mechanization of teaching have peppered popular media.

Stephen Ramsay’s On the Digital Humanities, a collection of essays spanning the personal to the polemic, is a spirited defense of the field of digital humanities. A founding figure in what was once known as “humanities computing,” Ramsay has a well-known and contentious relationship with what is now called the digital humanities (DH). Here Ramsay collects and updates his most influential and notorious essays and speeches from the past fifteen years, considering DH from an array of practical and theoretical perspectives.

The essays pursue a broad variety of themes, including the nature of data and its place in more conventional notions of text and interpretation, the relationship between the constraints of computation and the more open-ended nature of the humanities, the positioning of practical skills and infrastructures in both research and pedagogical contexts, the status of DH as a program for political and social action, and personal reflections on the author’s journey into the field as both a theorist and a technologist. These wide-ranging essays all center around one idea: that DH not forsake its connection to the humanities. While “digital humanities” may sound like an entirely new form of engagement with the artifacts of human culture, Ramsay argues that the field well reveals what is most essential to humanistic inquiry.

Hallel Yadin is an archivist and special projects manager at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

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Ari Ezra Waldman, "Industry Unbound: The Inside Story of Privacy, Data, and Corporate Power" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

2 september 2023 | 35 min

Bonnie Gordon, "Voice Machines: The Castrato, the Cat Piano, and Other Strange Sounds" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

31 augusti 2023 | 57 min

Donna J. Drucker, "Fertility Technology" (MIT Press, 2023)

29 augusti 2023 | 30 min

Gary Smith, "Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science" (Oxford UP, 2023)

27 augusti 2023 | 35 min

Artificial Intelligence, ChatGPT, and the Future of Academic Publishing

22 augusti 2023 | 39 min

Roma Agrawal, "Nuts and Bolts: Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World (in a Big Way)" (Norton, 2023)

19 augusti 2023 | 44 min

Academic Publishers Grapple with Advances in AI

19 augusti 2023 | 45 min

Codename Revolution: The Nintendo Wii Platform

18 augusti 2023 | 21 min

The Digital Mind: How Science Is Redefining Humanity

17 augusti 2023 | 17 min

Jieun Kiaer, "Emoji Speak: Communication and Behaviours on Social Media" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

16 augusti 2023 | 40 min

Scott Skinner-Thompson, "Privacy at the Margins" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

16 augusti 2023 | 22 min

The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga

16 augusti 2023 | 18 min

Long ago, in 1985, personal computers came in two general categories: the friendly, childish game machine used for fun (exemplified by Atari and Commodore products); and the boring, beige adult box used for business (exemplified by products from IBM). The game machines became fascinating technical and artistic platforms that were of limited real-world utility. The IBM products were all utility, with little emphasis on aesthetics and no emphasis on fun. Into this bifurcated computing environment came the Commodore Amiga 1000. This personal computer featured a palette of 4,096 colors, unprecedented animation capabilities, four-channel stereo sound, the capacity to run multiple applications simultaneously, a graphical user interface, and powerful processing potential. It was, Jimmy Maher writes in The Future Was Here, the world's first true multimedia personal computer.

Maher argues that the Amiga's capacity to store and display color photographs, manipulate video (giving amateurs access to professional tools), and use recordings of real-world sound were the seeds of the digital media future: digital cameras, Photoshop, MP3 players, and even YouTube, Flickr, and the blogosphere. He examines different facets of the platform--from Deluxe Paint to AmigaOS to Cinemaware--in each chapter, creating a portrait of the platform and the communities of practice that surrounded it. Of course, Maher acknowledges, the Amiga was not perfect: the DOS component of the operating systems was clunky and ill-matched, for example, and crashes often accompanied multitasking attempts. And Commodore went bankrupt in 1994. But for a few years, the Amiga's technical qualities were harnessed by engineers, programmers, artists, and others to push back boundaries and transform the culture of computing.

Jimmy Maher is an independent scholar and writer living in Norway.

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Networked: The New Social Operating System

15 augusti 2023 | 17 min

Hello Avatar: Rise of the Networked Generation

14 augusti 2023 | 18 min

Satsuki Takahashi, "Fukushima Futures: Survival Stories in a Repeatedly Ruined Seascape" (U Washington Press, 2023)

12 augusti 2023 | 53 min

The Future of Underground/Sea Cables: A Discussion with Henry Farrell

12 augusti 2023 | 51 min

Chris Wiggins and Matthew L Jones, "How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms" (Norton, 2023)

10 augusti 2023 | 43 min

From facial recognition―capable of checking people into flights or identifying undocumented residents―to automated decision systems that inform who gets loans and who receives bail, each of us moves through a world determined by data-empowered algorithms. But these technologies didn’t just appear: they are part of a history that goes back centuries, from the census enshrined in the US Constitution to the birth of eugenics in Victorian Britain to the development of Google search.

In How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms (Norton, 2023), Chris Wiggins and Matthew L. Jones illuminate the ways in which data has long been used as a tool and a weapon in arguing for what is true, as well as a means of rearranging or defending power. They explore how data was created and curated, as well as how new mathematical and computational techniques developed to contend with that data serve to shape people, ideas, society, military operations, and economies. Although technology and mathematics are at its heart, the story of data ultimately concerns an unstable game among states, corporations, and people. How were new technical and scientific capabilities developed; who supported, advanced, or funded these capabilities or transitions; and how did they change who could do what, from what, and to whom?

Wiggins and Jones focus on these questions as they trace data’s historical arc, and look to the future. By understanding the trajectory of data―where it has been and where it might yet go―Wiggins and Jones argue that we can understand how to bend it to ends that we collectively choose, with intentionality and purpose.

Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago. Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Jake’s work has been published in top venues such as ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

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Idolatry and Idle Hands (with Jacob Howland)

10 augusti 2023 | 69 min

Cory Doctorow, "The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation" (Verso, 2023)

9 augusti 2023 | 42 min

Driving While Black: African Americans and the Automobile

7 augusti 2023 | 40 min

The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games

6 augusti 2023 | 16 min

We may think of video games as being "fun," but in The Art of Failure, Jesper Juul claims that this is almost entirely mistaken. When we play video games, our facial expressions are rarely those of happiness or bliss. Instead, we frown, grimace, and shout in frustration as we lose, or die, or fail to advance to the next level. Humans may have a fundamental desire to succeed and feel competent, but game players choose to engage in an activity in which they are nearly certain to fail and feel incompetent. So why do we play video games even though they make us unhappy? Juul examines this paradox.

In video games, as in tragic works of art, literature, theater, and cinema, it seems that we want to experience unpleasantness even if we also dislike it. Reader or audience reaction to tragedy is often explained as catharsis, as a purging of negative emotions. But, Juul points out, this doesn't seem to be the case for video game players. Games do not purge us of unpleasant emotions; they produce them in the first place. What, then, does failure in video game playing do?

Juul argues that failure in a game is unique in that when you fail in a game, you (not a character) are in some way inadequate. Yet games also motivate us to play more, in order to escape that inadequacy, and the feeling of escaping failure (often by improving skills) is a central enjoyment of games. Games, writes Juul, are the art of failure: the singular art form that sets us up for failure and allows us to experience it and experiment with it.

The Art of Failure is essential reading for anyone interested in video games, whether as entertainment, art, or education.

Jesper Juul is Assistant Professor at the New York University Game Center. He is the author of Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds and A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players, both published by the MIT Press.

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The Future of Space Travel: A Discussion with Douglas C. Ligor

5 augusti 2023 | 41 min

Robot Futures

4 augusti 2023 | 15 min

Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet

3 augusti 2023 | 21 min

Moving Innovation: A History of Computer Animation

2 augusti 2023 | 18 min

Kathryn Cramer Brownell, "24/7 Politics: Cable Television and the Fragmenting of America from Watergate to Fox News" (Princeton UP, 2023)

1 augusti 2023 | 32 min

Betty Adamou, "Games and Gamification in Market Research: Increasing Consumer Engagement in Research for Business Success" (Kogan Page, 2018)

31 juli 2023 | 54 min

Games are the most engaging medium of all time: they harness storytelling and heuristics, drive emotion and push the evolution of technology in a way that no other platform has or can. It's no surprise, then, that games and gamification are revolutionizing the market research industry, offering opportunities to reinvigorate the notoriously sluggish engagement levels seen in traditional surveying methods. This not only improves data quality, but offers untapped insights unattainable through traditional methods. Games and Gamification in Market Research: Increasing Consumer Engagement in Research for Business Success (Kogan Page, 2018) shows readers how to design ResearchGames and Gamified Surveys that will intrinsically engage participants and how best to use these methodologies to become, and stay, commercially competitive.

In a world where brands and organizations are increasingly interested in the feelings and contexts that drive consumer choices, Games and Gamification in Market Research gives readers the skills to use the components in games to encourage play and observe consumer behaviours via simulations for predictive modelling. Written by Betty Adamou, the UK's leading research game designer and named as one of seven women shaping the future of market research, it explains the ways in which these methodologies will evolve with technologies such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence, and how it will shape research careers. Alongside a companion website, this book provides a fully immersive and fascinating overview of game-based research.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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Powering American Farms: A Conversation with Richard Hirsh

31 juli 2023 | 74 min

Alice E. Marwick, "The Private Is Political: Networked Privacy and Social Media" (Yale UP, 2023)

30 juli 2023 | 37 min

Rob Eschmann,, "When the Hood Comes Off: Racism and Resistance in the Digital Age" (U California Press, 2023)

29 juli 2023 | 73 min

Jeremy Black, "A History of Artillery" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)

28 juli 2023 | 37 min

Nina Lager Vestberg, "Picture Research: The Work of Intermediation from Pre-Photography to Post-Digitization" (MIT Press, 2023)

26 juli 2023 | 52 min

Juliet Schor, "After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back" (U California Press, 2021)

17 juli 2023 | 56 min

When the "sharing economy" launched a decade ago, proponents claimed that it would transform the experience of work--giving earners flexibility, autonomy, and a decent income. It was touted as a cure for social isolation and rampant ecological degradation. But this novel form of work soon sprouted a dark side: exploited Uber drivers, neighborhoods ruined by Airbnb, racial discrimination, and rising carbon emissions. Several of the most prominent platforms are now faced with existential crises as they prioritize growth over fairness and long-term viability.

Nevertheless, the basic model--a peer-to-peer structure augmented by digital tech--holds the potential to meet its original promises. Based on nearly a decade of pioneering research, After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back (U California Press, 2021) dives into what went wrong with this contemporary reimagining of labor. The book examines multiple types of data from thirteen cases to identify the unique features and potential of sharing platforms that prior research has failed to pinpoint. Juliet B. Schor presents a compelling argument that we can engineer a reboot: through regulatory reforms and cooperative platforms owned and controlled by users, an equitable and truly shared economy is still possible.

Juliet B. Schor is an American economist and Sociology Professor at Boston College. She has studied trends in working time, consumerism, the relationship between work and family, women's issues and economic inequality, and concerns about climate change in the environment. She is a New York Times bestselling author and the Chair of the Board of Directors of the Better Future Project.

Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly.

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Lin Zhang, "The Labor of Reinvention: Entrepreneurship in the Chinese Digital Economy" (Columbia UP, 2023)

17 juli 2023 | 61 min

Hello, world! This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series.

In this episode, our host Jing Wang discusses the book The Labor of Reinvention: Entrepreneurship in the New Chinese Digital Economy (Columbia UP, 2023) by Lin Zhang.

You’ll hear about:

A history of the book and Zhang’s entry into the fieldwork through family stories;
How to understand entrepreneurialism as a dominant ideology in the global neoliberal labor economy and China’s positionality in the world;
Why and how the book is organized based on three types of spaces – rural, urban, and transnational – across China and beyond;
The similarities and differences between the elite and the grassroot entrepreneurs in Beijing;
The e-commerce entrepreneurship as “platformized family production” in rural China and the roles played by government and large tech companies like Alibaba play in shaping the new rural production model;
The limit and possibility of reinvention through “shanzhai” (copycat) e-commerce production;
The gendered inequalities of entrepreneurial labor in rural and transnational spaces;
What is “daigou” (personal shopping agents) in transnational e-commerce and the structural challenges entrepreneurs – especially women – face across national borders and digital platforms;
What conversations in global studies of media and communication this book engages with.

About the book

From start-up founders in the Chinese equivalent of Silicon Valley to rural villages experiencing an e-commerce boom to middle-class women reselling luxury goods, the rise of internet-based entrepreneurship has affected every part of China. For many, reinventing oneself as an entrepreneur has appeared to be an appealing way to adapt to a changing economy and society. Yet in practice, digital entrepreneurship has also reinforced traditional Chinese ideas about state power, labor, gender, and identity. Lin Zhang explores how the everyday labor of entrepreneurial reinvention is remaking China amid changing geopolitical currents. She tells the stories of people from diverse class, gender, and age backgrounds across rural, urban, and transnational settings in rich detail, providing a multifaceted and ground-level view of the twenty-first-century Chinese economy. You can find more about the book here by the Columbia University Press.

Author: Lin Zhang is an associate professor of communication and media studies at the University of New Hampshire.

Host: Jing Wang is Senior Research Manager at the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC), Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, with an affiliation at the Center of the Study of Contemporary China (CSCC).

Editor & Producer: Jing Wang

Our podcast is part of the multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the very best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues.

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Jenna Grant, "Fixing the Image: Ultrasound and the Visuality of Care in Phnom Penh" (U Washington Press, 2022)

15 juli 2023 | 45 min

Randall Patnode, "The Synchronized Society: Time and Control From Broadcasting to the Internet" (Rutgers UP, 2023)

12 juli 2023 | 52 min

Palo Alto: A Conversation with Malcolm Harris

10 juli 2023 | 92 min

The War on Learning: Gaining Ground in the Digital University

30 juni 2023 | 16 min

Behind the lectern stands the professor, deploying course management systems, online quizzes, wireless clickers, PowerPoint slides, podcasts, and plagiarism-detection software. In the seats are the students, armed with smartphones, laptops, tablets, music players, and social networking. Although these two forces seem poised to do battle with each other, they are really both taking part in a war on learning itself. In The War on Learning, Elizabeth Losh examines current efforts to “reform” higher education by applying technological solutions to problems in teaching and learning. She finds that many of these initiatives fail because they treat education as a product rather than a process. Highly touted schemes—video games for the classroom, for example, or the distribution of iPads—let students down because they promote consumption rather than intellectual development.

Losh analyzes recent trends in postsecondary education and the rhetoric around them, often drawing on first-person accounts. In an effort to identify educational technologies that might actually work, she looks at strategies including MOOCs (massive open online courses), the gamification of subject matter, remix pedagogy, video lectures (from Randy Pausch to “the Baked Professor”), and educational virtual worlds. Finally, Losh outlines six basic principles of digital learning and describes several successful university-based initiatives. Her book will be essential reading for campus decision makers—and for anyone who cares about education and technology.

Elizabeth Losh directs the Culture, Art, and Technology Program at Sixth College at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes (MIT Press) and the coauthor of Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Writing.

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The Marketplace of Attention: How Audiences Take Shape in a Digital Age

29 juni 2023 | 19 min

Feature films, television shows, homemade videos, tweets, blogs, and breaking news: digital media offer an always-accessible, apparently inexhaustible supply of entertainment and information. Although choices seems endless, public attention is not. How do digital media find the audiences they need in an era of infinite choice? In The Marketplace of Attention, James Webster explains how audiences take shape in the digital age.

Webster describes the factors that create audiences, including the preferences and habits of media users, the role of social networks, the resources and strategies of media providers, and the growing impact of media measures—from ratings to user recommendations. He incorporates these factors into one comprehensive framework: the marketplace of attention. In doing so, he shows that the marketplace works in ways that belie our greatest hopes and fears about digital media.

Some observers claim that digital media empower a new participatory culture; others fear that digital media encourage users to retreat to isolated enclaves. Webster shows that public attention is at once diverse and concentrated—that users move across a variety of outlets, producing high levels of audience overlap. So although audiences are fragmented in ways that would astonish midcentury broadcasting executives, Webster argues that this doesn't signal polarization. He questions whether our preferences are immune from media influence, and he describes how our encounters with media might change our tastes. In the digital era's marketplace of attention, Webster claims, we typically encounter ideas that cut across our predispositions. In the process, we will remake the marketplace of ideas and reshape the twenty-first century public sphere.

James G. Webster is Professor in the School of Communication at Northwestern University.

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Helle Porsdam, "Science as a Cultural Human Right" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)

28 juni 2023 | 45 min

The human right to science, outlined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and repeated in the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, recognizes everyone's right to "share in scientific advancement and its benefits" and to "enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications." This right also requires state parties to develop and disseminate science, to respect the freedom of scientific research, and to recognize the benefits of international contacts and co-operation in the scientific field.

The right to science has never been more important. Even before the COVID-19 health crisis, it was evident that people around the world increasingly rely on science and technology in almost every sphere of their lives from the development of medicines and the treatment of diseases, to transport, agriculture, and the facilitation of global communication. At the same time, however, the value of science has been under attack, with some raising alarm at the emergence of "post-truth" societies. "Dual use" and unintended, because often unforeseen, consequences of emerging technologies are also perceived to be a serious risk.

The important role played by science and technology and the potential for dual use makes it imperative to evaluate scientific research and its products not only on their scientific but also on their human rights merits. In Science as a Cultural Human Right (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022), Helle Porsdam argues robustly for the role of the right to science now and in the future. The book analyzes the legal stature of this right, the potential consequences of not establishing it as fundamental, and its connection to global cultural rights. It offers the basis for defending the free and responsible practice of science and ensuring that its benefits are spread globally.

Melek Firat Altay is a neuroscientist, biologist and musician. Her research focuses on deciphering the molecular and cellular mechanisms of neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders.

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Metadata

26 juni 2023 | 19 min

When "metadata" became breaking news, appearing in stories about surveillance by the National Security Agency, many members of the public encountered this once-obscure term from information science for the first time. Should people be reassured that the NSA was "only" collecting metadata about phone calls--information about the caller, the recipient, the time, the duration, the location--and not recordings of the conversations themselves? Or does phone call metadata reveal more than it seems? In Metadata, Jeffrey Pomerantz offers an accessible and concise introduction to metadata.

In the era of ubiquitous computing, metadata has become infrastructural, like the electrical grid or the highway system. We interact with it or generate it every day. It is not, Pomerantz tell us, just "data about data." It is a means by which the complexity of an object is represented in a simpler form. For example, the title, the author, and the cover art are metadata about a book. When metadata does its job well, it fades into the background; everyone (except perhaps the NSA) takes it for granted.

Pomerantz explains what metadata is, and why it exists. He distinguishes among different types of metadata--descriptive, administrative, structural, preservation, and use--and examines different users and uses of each type. He discusses the technologies that make modern metadata possible, and he speculates about metadata's future. By the end of the book, readers will see metadata everywhere. Because, Pomerantz warns us, it's metadata's world, and we are just living in it.

Jeffrey Pomerantz is an information scientist. He was most recently Associate Professor in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he developed and taught the MOOC “Metadata: Organizing and Discovering Information,” and a Visiting Professor at the University of Washington.

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The Singer Sewing Machine in Spain and Mexico: Multinational Business, Gender, and Technologies

26 juni 2023 | 81 min

Make it New: A History of Silicon Valley Design

25 juni 2023 | 21 min

California's Silicon Valley is home to the greatest concentration of designers in the world: corporate design offices at flagship technology companies and volunteers at nonprofit NGOs; global design consultancies and boutique studios; research laboratories and academic design programs. Together they form the interconnected network that is Silicon Valley. Apple products are famously “Designed in California,” but, as Barry Katz shows in this first-ever, extensively illustrated history, the role of design in Silicon Valley began decades before Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak dreamed up Apple in a garage.

In Make it New, Katz tells how design helped transform Silicon Valley into the most powerful engine of innovation in the world. From Hewlett-Packard and Ampex in the 1950s to Google and Facebook today, design has provided the bridge between research and development, art and engineering, technical performance and human behavior. Katz traces the origins of all of the leading consultancies—including IDEO, frog, and Lunar—and shows the process by which some of the world's most influential companies came to place design at the center of their business strategies. At the same time, universities, foundations, and even governments have learned to apply “design thinking” to their missions. Drawing on unprecedented access to a vast array of primary sources and interviews with nearly every influential design leader—including Douglas Engelbart, Steve Jobs, and Don Norman—Katz reveals design to be the missing link in Silicon Valley's ecosystem of innovation.

Barry M. Katz is Professor of Industrial and Interaction Design at California College of the Arts, Consulting Professor in the Design Group at Stanford University, and Fellow at IDEO, Inc. He is coauthor of Change by Design, with Tim Brown, and NONOBJECT, with Branko Lukić (MIT Press).

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Brian Cummings, "Bibliophobia: The End and the Beginning of the Book" (Oxford UP, 2022)

25 juni 2023 | 88 min

Bibliophobia: The End and the Beginning of the Book (Oxford UP, 2022) is a book about material books, how they are cared for, and how they are damaged, throughout the 5000-year history of writing from Sumeria to the smartphone. Its starting point is the contemporary idea of 'the death of the book' implied by the replacement of physical books by digital media, with accompanying twenty-first-century experiences of paranoia and literary apocalypse. It traces a twin fear of omniscience and oblivion back to the origins of writing in ancient Babylon and Egypt, then forwards to the age of Google. It uncovers bibliophobia from the first Chinese emperor to Nazi Germany, alongside parallel stories of bibliomania and bibliolatry in world religions and literatures. Books imply cognitive content embodied in physical form, in which the body cooperates with the brain. At its heart this relationship of body and mind, or letter and spirit, always retains a mystery. Religions are founded on holy books, which are also sites of transgression, so that writing is simultaneously sacred and profane. In secular societies these complex feelings are transferred to concepts of ideology and toleration. In the ambiguous future of the internet, digital immateriality threatens human equilibrium once again.

Bibliophobia is a global history, covering six continents and seven religions, describing written examples from each of the last thirty centuries (and several earlier). It discusses topics such as the origins of different kinds of human script; the development of textual media such as scrolls, codices, printed books, and artificial intelligence; the collection and destruction of libraries; the use of books as holy relics, talismans, or shrines; and the place of literacy in the history of slavery, heresy, blasphemy, censorship, and persecution. It proposes a theory of writing, how it relates to speech, images, and information, or to concepts of mimesis, personhood, and politics. Originating as the Clarendon Lectures in the Faculty of English at the University of Oxford, the methods of Bibliophobia range across book history; comparative religion; philosophy from Plato to Hegel and Freud; and a range of global literature from ancient to contemporary. Richly illustrated with textual forms, material objects, and art works, its inspiration is the power that books always (and continue to) have in the emotional, spiritual, bodily, and imaginative lives of readers.

Brian Cummings is Anniversary Professor at the University of York. Before arriving at York, he was Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and then Professor of English at the University of Sussex.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

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Reading the Comments: Likers, Haters, and Manipulators at the Bottom of the Web

24 juni 2023 | 18 min

Works of Game: On the Aesthetics of Games and Art

23 juni 2023 | 15 min

Games and art have intersected at least since the early twentieth century, as can be seen in the Surrealists' use of Exquisite Corpse and other games, Duchamp's obsession with Chess, and Fluxus event scores and boxes--to name just a few examples. Over the past fifteen years, the synthesis of art and games has clouded for both artists and gamemakers. Contemporary art has drawn on the tool set of videogames, but has not considered them a cultural form with its own conceptual, formal, and experiential affordances. For their part, game developers and players focus on the innate properties of games and the experiences they provide, giving little attention to what it means to create and evaluate fine art. In Works of Game, John Sharp bridges this gap, offering a formal aesthetics of games that encompasses the commonalities and the differences between games and art.

Sharp describes three communities of practice and offers case studies for each. "Game Art," which includes such artists as Julian Oliver, Cory Arcangel, and JODI (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans) treats videogames as a form of popular culture from which can be borrowed subject matter, tools, and processes. "Artgames," created by gamemakers including Jason Rohrer, Brenda Romero, and Jonathan Blow, explore territory usually occupied by poetry, painting, literature, or film. Finally, "Artists' Games"--with artists including Blast Theory, Mary Flanagan, and the collaboration of Nathalie Pozzi and Eric Zimmerman--represents a more synthetic conception of games as an artistic medium. The work of these gamemakers, Sharp suggests, shows that it is possible to create game-based artworks that satisfy the aesthetic and critical values of both the contemporary art and game communities.

John Sharp is Associate Professor of Games and Learning at Parsons the New School for Design and a member of the game design collective Local No. 12.

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Lars de Wildt, "The Pop Theology of Videogames: Producing and Playing with Religion" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)

22 juni 2023 | 36 min

This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture

22 juni 2023 | 20 min

Internet trolls live to upset as many people as possible, using all the technical and psychological tools at their disposal. They gleefully whip the media into a frenzy over a fake teen drug crisis; they post offensive messages on Facebook memorial pages, traumatizing grief-stricken friends and family; they use unabashedly racist language and images. They take pleasure in ruining a complete stranger's day and find amusement in their victim's anguish. In short, trolling is the obstacle to a kinder, gentler Internet. To quote a famous Internet meme, trolling is why we can't have nice things online. Or at least that's what we have been led to believe. In This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, Whitney Phillips argues that trolling, widely condemned as obscene and deviant, actually fits comfortably within the contemporary media landscape. Trolling may be obscene, but, Phillips argues, it isn't all that deviant. Trolls' actions are born of and fueled by culturally sanctioned impulses--which are just as damaging as the trolls' most disruptive behaviors.

Phillips describes, for example, the relationship between trolling and sensationalist corporate media--pointing out that for trolls, exploitation is a leisure activity; for media, it's a business strategy. She shows how trolls, "the grimacing poster children for a socially networked world," align with social media. And she documents how trolls, in addition to parroting media tropes, also offer a grotesque pantomime of dominant cultural tropes, including gendered notions of dominance and success and an ideology of entitlement. We don't just have a trolling problem, Phillips argues; we have a culture problem. This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things isn't only about trolls; it's about a culture in which trolls thrive.

Whitney Phillips is a Lecturer in the Department of Communications at Humboldt State University.

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Richard Duncan, "The Money Revolution: How to Finance the Next American Century" (John Wiley & Sons, 2022)

21 juni 2023 | 55 min

The Future of Venture Capitalists: A Discussion with Sebastian Mallaby

20 juni 2023 | 39 min

David A. Banks, "The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America" (U California Press, 2023)

19 juni 2023 | 49 min

The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America (U California Press, 2023) is the first book to explore how our cities gentrify by becoming social media influencers—and why it works.

Cities, like the people that live in them, are subject to the attention economy. In The City Authentic, author David A. Banks shows how cities are transforming themselves to appeal to modern desires for authentic urban living through the attention-grabbing tactics of social media influencers and reality-TV stars.

Blending insightful analysis with pop culture, this engaging study of New York State’s Capital Region is an accessible glimpse into the social phenomena that influence contemporary cities. The rising economic fortunes of cities in the Rust Belt, Banks argues, are due in part to the markers of its previous decay—which translate into signs of urban authenticity on the internet. The City Authentic unpacks the odd connection between digital media and derelict buildings, the consequences of how we think about industry and place, and the political processes that have enabled a new paradigm in urban planning. Mixing urban sociology with media and cultural studies, Banks offers a lively account of how urban life and development are changing in the twenty-first century.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is on media representations of people and place. He is currently conducting research on the branding of cities. I am particularly interested in the similarities and differences in how travel and tourism agencies see a city as compared to how residents and visitors see the same city. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected].

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Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa, "The Celluloid Specimen: Moving Image Research into Animal Life" (U California Press, 2023)

18 juni 2023 | 80 min

Brett Brehm, "Kaleidophonic Modernity: Transatlantic Sound, Technology, and Literature" (Fordham UP, 2023)

16 juni 2023 | 66 min

What stories remain hidden behind one of the most significant inventions of the nineteenth century? Kaleidophonic Modernity: Transatlantic Sound, Technology, and Literature (Fordham University Press, 2023) reexamines the development of mechanical sound recording technology by charting the orbits of writers, scientists, and artists in France and the United States. Working between comparative literature, the history of science, and urban studies, Dr. Brett Brehm builds a bridge between visual culture and sound studies.

Kaleidophonic Modernity places the poet and inventor Charles Cros and his lover, the celebrated concert pianist and salonnière Nina de Villard at the heart of modern aesthetic and scientific vanguards. Cros's scientific endeavors ranged from color photography, to telecommunications, to mechanical sound reproducibility. In his poetry the Surrealists found an ancestor and inspiration. His literary and scientific works prove startling and relevant to predicaments of technological media in his own time and ours. For nearly twenty years Nina de Villard presided over a supremely daring intellectual salon. There, she welcomed manifold literary, artistic, and musical luminaries into a veritable crucible of the artistic avant-garde and precursor to the famous Chat Noir cabaret. Together, these two forgotten but pivotal figures, Cros and Villard, help reframe our thinking on Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Walt Whitman, icons of urban modernity who can now be seen and heard in a kaleidophonic light, one that offers a compelling new perspective on modern mediascapes.

In elaborating this transatlantic phenomenon, Kaleidophonic Modernity illuminates the prehistory of the phonograph as it intersects with the aesthetics of sound reproducibility, Franco-American literary exchange, Poe’s aesthetic and intellectual legacy, the sounds of modern cities and technologies, and the genealogy of audiovisual experimentation found in such movements as Dada, Futurism, and the sound art of today.

Annie deSaussure, holds a Ph.D. in French from Yale University and is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies in the Department of Languages and Literary Studies at Lafayette College. Her work focuses on minority regional languages, literatures, and cultures in contemporary France, radio, sound studies, and podcasting. Her most recent article on feminist discourses of motherhood in French podcasting is forthcoming in the 2023 special issue, “Podcasting Disruptive Voices,” of CFC Intersections.

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Doctor Ex Machina: AI in Medicine and its Pitfalls

13 juni 2023 | 73 min

Red Team Blues and the Social Dimensions of Technology

12 juni 2023 | 70 min

Zhouxiang Lu, "A History of Competitive Gaming" (Routledge, 2022)

12 juni 2023 | 33 min

Payal Arora et al., "Feminist Futures of Work: Reimagining Labour in the Digital Economy" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)

12 juni 2023 | 39 min

Brendan Keogh, "The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist: Why We Should Think Beyond Commercial Game Production" (MIT Press, 2023)

11 juni 2023 | 60 min

The videogame industry, we're invariably told, is a multibillion-dollar, high-tech business conducted by large corporations in certain North American, European, and East Asian cities. But most videogames today, in fact, are made by small clusters of people working on shoestring budgets, relying on existing, freely available software platforms, and hoping, often in vain, to rise to stardom—in short, people working like artists.

Aiming squarely at this disconnect between perception and reality, Brendan Keogh's book The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist: Why We Should Think Beyond Commercial Game Production (MIT Press, 2023) presents a much more accurate and nuanced picture of how the vast majority of videogame-makers work—a picture that reveals the diverse and precarious communities, identities, and approaches that make videogame production a significant cultural practice.

Drawing on insights provided by over 400 game developers across Australia, North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia, Keogh develops a new framework for understanding videogame production as a cultural field in all its complexity. Part-time hobbyists, aspirational students, client-facing contractors, struggling independents, artist collectives, and tightly knit local scenes—all have a place within this model. But proponents of non-commercial game making don't exist in isolation; Keogh shows how they and their commercial counterparts are deeply interconnected and codependent in the field of videogame production.

A cultural intervention, The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist challenges core assumptions about videogame production—ideas about creativity, professionalism, labor, diversity, education, globalization, and community. Its in-depth, complex portrayal suggests new ways of seeing, and engaging in, the videogame industry that really does exist.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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Drone: Remote Control Warfare

7 juni 2023 | 18 min

Amy Brady, "Ice: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks--a Cool History of a Hot Commodity" (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2023)

6 juni 2023 | 34 min

Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell, "The Smartness Mandate" (MIT Press, 2023)

4 juni 2023 | 55 min

Jen Ross, "Digital Futures for Learning: Speculative Methods and Pedagogies" (Routledge, 2022)

4 juni 2023 | 38 min

Elizabeth Reddy, "¡Alerta!: Engineering on Shaky Ground" (MIT Press, 2023)

2 juni 2023 | 52 min

The Sistema de Alerta Sísmica Mexicano is the world’s oldest public earthquake early warning system. Given the unpredictability of earthquakes, the technology was designed to give the people of Mexico City more than a minute to prepare before the next big quake hits. How does this kind of environmental monitoring technology get built in the first place? How does its life-saving promise align with reality? And who shapes modern risk mitigation?

In ¡Alerta!: Engineering on Shaky Ground (MIT Press, 2023), Elizabeth Reddy surveys this innovation to shed light on what it means to imagine a world where sirens could sound out an ¡alerta sísmica! at any moment—and what it would be like to live in such a world.

Proponents of earthquake early warnings have long held that the technology can save lives and limit economic losses. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival data, Reddy conducts a thorough, qualitative analysis of these claims and considers the requirements and uses of the alert system. She embeds her study in a rich narrative of the engineers who designed the system in conjunction with contingent political and environmental conditions. The result demonstrates how addressing earthquake dangers is no small task: it means trying to change relationships between the environment, society, and technology. Doing so, she critiques universalist and techno-centric approaches to hazard risk mitigation and celebrates the potential of contextually appropriate and broadly supported efforts.

¡Alerta! takes readers on a vivid journey into the world of Mexican earthquake risk mitigation, with critical insights for anthropologists and science and technology studies scholars, as well as specialists in the geosciences, engineering, and emergency management.

Mentioned in this episode:

Donna Riley’s interview with Lee Vinsel on the NBN Peoples & Things series.

Elizabeth Reddy is Assistant Professor of Engineering, Design, & Society at the Colorado School of Mines, with a joint appointment in Geophysics.

Liliana Gil is an anthropologist. She is incoming Assistant Professor of Comparative Studies (STS) at the Ohio State University.

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Orly Lobel, "The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future" (PublicAffairs, 2022)

31 maj 2023 | 56 min

Lawrence H. White, "Better Money: Gold, Fiat, or Bitcoin?" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

28 maj 2023 | 44 min

Kenneth Mondschein, "On Time: A History of Western Timekeeping" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020)

26 maj 2023 | 49 min

Amanda Parrish Morgan, "Stroller" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

24 maj 2023 | 49 min

Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, "We Have Always Been Cyborgs: Digital Data, Gene Technologies, and an Ethics of Transhumanism" (Bristol UP, 2023)

21 maj 2023 | 44 min

Meredith Broussard, "More than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech" (MIT Press, 2023)

18 maj 2023 | 41 min

America & Democracy Ep. 4: George Zarkadakis on Digital Liberalism

17 maj 2023 | 34 min

Anne Kaun and Fredrik Stiernstedt, "Prison Media: Incarceration and the Infrastructures of Work and Technology" (MIT Press, 2023)

13 maj 2023 | 26 min

Karen Schrier, "We the Gamers: How Games Teach Ethics and Civics" (Oxford UP, 2021)

11 maj 2023 | 34 min

Ethics and civics have always mattered, but perhaps they matter now more than ever before. Recently, with the rise of online teaching and movements like #PlayApartTogether, games have become increasingly acknowledged as platforms for civic deliberation and value sharing. We the Gamers: How Games Teach Ethics and Civics (Oxford UP, 2021) explores these possibilities by examining how we connect, communicate, analyze, and discover when we play games. Combining research-based perspectives and current examples, this volume shows how games can be used in ethics, civics, and social studies education to inspire learning, critical thinking, and civic change.

We the Gamers introduces and explores various educational frameworks through a range of games and interactive experiences including board and card games, online games, virtual reality and augmented reality games, and digital games like Minecraft,Executive Command, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, Fortnite, When Rivers Were Trails, Politicraft, Quandary, and Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The book systematically evaluates the types of skills, concepts, and knowledge needed for civic and ethical engagement, and details how games can foster these skills in classrooms, remote learning environments, and other educational settings. We the Gamers also explores the obstacles to learning with games and how to overcome those obstacles by encouraging equity and inclusion, care and compassion, and fairness and justice.

Featuring helpful tips and case studies, We the Gamers shows teachers the strengths and limitations of games in helping students connect with civics and ethics, and imagines how we might repair and remake our world through gaming, together.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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Barbara Penner et al., "Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects" (Reaktion Books, 2021)

8 maj 2023 | 62 min

Jason C. Cash and Craig T. Olsen, "The World of Final Fantasy VII: Essays on the Game and Its Legacy" (McFarland, 2023)

7 maj 2023 | 42 min

Sarrah Kassem, "Work and Alienation in the Platform Economy: Amazon and the Power of Organization" (Bristol UP, 2023)

6 maj 2023 | 47 min

Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, "Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity" (PublicAffairs, 2023)

5 maj 2023 | 45 min

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity (PublicAffairs, 2023) is a groundbreaking work by bestselling authors Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, in which they challenge conventional wisdom about the role of technology in driving prosperity. The authors argue that technology is not a neutral force working in the public interest but is shaped by the interests and beliefs of the powerful. Those who control technology are the ones who benefit from it, leaving the rest of society with the illusion of progress.

The authors provide a historical account of how technological choices have shaped the course of history, from the appropriation of the economic surplus of the Middle Ages by an ecclesiastical elite to the making of vast fortunes from digital technologies today, while millions of people are pushed towards poverty. The authors emphasize that technological progress can either serve the narrow interests of an elite or become the foundation for widespread prosperity.

The book presents a manifesto for building a better society by using the tremendous digital advances of the last half century to create useful and empowering tools, rather than marginalizing most people through automated work and political passivity. The authors argue that to achieve the true potential of innovation, we need to ensure that technology is creating new jobs and opportunities for everyone. The book offers a vision to reimagine and reshape the path of technology, ensuring that it leads to true shared prosperity.

Power and Progress offers a fresh perspective on how technology shapes our lives and highlights the need for a more democratic approach to technological progress. The book provides a compelling argument that the path of technology is not predetermined but can be brought under control to ensure that it benefits everyone, not just a few powerful individuals or corporations. The authors provide an insightful analysis of the power dynamics that underlie technological progress, and their manifesto for a better society is a call to action for policymakers, business leaders, and individuals alike.

Javier Mejia is an economist at Stanford University who specializes in the intersection of social networks and economic history. His research interests also include entrepreneurship and political economy, with a particular focus on Latin America and the Middle East. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. Mejia has previously been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University-Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is also a frequent contributor to various news outlets, currently serving as an op-ed columnist for Forbes Magazine.

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Collaborative Society

3 maj 2023 | 30 min

Michael W. Hankins, "Flying Camelot: The F-15, the F-16, and the Weaponization of Fighter Pilot Nostalgia" (Cornell UP, 2021)

2 maj 2023 | 61 min

Spatial Computing

1 maj 2023 | 33 min

Jonathan E. Abel, "The New Real: Media and Mimesis in Japan from Stereographs to Emoji" (U of Minnesota Press, 2023)

28 april 2023 | 66 min

Computer Graphics

27 april 2023 | 16 min

In this episode of High Theory, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan talks with us about computer graphics. Emerging from tools for sailing and warmaking, like sea charts and radar, modern computer graphics are technologies of mapping and managing risk. They seem intent on absorbing the human sensorium into the machine.

In the episode Bernard refers to computer graphics as “techniques of addressing,” a term he attributes to Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal. He also uses the term “operational images” which comes from the work of Harun Farocki, and talks about SAGE, the US Government’s Cold War era Semi-Automatic Ground Environment Air Defense System. Bernard references Paul Edward’s book A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2013). He also mentions the German scholar Christoph Borbach who has written on auditory computer interfaces, and American disability studies scholar Mara Mills, who has written on the Deaf history of computing. He was kind enough to give us an extensive bibliography on this topic, which is posted below.

Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan is a reader in the History and Theory of Digital Media at King’s College London. He has a brand new book out on the cybernetic history of French theory, called Code: From Information Theory to French Theory (Duke UP, 2023). Kim met him when he came to give a talk at the Stanford Humanities Center in January 2023. He wore denim and had a slightly manic affect. People came all the way from Berkeley to hear what he had to say, which is quite impressive in the Bay Area.

This week’s image is a radar loop of the December 16 2007 Eastern North America winter storm, found on Wikimedia Commons. The loop runs from Saturday Morning at 7 AM (Dec 15) to Sunday Night at 7 PM (Dec 16). The image is in the public domain because it was made by someone who works for the National Weather Service.

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Technologies of the Human Corpse

25 april 2023 | 32 min

In this episode we hear from John Troyer, author of Technologies of the Human Corpse and the Director of The Center for Death and Society at The University of Bath. We discuss the way technology is blurring the distinctions between life and death, the emergence of death studies from the 70s social and political milieu and how his own experiences of bereavement inform his research.

The relationship of the dead body with technology through history, from nineteenth-century embalming machines to the death-prevention technologies of today.

Death and the dead body have never been more alive in the public imagination—not least because of current debates over modern medical technology that is deployed, it seems, expressly to keep human bodies from dying, blurring the boundary between alive and dead. In this book, John Troyer examines the relationship of the dead body with technology, both material and conceptual: the physical machines, political concepts, and sovereign institutions that humans use to classify, organize, repurpose, and transform the human corpse. Doing so, he asks readers to think about death, dying, and dead bodies in radically different ways.

Troyer explains, for example, how technologies of the nineteenth century including embalming and photography, created our image of a dead body as quasi-atemporal, existing outside biological limits formerly enforced by decomposition. He describes the “Happy Death Movement” of the 1970s; the politics of HIV/AIDS corpse and the productive potential of the dead body; the provocations of the Body Worlds exhibits and their use of preserved dead bodies; the black market in human body parts; and the transformation of historic technologies of the human corpse into “death prevention technologies.” The consequences of total control over death and the dead body, Troyer argues, are not liberation but the abandonment of Homo sapiens as a concept and a species. In this unique work, Troyer forces us to consider the increasing overlap between politics, dying, and the dead body in both general and specifically personal terms.

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Adi Kuntsman and Liu Xin, "Digital Politics, Digital Histories, Digital Futures: New Approaches for Historicising, Politicising and Imagining the Digital" (Emerald, 2023)

21 april 2023 | 51 min

What is digital politics? What new creative and experimental tools can we use to study digital politics historically and analyse and create future imaginaries of digital politics? Adi Kuntsman and Liu Xin about their co-edited book Digital Politics, Digital Histories, Digital Futures: New Approaches for Historicising, Politicising and Imagining the Digital (2023, Emerald Publishing Limited).

In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, Adi Kuntsman and Liu Xin speak about how they managed to bring together contributions from junior and experienced scholars in a book that examines digital politics theoretically, methodologically, and ethically, offering interdisciplinary perspectives and innovative pedagogies.

The first part of the book presents research chapters that look at misinformation and reactionary online activism, digital imperialism and capitalism, future internet governance, digital memory, digital waste, and environmental imagination. The second part showcases several creative and experimental tools for studying digital politics historically, and for analysing and creating future imaginaries of digital politics.

Adi Kuntsman is Reader in Digital Politics at the Department of History, Politics and Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. Adi’s work lies at the intersection of cybercultures/digital and social media; anti-colonial and feminist scholarship; queer theory; and social research on war, nationalism and colonialism. Read more on the Digital Politics blog.

Liu Xin is a senior lecturer at the Center for Gender Studies, Karlstad University, Sweden. Her recent research projects are located at the intersection of feminist theory, environmental humanities, critical race studies, science and technology studies, social theory and digital media research. Find her on Twitter @LiuxinYB.

Joanne Kuai is a PhD Candidate at Karlstad University, Sweden, with a research project on Artificial Intelligence in Chinese Newsrooms. Her research interests centre around data and AI for media, computational journalism, and the social implications of automation and algorithms. Find her on LinkedIn or Twitter @JoanneKuai.

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Rachel Robison-Greene, "Edibility and in Vitro Meat: Ethical Considerations" (Lexington Books, 2022)

21 april 2023 | 50 min

Tiger C. Roholt, "Distracted from Meaning: A Philosophy of Smartphones" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

10 april 2023 | 60 min

Johnny Walker, "Rewind, Replay: Britain and the Video Boom, 1978-92" (Edinburgh UP, 2022)

7 april 2023 | 46 min

Nostalgia for the 1980s is in the air. From Stranger Things to the relaunch of 80s franchises like Top Gun, the American entertainment industry casts the period as an age of simpler things, clearer dichotomies, and less technology. Yet not all was simple. The 1980s were the heyday of the Cold War. They were the decade of rapid social change, of deregulation and selfish consumption, of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. They were also the decade when a new technology swept the world, setting the stage for our all-too-digital present.

A lot has been written about the rise of video in the United States, the format wars, the impact it had on the entertainment industry, on personal entertainment consumption habits, and new business models. But the rise of video was not a uniquely American phenomenon, nor was the American experience normative. In fact, wherever the new technology arrived, from the US, to the Middle East, to Eastern Europe, it reshaped social and business practices, as well as government responses to it, in ways that reflected the political, social, and economic arrangements of each space.

Johnny Walker’s Rewind, Replay: Britain and the Video Boom, 1972-1992 (Edinburgh UP, 2022) tells the story of Britain’s vide boom in the 1980s by focusing on the first video distributors who took chances on a wide range of films, from documentaries, to horror, to kids entertainment, in order to attract consumer interest. The new video shops that mushroomed across Britain turned video rental into a common practice among the public. Soon, despite a crushing recession, more and more industry players started to invest into what media at the time was dismissing as a mere ‘plaything.’ Rewind, Replay chronicles the idiosyncratic ways in which British distributors and store owners navigated various local political and economic pressures including piracy, the infamous video nasties moral panic and the government crackdown on the industry, as well as the corporate expansion of the industry which, by the end of the decade, eliminated independent distributors, and turned the pre-recorded videocassette from morally questionable enterprise into a staple of high street retail.

Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy is Teaching Professor of American Studies at Miami University of Ohio. Her book, Between Empire and Republic: America in the Colonial Canadian Imagination, came out in 2022. Twitter: @OanaGodyKenw. Oana’s webpage.

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Antero Garcia, "All through the Town: The School Bus as Educational Technology" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)

6 april 2023 | 49 min

Ben Shneiderman, "Human-Centered AI" (Oxford UP, 2022)

4 april 2023 | 22 min

Control Through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management

3 april 2023 | 99 min

Rhea Myers, "Proof of Work: Blockchain Provocations 2011-2021" (MIT Press, 2023)

3 april 2023 | 79 min

NFT, BTC, DAO, ETH, WAGMI, HODL. It would have been hard to avoid these acronyms only a year ago. The hype around cryptocurrencies and blockchain art was almost as annoying as the glee with which crypto sceptics welcomed the sudden onset of the crypto winter.

But for all the popularity of Bored Apes and Ponzi scheme stories, there seems to have been little serious engagement with the philosophical, political, and aesthetic implications of the blockchain. The academy appears to have dismissed the crypto world out of hand, citing its financial unviability and the deeply ‘problematic’ philosophical foundations of its technology.

Rhea Myers is a crypto artist, writer, and hacker who searches for faces in cryptographic hashes, follows a day in the life of a young shibe in the year 2032, and patiently explains why all art should be destructively uploaded to the blockchain. Her engagement in the technical history and debates in blockchain technology is complemented by a broader sense of the crypto movement and the artistic and political sensibilities that accompanied its ascendancy.

Remodelling the tropes of conceptual art and net art to explore what blockchain technology reveals about our concepts of value, culture and currency, Myers’s work has become required viewing for anyone interested in the future of art, consensus, law, and collectivity.

Rhea Myers speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about art’s role in mapping and shaping the emergent properties of blockchain technologies, the crypto-libertarian, anarchy-capitalist nexus, and the enduring legacy of the conceptual art movement.

Proof of Work brings together annotated presentations of Myers’s blockchain artworks with essays, reviews, and fictions—a sustained critical encounter between the cultures and histories of the artworld and crypto-utopianism, technically accomplished but always generously demystifying and often mischievous.

PostScript Viruses, 1993
Portrait of V.I. Lenin with Cap, in the Style of Jackson Pollock III by Art & Language
Futherfield Gallery, London
Is Art, 2014/15, Art Is, 2014/17
Pierre's essay on the speculative deficit and NFT art
Certificate of Inauthenticity, 2020

Rhea Myers is an artist, writer, and blockchain developer and activist. Now an acknowledged pioneer whose work has graced the auction room at Sotheby’s, Myers focussed on blockchain tech in 2011, becoming one of the first artists to enter into creative, speculative, and conceptual engagement with ‘the new internet’.

Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional.

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Karen Frost-Arnold, "Who Should We Be Online?: A Social Epistemology for the Internet" (Oxford UP, 2023)

1 april 2023 | 66 min

Elizabeth M. Renieris, "Beyond Data: Reclaiming Human Rights at the Dawn of the Metaverse" (MIT Press, 2023)

31 mars 2023 | 22 min

Why laws focused on data cannot effectively protect people—and how an approach centered on human rights offers the best hope for preserving human dignity and autonomy in a cyberphysical world.

Ever-pervasive technology poses a clear and present danger to human dignity and autonomy, as many have pointed out. And yet, for the past fifty years, we have been so busy protecting data that we have failed to protect people. In Beyond Data: Reclaiming Human Rights at the Dawn of the Metaverse (MIT Press, 2023), Elizabeth Renieris argues that laws focused on data protection, data privacy, data security and data ownership have unintentionally failed to protect core human values, including privacy. And, as our collective obsession with data has grown, we have, to our peril, lost sight of what’s truly at stake in relation to technological development—our dignity and autonomy as people.

Far from being inevitable, our fixation on data has been codified through decades of flawed policy. Renieris provides a comprehensive history of how both laws and corporate policies enacted in the name of data privacy have been fundamentally incapable of protecting humans. Her research identifies the inherent deficiency of making data a rallying point in itself—data is not an objective truth, and what’s more, its “entirely contextual and dynamic” status makes it an unstable foundation for organizing. In proposing a human rights–based framework that would center human dignity and autonomy rather than technological abstractions, Renieris delivers a clear-eyed and radically imaginative vision of the future.

At once a thorough application of legal theory to technology and a rousing call to action, Beyond Data boldly reaffirms the value of human dignity and autonomy amid widespread disregard by private enterprise at the dawn of the metaverse.

Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago. Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Jake’s work has been published in top venues such as ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

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Jeffrey G. Snodgrass, "The Avatar Faculty: Ecstatic Transformations in Religion and Video Games" (U California Press, 2023)

28 mars 2023 | 56 min

Woodrow Hartzog, "Privacy's Blueprint: The Battle to Control the Design of New Technologies" (Harvard UP, 2018)

28 mars 2023 | 27 min

Every day, Internet users interact with technologies designed to undermine their privacy. Social media apps, surveillance technologies, and the Internet of Things are all built in ways that make it hard to guard personal information. And the law says this is okay because it is up to users to protect themselves―even when the odds are deliberately stacked against them.

In Privacy's Blueprint: The Battle to Control the Design of New Technologies (Harvard UP, 2018), Woodrow Hartzog pushes back against this state of affairs, arguing that the law should require software and hardware makers to respect privacy in the design of their products. Current legal doctrine treats technology as though it were value-neutral: only the user decides whether it functions for good or ill. But this is not so. As Hartzog explains, popular digital tools are designed to expose people and manipulate users into disclosing personal information.

Against the often self-serving optimism of Silicon Valley and the inertia of tech evangelism, Hartzog contends that privacy gains will come from better rules for products, not users. The current model of regulating use fosters exploitation. Privacy’s Blueprint aims to correct this by developing the theoretical underpinnings of a new kind of privacy law responsive to the way people actually perceive and use digital technologies. The law can demand encryption. It can prohibit malicious interfaces that deceive users and leave them vulnerable. It can require safeguards against abuses of biometric surveillance. It can, in short, make the technology itself worthy of our trust.

Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago. Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Jake’s work has been published in top venues such as ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

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Wake Smith, "Pandora's Toolbox: The Hopes and Hazards of Climate Intervention" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

28 mars 2023 | 29 min

Winning & Losing in the Emerging EV Wars/The Aftershocks of the EV Transition Could Be Ugly

27 mars 2023 | 97 min

Felix Zimmermann, "Virtual Realities: Atmospheric Experience of the Past in Digital Games (Büchner-Verlag, 2023)

26 mars 2023 | 36 min

Left to Our Own Devices: A Conversation with Julia Ticona

20 mars 2023 | 80 min

The Challenge of AI to Publishing: A Discussion with Sally Wilson

18 mars 2023 | 46 min

Bleddyn E. Bowen, "Original Sin: Power, Technology and War in Outer Space" (Oxford UP, 2022)

17 mars 2023 | 47 min

Computer Music and Human Computer Interaction

15 mars 2023 | 20 min

Illuminations Episode 3: Divine Technology

14 mars 2023 | 17 min

James W. Cortada, "Birth of Modern Facts: How the Information Revolution Transformed Academic Research, Governments and Businesses" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)

12 mars 2023 | 52 min

Jessa Lingel, "The Gentrification of the Internet: How to Reclaim Our Digital Freedom" (U California Press, 2023)

12 mars 2023 | 30 min

Miguel Sicart, "Playing Software: Homo Ludens in Computational Culture" (MIT Press, 2023)

8 mars 2023 | 62 min

The Chinese Typewriter: A History

4 mars 2023 | 26 min

In this episode Chris Gondek speaks with author Tom Mullaney on the invention of the Chinese typewriter, and how the characters originally utilized are still the ones available on modern keyboards.

Chinese writing is character based, the one major world script that is neither alphabetic nor syllabic. Through the years, the Chinese written language encountered presumed alphabetic universalism in the form of Morse Code, Braille, stenography, Linotype, punch cards, word processing, and other systems developed with the Latin alphabet in mind. This book is about those encounters--in particular thousands of Chinese characters versus the typewriter and its QWERTY keyboard. Thomas Mullaney describes a fascinating series of experiments, prototypes, failures, and successes in the century-long quest for a workable Chinese typewriter.

The earliest Chinese typewriters, Mullaney tells us, were figments of popular imagination, sensational accounts of twelve-foot keyboards with 5,000 keys. One of the first Chinese typewriters actually constructed was invented by a Christian missionary, who organized characters by common usage (but promoted the less-common characters for "Jesus" to the common usage level). Later came typewriters manufactured for use in Chinese offices, and typewriting schools that turned out trained "typewriter girls" and "typewriter boys." Still later was the "Double Pigeon" typewriter produced by the Shanghai Calculator and Typewriter Factory, the typewriter of choice under Mao. Clerks and secretaries in this era experimented with alternative ways of organizing characters on their tray beds, inventing an input method that was the first instance of "predictive text."

Today, after more than a century of resistance against the alphabetic, not only have Chinese characters prevailed, they form the linguistic substrate of the vibrant world of Chinese information technology. The Chinese Typewriter, not just an "object history" but grappling with broad questions of technological change and global communication, shows how this happened.

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Marcus Rediker, "The Slave Ship: A Human History" (Penguin, 2008)

3 mars 2023 | 55 min

Isabel Huacuja Alonso, "Radio for the Millions: Hindi-Urdu Broadcasting Across Borders" (Columbia UP, 2022)

2 mars 2023 | 40 min

From news about World War II to the broadcasting of music from popular movies, radio played a crucial role in an increasingly divided South Asia for more than half a century. Radio for the Millions: Hindi-Urdu Broadcasting Across Borders (Columbia University Press, 2023) by Isabel Huacuja Alonso examines the history of Hindi-Urdu radio during the height of its popularity from the 1930s to the 1980s, showing how it created transnational communities of listeners.

Huacuja Alonso argues that despite British, Indian, and Pakistani politicians’ efforts to usurp the medium for state purposes, radio largely escaped their grasp. She demonstrates that the medium enabled listeners and broadcasters to resist the cultural, linguistic, and political agendas of the British colonial administration and the subsequent independent Indian and Pakistani governments. Rather than being merely a tool of nation building in South Asia, radio created affective links that defied state agendas, policies, and borders. It forged an enduring transnational soundscape, even after the 1947 Partition had made a united India a political impossibility.

The book traces how people engaged with radio across news, music, and drama broadcasts, arguing for a more expansive definition of what it means to listen. She develops the concept of “radio resonance” to understand how radio relied on circuits of oral communication such as rumor and gossip and to account for the affective bonds this “talk” created. By analyzing Hindi film-song radio programs, she demonstrates how radio spurred new ways of listening to cinema. Drawing on a rich collection of sources, including newly recovered recordings, listeners’ letters to radio stations, original interviews with broadcasters, and archival documents from across three continents, Radio for the Millions rethinks assumptions about how the medium connects with audiences.

Isabel Huacuja Alonso is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asia, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University. She is a historian of sound media and modern South Asia.

Shatrunjay Mall is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He works on transnational Asian history, and his dissertation explores intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities that emerged between Indian anti-colonialism and imperial Japan in the twentieth century.

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Nuclear Ghosts: Ryo Morimoto (EF, JP)

2 mars 2023 | 44 min

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing

2 mars 2023 | 23 min

In this episode Chris Gondek interviews Ed Finn, author of the new book What Algorithms Want. Tune in for an interesting discussion on algorithm disconnect revolving around things humans regularly use, like Siri. And listen in for a definition of the phrase "culture machines".

We depend on--we believe in--algorithms to help us get a ride, choose which book to buy, execute a mathematical proof. It's as if we think of code as a magic spell, an incantation to reveal what we need to know and even what we want. Humans have always believed that certain invocations--the marriage vow, the shaman's curse--do not merely describe the world but make it. Computation casts a cultural shadow that is shaped by this long tradition of magical thinking. In this book, Ed Finn considers how the algorithm--in practical terms, "a method for solving a problem"--has its roots not only in mathematical logic but also in cybernetics, philosophy, and magical thinking.

Finn argues that the algorithm deploys concepts from the idealized space of computation in a messy reality, with unpredictable and sometimes fascinating results. Drawing on sources that range from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash to Diderot's Encyclopédie, from Adam Smith to the Star Trek computer, Finn explores the gap between theoretical ideas and pragmatic instructions. He examines the development of intelligent assistants like Siri, the rise of algorithmic aesthetics at Netflix, Ian Bogost's satiric Facebook game Cow Clicker, and the revolutionary economics of Bitcoin. He describes Google's goal of anticipating our questions, Uber's cartoon maps and black box accounting, and what Facebook tells us about programmable value, among other things.

If we want to understand the gap between abstraction and messy reality, Finn argues, we need to build a model of "algorithmic reading" and scholarship that attends to process, spearheading a new experimental humanities.

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Celeste Vaughan Curington et al., "The Dating Divide: Race and Desire in the Era of Online Romance" (U California Press, 2021)

1 mars 2023 | 50 min

Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt: A Conversation with Andrew Simon

27 februari 2023 | 68 min

Social Media Influencers and Digital Media Regulation in Vietnam

23 februari 2023 | 25 min

In 2021, a famous Vietnamese businesswoman hosted a three-hour long Facebook livestream, in which she named and shamed celebrities for their controversial public behaviours. This formed part of a regular pattern of personal attacks, in which she weaponised livestreaming to denounce media and charity organisations in front of huge online audiences. This case marked a turning point in Vietnam, forcing the government to contend with growing political activity in the online environment, and prompting new digital media regulation.

In this episode, Dr Jonathon Hutchinson joins Dr Natali Pearson to discuss this case and other examples of online socio-political activism in Vietnam, reflecting on the tension between social media influencing and digital media regulation, and highlighting its potential positive and negative effects.

About Jonathon Hutchinson:

Dr Jonathon Hutchinson is a Senior Lecturer in Online Communication and Media at the University of Sydney. He is a Chief Investigator on the Australian Research Council Discovery Project, Online News and Media Pluralism, and is also a Chief Investigator on the eSafety Commission Research project, Emerging online safety issue: co-creating social media education with young people. His research explores cultural production, public service media, cultural intermediation, everyday social media, automated media, and algorithms in media. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Policy & Internet journal and the Treasurer for the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association. Dr Hutchinson is on the Board of Directors for the Wholistic World Innovation Trophy as part of the Diplomatic World Institute and is an active and regular contributor to the media. He is an award-winning author with articles in a number of national and international Scimago Q1 journals, government submissions, and his book, Cultural Intermediaries: Audience Participation and Media Organisations (2017), is published through Palgrave Macmillan.

For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac.

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Seeing Truth in Photographs

23 februari 2023 | 43 min

Jacob Birken, "Video Games: Digital Image Cultures" (Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 2022)

19 februari 2023 | 94 min

Alan Meades, "Arcade Britannia: A Social History of the British Amusement Arcade" (MIT Press, 2022)

18 februari 2023 | 55 min

The story of the British amusement arcade from the 1800s to the present.

Amusement arcades are an important part of British culture, yet discussions of them tend to be based on American models. Alan Meades, who spent his childhood happily playing in British seaside arcades, presents the history of the arcade from its origins in traveling fairs of the 1800s to the present. Drawing on firsthand accounts of industry members and archival sources, including rare photographs and trade publications, he tells the story of the first arcades, the people who made the machines, the rise of video games, and the legislative and economic challenges spurred by public fears of moral decline.

Arcade Britannia: A Social History of the British Amusement Arcade (MIT Press, 2022) highlights the differences between British and North American arcades, especially in terms of the complex relationship between gambling and amusements. He also underlines Britain’s role in introducing coin-operated technologies into Europe, as well as the industry’s close links to America and, especially, Japan. He shows how the British arcade is a product of centuries of public play, gambling, entrepreneurship, and mechanization. Examining the arcade’s history through technological, social, cultural, biographic, and legislative perspectives, he describes a pendulum shift between control and liberalization, as well as the continued efforts of concerned moralists to limit and regulate public play.

Finally, he recounts the impact on the industry of legislative challenges that included vicious taxation, questions of whether copyright law applied to video-game code, and the peculiar moment when every arcade game in Britain was considered a cinema.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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Fabio Duarte and Ricardo Alvarez, "Urban Play: Make-Believe, Technology, and Space" (MIT Press, 2021)

18 februari 2023 | 71 min

Why technology is most transformative when it is playful, and innovative spatial design happens only when designers are both tinkerers and dreamers.

In Urban Play: Make-Believe, Technology, and Space (MIT Press, 2021), Fábio Duarte and Ricardo Álvarez argue that the merely functional aspects of technology may undermine its transformative power. Technology is powerful not when it becomes optimally functional, but while it is still playful and open to experimentation. It is through play—in the sense of acting for one's own enjoyment rather than to achieve a goal—that we explore new territories, create new devices and languages, and transform ourselves. Only then can innovative spatial design create resonant spaces that go beyond functionalism to evoke an emotional response in those who use them.

The authors show how creativity emerges in moments of instability, when a new technology overthrows an established one, or when internal factors change a technology until it becomes a different technology. Exploring the role of fantasy in design, they examine Disney World and its outsize influence on design and on forms of social interaction beyond the entertainment world. They also consider Las Vegas and Dubai, desert cities that combine technology with fantasies of pleasure and wealth. Video games and interactive media, they show, infuse the design process with interactivity and participatory dynamics, leaving spaces open to variations depending on the users' behavior. Throughout, they pinpoint the critical moments when technology plays a key role in reshaping how we design and experience spaces.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington, 2022). His general area of study is on media representations of people and place at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on his next book where he conducted research on an annual canoeing and kayaking event that takes place on the Upper Mississippi River. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected].

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Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud, "Pegasus: How a Spy in Your Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity, and Democracy" (Henry Holt, 2023)

18 februari 2023 | 31 min

99* Gael McGill Visualizes Intracellular Data (JP, GT)

16 februari 2023 | 38 min

What’s actually going on in a cell–or on the spiky outside of an invading virus? Gael McGill, Director of Molecular Visualization at the Center for Molecular and Cellular Dynamics at Harvard Medical School is founder and CEO of Digizyme and has spent his career exploring and developing different modes for visualizing evidence.

For this scientific conversation taped back in 2021, Recall this Book host John is joined once again by Brandeis neuroscientist Gina Turrigiano (think ep 4 Madeline Miller; think ep 2 Addiction!).

You may want to check out Digizyme‘s images of the spike protein attaching the SARS-CoV2 virus to a hapless cell and fusing their membranes. Or click through to watch a gorgeous video Gael and his team have created.

Mentioned in the Episode:

Gael praised Galileo’s revolutionary images (drawings? diagrams?) of Jupiter’s moons:
Leonardo’s stunning anatomical drawings:
The DNA Double-Helix: We all knew that Watson and Crick‘s revelation came with this model: But it’s easy to forget this indispensable antecedent: the enigmatic yet foundational x-ray crystallography of Rosalind Franklin:
“All models are wrong; some are useful.”smiley statistician George Box
“A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 115
And what sort of deceptive picture did Wittgenstein have in mind? well, how about the 1904 “Plum-pudding model” of what the atom might look like? Wrong, and productive of all sorts of mistaken hypotheses.
Gina credited the beautiful drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal with inspiring and illuminating generations of neuroscientists.
John credits Science in the Marketplace, an edited collection reminding us that even in crowded lecture-halls, to display science may also mean doing science…..
Gael ended his historical tour by praising David Goodsell, cell-painter extraordinaire:
John also raved (as he is wont to do) about cave paintings as the first animation in the world (e.g. these horses from Peche-Merle).

Listen and Read Here:

47 Glimpsing COVID: Gael McGill on Data Visualization

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The Politics of Bicycling

16 februari 2023 | 91 min

Emily Hund, "The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media" (Princeton UP, 2023)

15 februari 2023 | 49 min

American Independent Inventors in an Era of Corporate R&D

13 februari 2023 | 59 min

Gun-Detecting AI, Infrastructure, and Bureaucracy

12 februari 2023 | 86 min

James Raven, "The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book" (Oxford UP, 2022)

11 februari 2023 | 66 min

In 14 original essays, The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book (Oxford UP, 2022) reveals the history of books in all their various forms, from the ancient world to the digital present. Leading international scholars offer an original and richly illustrated narrative that is global in scope.

The history of the book is the history of millions of written, printed, and illustrated texts, their manufacture, distribution, and reception. Here are different types of production, from clay tablets to scrolls, from inscribed codices to printed books, pamphlets, magazines, and newspapers, from written parchment to digital texts. The history of the book is a history of different methods of circulation and dissemination, all dependent on innovations in transport, from coastal and transoceanic shipping to roads, trains, planes and the internet. It is a history of different modes of reading and reception, from learned debate and individual study to public instruction and entertainment. It is a history of manufacture, craftsmanship, dissemination, reading and debate.

Yet the history of books is not simply a question of material form, nor indeed of the history of reading and reception. The larger question is of the effect of textual production, distribution and reception - of how books themselves made history. To this end, each chapter of this volume, succinctly bounded by period and geography, offers incisive and stimulating insights into the relationship between books and the story of their times.

James Raven is Professor of Modern History at the University of Essex and a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge. Formerly he was Reader in Social and Cultural History, University of Oxford, and Professorial Fellow of Mansfield College. He is the author, editor and co-editor of numerous books in early modern and modern British, European and colonial history, including Judging New Wealth (1992); The Practice and Representation of Reading (1996); The English Novel 1770-1829 (2000); Free Print and Non-Commercial Publishing (2000); London Booksellers and American Customers (2002); Lost Libraries (2004); The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade (2007); Books between Europe and the Americas (2011); Publishing Business (2014) and Bookscape: Geographies of Printing and Publishing in London before 1800 (2014).

Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found at https://fifteenminutefilm.podb... and on Twitter @15MinFilm.

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The Geopolitics of Microchips: China, the EU, and the US

10 februari 2023 | 24 min

The Techlash and Tech Crisis Communication

10 februari 2023 | 69 min

How a California Electricity Utility Caused Deadly Wildfires

8 februari 2023 | 66 min

Jeremiah McCall, "Gaming the Past: Using Video Games to Teach Secondary History" (Routledge, 2022)

7 februari 2023 | 51 min

The Promises and Perils of Hype in Science and Technology

5 februari 2023 | 73 min

Christiaan De Beukelaer, "Trade Winds: A Sailing Voyage to a Sustainable Future for Shipping" (Manchester UP, 2023)

5 februari 2023 | 49 min

The Internet, Inequality, and the “Digital Divide”

4 februari 2023 | 84 min

The Future of Nuclear Fusion: A Discussion with Sharon Ann Holgate

4 februari 2023 | 36 min

Computers, Information, and Decision-Making

3 februari 2023 | 65 min

Amy S. Bruckman, "Should You Believe Wikipedia?: Online Communities and the Construction of Knowledge" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

3 februari 2023 | 47 min

Nick Seaver, "Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

2 februari 2023 | 88 min

Inventing American Telecommunications

1 februari 2023 | 80 min

Angela Vanhaelen, "The Moving Statues of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam: Automata, Waxworks, Fountains, Labyrinths" (Penn State UP, 2022)

30 januari 2023 | 50 min

Public Thinking: Social Media and the New 'Public Intellectual'

30 januari 2023 | 30 min

Collaborations between Cold War Scientists and Artists

29 januari 2023 | 76 min

The Future of Computer Chips: A Discussion with Julian Kamasa

28 januari 2023 | 48 min

The History of Electricity in Mexico

27 januari 2023 | 73 min

The Archaeology of Innovation

26 januari 2023 | 74 min

Virtually Violent: Are Online Attacks "Violence?"

26 januari 2023 | 24 min

Ajay Agrawal et al., "Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence" (HBR Press, 2022)

24 januari 2023 | 52 min

Disruption resulting from the proliferation of AI is coming. The authors of the bestselling Prediction Machines describe what you can do to prepare. Banking and finance, pharmaceuticals, automotive, medical technology, retail. Artificial intelligence (AI) has made its way into many industries around the world. But the truth is, it has just begun its odyssey toward cheaper, better, and faster predictions to drive strategic business decisions--powering and accelerating business. When prediction is taken to the max, industries transform. The disruption that comes with such transformation is yet to be felt--but it is coming. How do businesses prepare?

In Prediction Machines, eminent economists Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb explained the simple yet game-changing economics of AI. Now, in Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence (HBR Press, 2022), they go further to reveal AI as a prediction technology directly impacting decision-making and to teach businesses how to identify disruptive opportunities and threats resulting from AI. Their exhaustive study of new developments in artificial intelligence and the past history of how technologies have disrupted industries highlights the striking phase we are now in: after witnessing the power of this new technology and before its widespread adoption--what they call "the Between Times." While there continue to be important opportunities for businesses, there are also threats of disruption. As prediction machines improve, old ways of doing things will be upended. Also, the process by which AI filters into the many systems involved in application is very uneven. That process will have winners and losers. How can businesses leverage, or protect, their positions? Filled with illuminating insights, rich examples, and practical advice, Power and Prediction is the must-read guide for any business leader or policy maker on how to make the coming AI disruptions work for you rather than against you.

Interviewee Avi Goldfarb is the Rotman Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare and a professor of marketing at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Avi is also Chief Data Scientist at the Creative Destruction Lab and the CDL Rapid Screening Consortium, a faculty affiliate at the Vector Institute and the Schwartz-Reisman Institute for Technology and Society, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Avi’s research focuses on the opportunities and challenges of the digital economy.

He has published academic articles in marketing, statistics, law, management, medicine, political science, refugee studies, physics, computing, and economics. Avi is a former Senior Editor at Marketing Science. His work on online advertising won the INFORMS Society of Marketing Science Long Term Impact Award. He testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on competition and privacy in digital advertising. His work has been referenced in White House reports, European Commission documents, the New York Times, the Economist, and elsewhere.

Peter Lorentzen is economics professor at the University of San Francisco. He heads USF's Applied Economics Master's program, which focuses on the digital economy. His research is mainly on China's political economy.

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Deafness “Cures” in History

22 januari 2023 | 62 min

The Thought of Ivan Illich

20 januari 2023 | 86 min

Spiritual Machines: Transhumanism and Religion

19 januari 2023 | 30 min

Jennifer Forestal, "Designing for Democracy: How to Build Community in Digital Environments" (Oxford UP, 2021)

19 januari 2023 | 40 min

Political Theorist Jennifer Forestal’s new book is a fascinating exploration of contemporary democracy and how it operates in different spaces. Forestal’s avenue into the question of democracy and the space in which it functions comes out of the idea of how spaces are designed and for what reasons. This idea of built environments—be they city centers in urban areas, software architecture, or the existence and width of sidewalks—contribute to how we, as individuals and community members, operate in those spaces. Forestal is paying particular attention to participatory democracy, where community members come together to solve problems collectively.

Designing for Democracy: How to Build Community in Digital Environments (Oxford UP, 2021)weaves together the concrete, the actual spaces where we can gather together or where we are pushed apart, and the theoretical, the way democracy, as a concept, draws on the will of the people to govern themselves. In examining democratic theory, Forestal integrates work from Aristotle, Alexis de Tocqueville, and John Dewey, all of whom provide frameworks for thinking about and understanding interactions between individuals and the effort to share responsibility to govern in common.

Forestal unpacks the many ways that built environments guide our choices and behavior—from how the layout of a grocery store pushes us towards certain kinds of purchases, to the design of sidewalks or the absence of sidewalks as determining our public engagement or disengagement—and how this is an often overlooked or obscured exertion of power, especially political power. The power of the built environment trains us in a variety of ways, and this is an area where changing the design of the space in which we exist can also change our behavior and can shift our perspectives. Democratic theory is predicated on individuals acting together, and the space in which we do this contributes to the success of these efforts, or their fragmentation. Social media spaces are very much like the physical built environment, and Forestal examines three different social media spaces, Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit, exploring how they are and are not hospitable spaces for democracy.

Designing for Democracy: How to Build Community in Digital Environments is an original analysis of how physical and virtual spaces provide individuals with barriers or openings to engagement, and how these spaces can shift our behavior and our priorities. Ultimately, democracy is an idea that must be translated by real people in real spaces and places, and how we all engage with one another is not just important, it is the basis for the implementation of this concept of self-government.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @gorenlj.

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BONUS EPISODE: New Books Network and Future Plans

19 januari 2023 | 13 min

Automating Finance

19 januari 2023 | 57 min

Shoddy: Recycled Textiles in History

18 januari 2023 | 56 min

South Korea, Technology, and Globalization

16 januari 2023 | 62 min

Infrastructure and Inequality

15 januari 2023 | 64 min

Bridget Whearty, "Digital Codicology: Medieval Books and Modern Labor" (Stanford UP, 2022)

14 januari 2023 | 50 min

The Politics of Digital Technology

14 januari 2023 | 75 min

Christopher Bartel, "Video Games, Violence, and the Ethics of Fantasy: Killing Time" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

14 januari 2023 | 46 min

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World

13 januari 2023 | 63 min

Harald Koberg, "Free Play: Digital Gaming and the Longing for Effectiveness" (Büchner-Verlag, 2021)

13 januari 2023 | 59 min

Jayita Sarkar, "Ploughshares and Swords: India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War" (Cornell UP, 2022)

12 januari 2023 | 39 min

Understanding Technology Bubbles

11 januari 2023 | 78 min

The History of Household Technology from Open Hearth to the Microwave

9 januari 2023 | 74 min

Albert Glinsky, "Switched On: Bob Moog and the Synthesizer Revolution" (Oxford UP, 2022)

7 januari 2023 | 71 min

Mirror Image: New Technologies and the Self

7 januari 2023 | 15 min

Robert M. Geraci, "Futures of Artificial Intelligence: Perspectives from India and the U.S." (Oxford UP, 2021)

5 januari 2023 | 45 min

Samantha Muka, "Oceans Under Glass: Tank Craft and the Sciences of the Sea" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

4 januari 2023 | 50 min

Lilie Chouliaraki and Myria Georgiou, "The Digital Border: Migration, Technology, Power" (NYU Press, 2022)

2 januari 2023 | 81 min

Hello, world! This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series.

In this episode, our host Juan Llamas-Rodriguez discusses the book The Digital Border: Migration, Technology, Power (2022) by Dr. Lilie Chouliaraki and Dr. Myria Georgiou.

You’ll hear about:

What The Digital Border is about, its importance, and its implication;
How the authors’ previous works helped build the foundation for writing this book collaboratively;
Why and how the authors chose to focus on specific forms of media such as social media and journalism;
A discussion of humanitarian securitization vis a vis entrepreneurial securitization;
How to understand the theoretical shift from the “crisis of migration” to the “crisis of responsibility”;
How do we contend the different temporalities of resistance as various actors produce or respond to border technologies and infrastructures;
As the displacement of people are intensifying, what frameworks and toolkits can be useful for us to rethink global migration against the “crisis of imaginary” (imaginary as a representational framework that people normatively think about certain issues);
What are the futures of globalization and its counter movements in Global North from the perspectives of migration and bordering;
What are the areas the authors wish to further explore in the future.

About the book

What is the role of digital technologies is shaping migration today? How do digital infrastructures, platforms, and institutions control the flow of people at the border? And how do they also control the public narratives of migration as a “crisis”? Finally, how do migrants themselves use these same platforms to speak back and make themselves heard in the face of hardship and hostility? Taking their case studies from the biggest migration event of the twenty-first century in the West, the 2015 European migration “crisis” and its aftermath up to 2020, Lilie Chouliaraki and Myria Georgiou offer a holistic account of the digital border as an expansive assemblage of technological infrastructures (from surveillance cameras to smartphones) and media imaginaries (stories, images, social media posts) to tell the story of migration as it unfolds in Europe’s outer islands as much as its most vibrant cities. You can find this book on the NYU Press website.

Authors:

Lilie Chouliaraki is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics, where she also serves as the department’s Doctoral Program Director.

Myria Georgiou is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics, where she also serves as Research Director.

Host: Juan Llamas-Rodriguez is an assistant professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, where he researches and teaches global media cultures, digital technologies, border studies, infrastructure studies, and Latin American media.

Editor & Producer: Jing Wang is Senior Research Manager at CARGC at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.

Our podcast is part of the multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the very best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues.

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Ethical AI

31 december 2022 | 23 min

Luke Munn, "Automation Is a Myth" (Stanford UP, 2022)

27 december 2022 | 67 min

Mariëlle Wijermars et al., "The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Russia Studies" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020)

24 december 2022 | 56 min

How has digitalisation changed Russian politics? How has Russia’s invasion of Ukraine changed Russia studies? What is special about Russia’s approach to algorithmic governance and internet control? Assistant Professor in Cyber-Security and Politics from Maastricht University, Mariëlle Wijermars, talks about her ongoing research on Russian politics, internet policy and platform governance.

In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, Mariëlle Wijermars also talks about The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Russia Studies. This open-access handbook was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2020 and was edited by Mariëlle together with Daria Gritsenko and Mikhail Kopotev.

This handbook presents a multidisciplinary and multifaceted perspective on how the ‘digital’ is simultaneously changing Russia and the research methods scholars use to study Russia. It provides a critical update on how Russian society, politics, economy, and culture are reconfigured in the context of ubiquitous connectivity and accounts for the political and societal responses to digitalization.

Dr. Mariëlle Wijermars is an Assistant Professor in Cyber-Security and Politics at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. She is currently a CORE Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, where she researches internet freedom and the human rights’ implications of internet policy and platform governance, in particular in authoritarian states.

You can connect with Mariëlle Wijermars on Twitter @Marielle_W_ and on Mastodon @[email protected].

Joanne Kuai is a PhD Candidate at Karlstad University, Sweden, with a research project on Artificial Intelligence in Chinese Newsrooms. Her research interests centre around data and AI for media, computational journalism, and the social implications of automation and algorithms. Find her on LinkedIn or on Twitter @JoanneKuai.

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John D. Wong, "Hong Kong Takes Flight: Commercial Aviation and the Making of a Global Hub, 1930s-1998" (Harvard UP, 2022)

22 december 2022 | 44 min

Geert Lovink, "Sad by Design: On Platform Nihilism" (Pluto Press, 2019)

22 december 2022 | 59 min

Heather Ford, "Writing the Revolution: Wikipedia and the Survival of Facts in the Digital Age" (MIT Press, 2022)

21 december 2022 | 57 min

Jenny L. Davis, "How Artifacts Afford: The Power and Politics of Everyday Things" (MIT Press, 2020)

20 december 2022 | 37 min

A conceptual update of affordance theory that introduces the mechanisms and conditions framework, providing a vocabulary and critical perspective.

Technological affordances mediate between the features of a technology and the outcomes of engagement with that technology. The concept of affordances, which migrated from psychology to design with Donald Norman's influential 1988 book, How Artifacts Afford: The Power and Politics of Everyday Things (MIT Press, 2020), offers a useful analytical tool in technology studies—but, Jenny L. Davis argues in How Artifacts Afford, it is in need of a conceptual update. Davis provides just such an update, introducing the mechanisms and conditions framework, which offers both a vocabulary and necessary critical perspective for affordance analyses.

The mechanisms and conditions framework shifts the question from what objects afford to how objects afford, for whom, and under what circumstances. Davis shows that through this framework, analyses can account for the power and politics of technological artifacts. She situates the framework within a critical approach that views technology as materialized action. She explains how request, demand, encourage, discourage, refuse, and allow are mechanisms of affordance, and shows how these mechanisms take shape through variable conditions—perception, dexterity, and cultural and institutional legitimacy.

Putting the framework into action, Davis identifies existing methodological approaches that complement it, including critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA), app feature analysis, and adversarial design. In today's rapidly changing sociotechnical landscape, the stakes of affordance analyses are high. Davis's mechanisms and conditions framework offers a timely theoretical reboot, providing tools for the crucial tasks of both analysis and design.

Jenny L. Davis is Associate Professor of Sociology at Australian National University.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington, 2022). His general area of study is on media representations of people and place at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on his next book where he conducted research on an annual canoeing and kayaking event that takes place on the Upper Mississippi River. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected].

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Pamela H. Smith, "From Lived Experience to the Written Word: Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

19 december 2022 | 62 min

Renee M. P. Teate, "SQL for Data Scientists: A Beginner's Guide for Building Datasets for Analysis" (John Wiley & Sons, 2021)

19 december 2022 | 43 min

Economists and other social scientists are used to working with data that comes nicely organized into a table with a series of variable names across the top and a list of observations or datapoints down the right hand side. Data also naturally falls into this format when it comes from surveys we run. But the vast amounts of data generated by businesses and by all our online activities are usually organized in different ways. In corporate settings that first step of getting the right data and putting it into a table where it can be analyzed can be as important and challenging as the subsequent analyses. SQL (Structured Query Language) has been the standard language for accessing information in databases since the 1980s.

In this episode I interview Renee Teate, also known as “Data Science Renee” on Twitter, about her new book, SQL for Data Scientists: A Beginner’s Guide for Building Datasets for Analysis (Wiley, 2022). I learned about Renee from her popular blog and podcast, “Becoming a Data Scientist,” in which she talked about the paths she and others took to becoming a data scientist. While she was coming from more of an engineering background, many economists have been becoming data scientists from the other direction. They are building up their skills with databases and programming to complement their statistical and social science training, either because of new jobs in the tech sector or because of the new academic research possibilities this opens up. SQL is a crucial part of this toolkit, and this book is a great way to get started learning it.

In our conversation, we also discuss her current role as a lead data scientist at higher education analytics company Heliocampus, and some of her tips for aspiring data scientists as they apply for and interview for their first jobs.

Host Peter Lorentzen is the Chair of the Economics Department at the University of San Francisco, where he created a new Master’s degree in Applied Economics designed specifically to train students in a combination of economics and data science skills that equips them to succeed in the new digital economy.

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The Future of the Arms Industry: A Discussion with Pieter D. Wezeman

17 december 2022 | 44 min

Kelly I. Aliano, "The Performance of Video Games: Enacting Identity, History and Culture Through Play" (McFarland, 2022)

17 december 2022 | 42 min

Danielle Keats Citron, "The Fight for Privacy: Protecting Dignity, Identity, and Love in the Digital Age" (Norton, 2022)

17 december 2022 | 36 min

Matthew Hall et al., "Digital Gender-Sexual Violations: Violence, Technologies, Motivations" (Routledge, 2022)

16 december 2022 | 71 min

This groundbreaking book argues that the fundamental issues around how victim-survivors of digital gender-sexual violations (DGSVs) are abused can be understood in terms of gender and sexual dynamics, constructions, positioning and logics. Digital Gender-Sexual Violations: Violence, Technologies, Motivations (Routledge, 2022) builds upon Hall and Hearn's previous work, Revenge Pornography, but has been substantially reworked to examine other forms of DGSV such as upskirting and sexual deepfakes, as well as the latest research and debates in the field.

Facilitated by developments in internet and mobile technologies, the non-consensual posting of real or fake sexually explicit images of others for revenge, entertainment, homosocial status or political leverage has become a global phenomenon. Using discourse and thematic analytical approaches, this text examines digital, survey and interview data on gendered sexual violences, abuses, and violations. The words of both the perpetrators and victim-survivors are presented, showing the impact on victim-survivors and the complex ways in which phallocentric power relations and existing hegemonic masculinities are reinforced and invoked by perpetrators to position girls and women as gendered and sexualised commodities to be traded, admired, violated or abused for the needs of individual men or groups of men.

Hall, Hearn, and Lewis explore their research in a broader social and political context, evaluating and suggesting changes to existing legislative frameworks, education, victim support, and practical and policy interventions against DGSV, along with wider political considerations. This is a unique resource for students, academics and researchers as well as professionals dealing with issues around digital gender-sexual violations.

Iqra Shagufta Cheema writes and teaches in the areas of digital cultures, postcolonial literatures, transnational digital feminisms, gender and sexuality studies, and global south film studies. Check out their latest book: The Other #MeToos. Follow them on Twitter.

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Karen Levy, "Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance" (Princeton UP, 2022)

15 december 2022 | 34 min

Yasmine Ali, "Walk Through Fire: The Train Disaster That Changed America" (Citadel Press, 2023)

14 december 2022 | 44 min

The first book to examine the rarely-acknowledged Waverly Train Disaster of 1978 - the catastrophic accident that changed America forever and led to the formation of FEMA.

Coinciding with the 45th anniversary of the event, Walk Through Fire: The Train Disaster That Changed America (Citadel Press, 2023) is a tribute to the first responders, as well as an examination of the strengths and vulnerabilities in rural America. On the night of February 22, 1978, a devastating freight train derailment drastically altered Waverly, Tennessee, and its place in history. This was one of the worst train explosions of the twentieth century, killing 16 people, injuring hundreds more, and causing millions of dollars in damage. What could have been dismissed as a single community's terrible misfortune instead became the catalyst for radical change, including the formation of FEMA, much-needed reforms in emergency response training, and the creation and enforcement of national and state safety regulations. Response to the disaster reshaped American infrastructure and laid the groundwork for the future of emergency management and disaster relief . . . and yet most Americans have never heard of Waverly.

Dr. Yasmine S. Ali, an award-winning medical writer and Waverly native, sets out to change this in Walk Through Fire, drawing from over a decade of meticulous research and interviews with survivors, first responders, and other firsthand accounts, including those of her own parents, first-generation Americans who were on call at the local hospital that treated the victims. Ali weaves a compelling narrative of small-town tragedy set against the broader backdrop of U.S. railroad history, rural healthcare, and other elements of American infrastructure that played a part in the creation--and the aftermath--of the Disaster. A tribute to resiliency and a call to action, Walk Through Fire tells the harrowing story of the Waverly Train Disaster from the perspectives of those who survived it, and those who still feel its impact today, illuminating how much a nation still has to learn from one small town in Tennessee.

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Scott Moore, "China's Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology Are Reshaping China's Rise and the World's Future" (Oxford UP, 2022)

13 december 2022 | 40 min

If the COVID-19 pandemic taught us anything, it is that the world is bound together by shared challenges—and that at the center of those challenges stands China. China's Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology Are Reshaping China's Rise and the World's Future (Oxford UP, 2022) re-envisions China’s role in the world in terms of sustainability and technology. The danger is that China’s next act will drive divergence on the rules and standards the world desperately needs in the decades ahead. This book helps foreign countries, companies, and other organizations prepare for a future shaped by sustainability, technology—and a dramatic new chapter for China and our world.

Sample takeaways:

China-linked political + economic risk isn’t going away and will get worse. No-regrets supply chain diversification will only make more sense over time.
Environmental sustainability will become a bigger and bigger priority in the China market because of growing regulatory + consumer pressure. This is both in direct operations & larger supply chains.
Data privacy, security, and surveillance will pose growing dilemmas for multi-national companies. Data governance is becoming more fragmented, and compliance and cross-border transfer more difficult. Firms need to prepare for “data de-globalization.”
China is becoming a more isolated, but still large & important, innovation ecosystem. How to access & leverage this ecosystem, and the talent within it, will become a bigger challenge as China-global research collaborations, student flows, etc. shrink.
China’s frothy biotech sector is cooling, but will still be a major growth driver in the years ahead. And developments in biotech will disrupt and reshape many sectors and industries via biometrics, biomaterials, etc.

Dr. Scott Moore is an acclaimed authority on China, sustainability, and technology whose career has spanned the U.S. government, multi-lateral institutions, and academia. He currently teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also Director of China Programs and Strategic Initiatives. Before returning to academia, Dr. Moore worked extensively on the Paris Agreement on climate change at the U.S. Department of State and at the World Bank. He graduated from Princeton University and received his doctorate from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

Dong Wang is collection editor of Asian Studies books at Lived Places Publishing (New York & the UK), H-Diplo review editor, director of the Wellington Koo Institute for Modern China in World History (Germany & USA), research associate at Harvard Fairbank Center (since 2002), distinguished professor of history at Shanghai University (since 2016), a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and an elected Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.

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Daniel Immerwahr, "The Galactic Vietnam: Technology, Modernization, and Empire in George Lucas’s Star Wars" (2022)

10 december 2022 | 66 min

Julia Ticona, "Left to Our Own Devices: Coping with Insecure Work in a Digital Age" (Oxford UP, 2022)

9 december 2022 | 53 min

Hello, world! This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series.

In this episode, our host Florence Madenga discusses the book Left to Our Own Devices

Coping with Insecure Work in a Digital Age (2022) by Dr. Julia Ticona.

You’ll hear about:

Dr. Ticona’s intellectual trajectory and how her first monograph has been transformed from a dissertation project into a book
What audience the book is intended for and what critical scholarship means for the author
The design of the research project and the processes and ethics of conducting research about the gig economy
How the ongoing pandemic has changed or altered the way Dr. Ticona thinks about this book
The core arguments and take-away points from the book around keywords such as “digital inequality,” “precarity,” “platform economy,” and “digital hustle”
The global implications of a study on low-wage gig economy workers in the American labor market
The question of agency in workers’ everyday life and how people survive in the global platform economy
The gendered nature of labor in the gig economy and what Dr. Ticona calls “tethered care work”
How we can better understand the complexity of our mediated worlds and precarious work beyond the tech companies and digital platforms

About the book

Over the past three decades, digital technologies like smartphones and laptops have transformed the way we work in the US. At the same time, workers at both ends of the income ladder have experienced rising levels of job insecurity and anxiety about their economic futures. In Left to Our Own Devices, Julia Ticona explores the ways that workers use their digital technologies to navigate insecure and flexible labor markets. Through 100 interviews with high and low-wage precarious workers across the US, she explores the surprisingly similar "digital hustles" they use to find work and maintain a sense of dignity and identity. Ticona then reveals how the digital hustle ultimately reproduces inequalities between workers at either end of polarized labor markets. A moving and accessible look at the intimate consequences of contemporary capitalism, Left to Our Own Devices will be of interest to sociologists, communication and media studies scholars, as well as a general audience of readers interested in digital technologies, inequality, and the future of work in the US.

You can find this book on the Oxford University Press website.

Author: Julia Ticona is an assistant professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.

Host: Florence Madenga is a doctoral fellow at CARGC at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.

Editor & Producer: Jing Wang is Senior Research Manager at CARGC at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.

Our podcast is part of the multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the very best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues.

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The Future of AI in Work: A Discussion with Daniel Susskind

9 december 2022 | 52 min

James A. Geraghty, "Inside the Orphan Drug Revolution: The Promise of Patient-Centered Biotechnology" (Cold Springs Harbor Lab Press, 2022)

6 december 2022 | 41 min

Advances in medicine have made possible better treatments for widespread, familiar human illnesses like cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. Yet there are thousands of much less common diseases, most of genetic origin, each classed as rare because it afflicts only a small number of people. These patient groups were long ignored by a pharmaceutical industry that judged them too small to provide a return on the investment needed to develop an effective remedy. Yet these orphaned diseases collectively caused misery and expense, often far greater than did more common ailments, for tens of millions of individuals and their families.

Forty years ago, a revolution that transformed the prospects of patients with rare diseases was lit by three sparks. The passage of the 1983 U.S. Orphan Drug Act resulted from public pressure brought by rare disease patients, their families, and advocates. The AIDS epidemic triggered additional activism, compounded when patients with the rare disease hemophilia became HIV-positive after infusion of tainted blood products. And the third spark was the emergence in the early 1980s of biotechnology companies like Genentech, Amgen, and Biogen employing then-new genetic engineering instead of conventional approaches to pharmaceutical development. Soon after, Genzyme became the first company to develop a treatment for a rare genetic disorder, Gaucher disease, which would come to transform the industry.

Jim Geraghty has been a passionate participant in the orphan drug revolution since its inception--a leader in the field as a strategy consultant, biotechnology executive, and venture entrepreneur. Inside the Orphan Drug Revolution: The Promise of Patient-Centered Biotechnology (Cold Springs Harbor Lab Press, 2022) is in part a history, with eyewitness accounts of advances as they occurred and portraits of the pioneering scientists and physicians, tireless activists, and visionary business leaders who made the revolution happen. And it tells deeply personal stories of patients and parents willing to risk new, untried therapies. But Geraghty also uses his exceptional experience and vantage point to look forward to the immense promise of the newest technologies like gene therapy and gene editing for the treatment of patients today and tomorrow. He concludes with thoughtful consideration of important questions. Why do drugs to treat orphan diseases cost so much? How can we ensure they are affordable? How can their effectiveness be responsibly assessed? And how can access to them be expanded internationally? This book graphically and poignantly illustrates how far an important healthcare revolution has come and reminds us that if not nurtured, it could end before its immense promise has been fulfilled.

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Melissa Kagen, "Wandering Games" (MIT Press, 2022)

4 december 2022 | 53 min

94 Elizabeth Kolbert on the Nature of the Future (GT, JP, NS, HY)

1 december 2022 | 46 min

How should humans respond to our ongoing human-made climate catastrophe? To answer that question, Recall this Book turned to prize-winning climate reporter Elizabeth Kolbert, who visited Brandeis this Fall. The topic was Under a White Sky, her recent book that documents the responses to the climate crisis ranging from a form of climate engineering that shoots reflective particles into the air to cool the atmosphere, to negative emission technologies that capture and inject carbon dioxide underground.

"You'd have to be pretty hard-hearted not to feel called to some kind of action when you see what we humans have done." But Elizabeth wonders what the best alternatives are. Should we set aside half the earth for biodiversity? Why is it that genetic engineering has become the cultural flashpoint for fear of unintended consequences? There are no easy answers at this point. Elizabeth thinks that if you're not frightened by what's going right now, including American politics around vaccination refusal, you're not paying attention.

Because this episode is associated with the annual Brandeis New Student Book Forum, first-year students Hedy Yang and Srinidhi Sriraman (who also goes by Nidhi) jump in with some thoughts.

Noticing repeated mentions of Henry David Thoreau in the book, Nidhi inquires about his role in inspiring Elizabeth's writing. Hedy's question about environmental justice and the comparative agency of rich and poor countries moves Elizabeth to talk about the staggering inequities in consumption and the goal of convergence in carbon emissions. What is the mechanism by which this happens, though? Do humans have the right to implement these technologies? Is the solution to issues created by human control really more control?

Mentioned in the Episode

E.O. Wilson, Half Earth
"Gene editing could revive a nearly lost tree"; the chestnut gene splicing debate in a recent Washington Post article. (Elizabeth has reported on Bill Powell's work)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)
Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006)
Cli-fi: climate fiction in all its bleakness. For example, Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake.
Kim Stanley Robinson, Ministry for the Future
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence: how to see things happening at different time scales.
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962)
Henry David Thoreau, "the touchstone" of American nature writing. e.g Walden (1854); dated yes, but "in most ways ahead of his time"
Des Poissons dans le Desert: Elizabeth's book title in French!

Listen to the episode here.

Read the transcript here.

Special credit and thanks for this episode goes to Hedy Yang and Srinidhi Sriraman, who took part in the audio editing and the preparation of the show notes, respectively.

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Jonathan R. Hunt, "The Nuclear Club: How America and the World Policed the Atom from Hiroshima to Vietnam" (Stanford UP, 2022)

1 december 2022 | 79 min

Sofya Glazunova, "Digital Activism in Russia: The Communication Tactics of Political Outsiders" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022)

30 november 2022 | 47 min

Paul Belleflamme and Martin Peitz, "The Economics of Platforms: Concepts and Strategy" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

30 november 2022 | 50 min

Sarah Abel, "Permanent Markers: Race, Ancestry, and the Body After the Genome" (UNC Press, 2021)

29 november 2022 | 66 min

Tim Walker and Lucian Morris, "The Handbook of Banking Technology" (John Wiley & Sons, 2021)

28 november 2022 | 82 min

Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow, "Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back" (Beacon Press, 2022)

23 november 2022 | 45 min

Corporate concentration has breached the stratosphere, as have corporate profits. An ever-expanding constellation of industries are now monopolies (where sellers have excessive power over buyers) or monopsonies (where buyers hold the whip hand over sellers)—or both.

In Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back (Beacon, 2022), scholar Dr. Rebecca Giblin and writer and activist Cory Doctorow argue we’re in a new era of “chokepoint capitalism,” with exploitative businesses creating insurmountable barriers to competition that enable them to capture value that should rightfully go to others. All workers are weakened by this, but the problem is especially well-illustrated by the plight of creative workers. From Amazon’s use of digital rights management and bundling to radically change the economics of book publishing, to Google and Facebook’s siphoning away of ad revenues from news media, and the Big Three record labels’ use of inordinately long contracts to up their own margins at the cost of artists, chokepoints are everywhere.

By analyzing book publishing and news, live music and music streaming, screenwriting, radio and more, Giblin and Doctorow deftly show how powerful corporations construct “anti-competitive flywheels” designed to lock in users and suppliers, make their markets hostile to new entrants, and then force workers and suppliers to accept unfairly low prices.

In the book’s second half, Giblin and Doctorow then explain how to batter through those chokepoints, with tools ranging from transparency rights to collective action and ownership, radical interoperability, contract terminations, job guarantees, and minimum wages for creative work.

Chokepoint Capitalism is a call to workers of all sectors to unite to help smash these chokepoints and take back the power and profit that’s being heisted away—before it’s too late.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Aynne Kokas, "Trafficking Data: How China Is Winning the Battle for Digital Sovereignty" (Oxford UP, 2022)

22 november 2022 | 55 min

On August 6, 2020, the Trump Administration issued a ban on TikTok in the United States, requiring that the owner, Beijing-based Bytedance, sell the company to American investors or shut it down. Legions of TikTokers were devastated at the possible loss of their beloved platform, and for what: a political grudge with China? American suitors like Walmart and Oracle tried to make a deal with Bytedance to keep the platform operating in the US. But then something curious happened. The Chinese government refused to let Bytedance sell TikTok on national security grounds. As it turns out, the pandemic era platform for dance challenges is a Chinese government asset.

As digital technologies and social media have evolved into organizing forces for the way in which we conduct our work and social lives, the business logic that undergirds these digital platforms has become clear: we are their product. We give these businesses information about everything--from where we live and work to what we like to do for entertainment, what we consume, where we travel, what we think politically, and with whom we are friends and acquaintances. We do this willingly, but often without a full understanding of how this information is stored or used, or what happens to it when it crosses international boundaries. As Aynne Kokas argues, both corporations and governments traffic much of this data without our consent--and sometimes illegally--for political and financial gain.

In Trafficking Data: How China Is Winning the Battle for Digital Sovereignty (Oxford UP, 2022), Aynne Kokas looks at how technology firms in the two largest economies in the world, the United States and China, have exploited government policy (and the lack thereof) to gather information on citizens, putting US national security at risk. Kokas argues that US government leadership failures, Silicon Valley's disruption fetish, and Wall Street's addiction to growth have fuelled China's technological goldrush. In turn, American complacency yields an unprecedented opportunity for Chinese firms to gather data in the United States and quietly send it back to China, and by extension, to the Chinese government. Drawing on years of fieldwork in the US and China and a large trove of corporate and policy documents, Trafficking Data explains how China is fast becoming the global leader in internet governance and policy, and thus of the data that defines our public and private lives.

Peter Lorentzen is economics professor at the University of San Francisco. He heads USF's Applied Economics Master's program, which focuses on the digital economy. His research is mainly on China's political economy.

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Anna Pendergrast and Kelly Pendergrast, "More Zeros and Ones: Digital Technology, Maintenance and Equity in Aotearoa New Zealand" (Bridget Williams Books, 2022)

21 november 2022 | 54 min

Robert P. Crease with Peter D. Bond, "The Leak: Politics, Activists, and Loss of Trust at Brookhaven National Laboratory" (MIT Press, 2022)

18 november 2022 | 55 min

Matthew Crain, "Profit over Privacy: How Surveillance Advertising Conquered the Internet" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)

15 november 2022 | 42 min

The contemporary internet's de facto business model is one of surveillance. Browser cookies follow us around the web, Amazon targets us with eerily prescient ads, Facebook and Google read our messages and analyze our patterns, and apps record our every move. In Profit over Privacy: How Surveillance Advertising Conquered the Internet (U Minnesota Press, 2021), Matthew Crain gives internet surveillance a much-needed origin story by chronicling the development of its most important historical catalyst: web advertising.

The first institutional and political history of internet advertising, Profit over Privacy uses the 1990s as its backdrop to show how the massive data-collection infrastructure that undergirds the internet today is the result of twenty-five years of technical and political economic engineering. Crain considers the social causes and consequences of the internet's rapid embrace of consumer monitoring, detailing how advertisers and marketers adapted to the existential threat of the internet and marshaled venture capital to develop the now-ubiquitous business model called "surveillance advertising." He draws on a range of primary resources from government, industry, and the press and highlights the political roots of internet advertising to underscore the necessity of political solutions to reign in unaccountable commercial surveillance.

The dominant business model on the internet, surveillance advertising is the result of political choices--not the inevitable march of technology. Unlike many other countries, the United States has no internet privacy law. A fascinating prehistory of internet advertising giants like Google and Facebook, Profit over Privacy argues that the internet did not have to turn out this way and that it can be remade into something better.

Peter C. Kunze is a visiting assistant professor of communication at Tulane University.

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The Future of Data Control: A Discussion with Sarah Lamdan

15 november 2022 | 48 min

Earvin Charles B. Cabalquinto, "(Im)mobile Homes: Family Life at a Distance in the Age of Mobile Media" (Oxford UP, 2022)

14 november 2022 | 30 min

Ernest M. Valea, "Artificial Intelligence, Reincarnation, and Resurrection: An Inquiry Into the Ultimate Fulfillment of Human Nature" (Resource Publications, 2021)

14 november 2022 | 43 min

Karen Bakker, "The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants" (Princeton UP, 2022)

11 november 2022 | 56 min

Adam Crowley, "Representations of Poverty in Videogames" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022)

11 november 2022 | 64 min

Emily J. H. Contois and Zenia Kish, "Food Instagram: Identity, Influence, and Negotiation" (U Illinois Press, 2022)

10 november 2022 | 49 min

Veronica Kirin, "Stories of Elders: What the Greatest Generation Knows about Technology that You Don't" (2018)

9 november 2022 | 55 min

Gerd Gigerenzer, "How to Stay Smart in a Smart World: Why Human Intelligence Still Beats Algorithms" (MIT Press, 2022)

3 november 2022 | 67 min

Timothy W. Burns, "Leo Strauss on Democracy, Technology, and Liberal Education" (SUNY Press, 2021)

3 november 2022 | 109 min

There are few thinkers who engender as much debate about their legacy as Leo Strauss (1899 –1973). His critics and biographers often don’t even agree about what scholarly discipline he practiced. Political theory or philosophy? Was he a proto-neoconservative or a middle-of-the-road Cold War defender of liberal democracy? He is often depicted as a major intellectual influence on sections of the national security state right, especially during the presidency of George W. Bush when he was portrayed as a puppeteer pulling from the grave the strings of such notable hawks as Paul Wolfowitz.

But the writings of Strauss often go unexamined. That is partly because they lean towards the abstruse. Strauss was not a general-audience-friendly public intellectual in his day and much of the homage to and attacks on him at this point are to be found in the pages of academic journals and in the halls of think tanks.

We are fortunate, therefore, that we can turn to the 2021 book, Leo Strauss on Democracy, Technology, and Liberal Education by Timothy W. Burns for elucidation of Strauss's thinking about how we can preserve liberal democracy in the face of apathy from moderates, classical liberals and traditional conservatives flummoxed by the rise of an aggressive left that questions whether the United States is a democracy at all and an alienated alt-right that regards liberal democracy as now practiced as a character-sapping anachronism leading to civilizational decline.

We learn from Burns of Strauss's admiration for Winston Churchill and touting of him as an exemplar of greatness within democracy. In one of the most absorbing sections of the book we learn of a 1941 lecture by Strauss entitled, “German Nihilism” in which he examined the arguments of such groups as rightist German students in the 1920s that liberal democracy fostered moral mediocrity.

Burns contrasts in detail the ideas of Strauss and Martin Heidegger and shows that Strauss foresaw that the other man’s emphasis on resoluteness would metastasize into Heidegger’s support for Nazism. Burns tells us that Strauss can speak to us today via his call to defend democratic constitutionalism and its spiritual and religious traditions.

That call can lead to charges of elitism against Strauss because it entailed his championing of the idea of an “aristocracy within democracy,” a cadre of cultivated, well-educated leaders who would help maintain the intellectual and cultural moorings of democracies.

Let’s hear now from Professor Burns about who Leo Strauss was and what he actually wrote and thought.

Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher.

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Chris Salter, "Sensing Machines: How Sensors Shape Our Everyday Life" (MIT Press, 2022)

1 november 2022 | 77 min

Brian A. Wong, "The Tao of Alibaba: Inside the Chinese Digital Giant That Is Changing the World" (PublicAffairs, 2022)

1 november 2022 | 64 min

This podcast features Brian A. Wong, discussing his new book, The Tao of Alibaba: Inside the Chinese Digital Giant That is Changing the World (Public Affairs, 2022). Brian joined Alibaba early, as its 52nd employee and first American employee, and worked for them for nearly twenty years. His book provides both insider insights and an analytical perspective on how Alibaba grew to become one of the most important companies in the global digital economy. This well-written and engaging book explains Alibaba’s unique organizational culture and how the Alibaba platform has helped spread economic opportunity beyond the elites in China’s big cities to the broader world of small and medium businesses throughout the country.

Brian Wong’s Radii China is an independent media platform founded in 2017 dedicated to bridging the East and West by highlighting topics and issues that connect the world’s young, globally-minded citizens. Listeners interested in the development of the US-China relationship are encouraged to participate in the NCUSCR’s CHINA Town Hall, on November 17th, featuring a national webcast by former Ambassador Jon Huntsman Jr. Local partner events around the US, including one at the University of San Francisco, provide opportunities to discuss the topic further in person with other community members and local experts on China. In the interview, we also discuss Benjamin Ho’s book Why Trust Matters, featured on this show last year.

Peter Lorentzen is the Chair of the Economics Department at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new Master's program in Applied Economics focused on the digital economy. His research focus is the political economy of governance in China and he is a member of the National Committee on US-China Relations (NCUSCR) and USF’s new Center on Business Studies and Innovation in the Asia-Pacific.

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Ashley Sweetman, "Cyber and the City: Securing London’s Banks in the Computer Age" (Springer, 2022)

1 november 2022 | 49 min

Darts Transit Commission: Silicon Valley’s Car Culture

31 oktober 2022 | 47 min

Emily Weinstein and Carrie James, "Behind Their Screens: What Teens Are Facing (and Adults Are Missing)" (MIT Press, 2022)

31 oktober 2022 | 65 min

Daniel D. Garcia-Swartz and Martin Campbell-Kelly, "Cellular: An Economic and Business History of the International Mobile-Phone Industry" (MIT Press, 2022)

28 oktober 2022 | 55 min

Andrei Nae, "Immersion, Narrative, and Gender Crisis in Survival Horror Video Games" (Routledge, 2021)

26 oktober 2022 | 54 min

Adrian Hon, "You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All" (Basic Books, 2022)

25 oktober 2022 | 45 min

Gwen Shuni D'Arcangelis, "Bio-Imperialism: Disease, Terror, and the Construction of National Fragility" (Rutgers UP, 2020)

21 oktober 2022 | 64 min

Seeing Truth in Data

20 oktober 2022 | 23 min

Paul Daugherty and H. James Wilson, "Radically Human: How New Technology Is Transforming Business and Shaping Our Future" (HBR Press, 2022)

20 oktober 2022 | 36 min

Orli Fridman, "Memory Activism and Digital Practices After Conflict: Unwanted Memories" (Amsterdam UP, 2022)

19 oktober 2022 | 61 min

Technocracy Now! Part 3: Technocracy in the Private Sector

19 oktober 2022 | 65 min

The first two episodes of this series told stories of technocrats who tied themselves to a muscular state. They believed the state could remake society, if it had the right expertise.

However, the state under neoliberalism doesn’t have the technocratic ambition it used to. zIs technocracy dead, then? No, technocracy is just moving into the private sector. More and more of our lives are governed by unaccountable private tyrannies—tyrannies that employ ruthlessly efficient technocratic systems, with even less democratic input than the technocracies of old.

For instance, many modern workplaces function like technocracies. The Amazon warehouse is the most technologically-sophisticated and totalizing manifestation of this. Their algorithmically-managed systems micro-manage workers’ every step, turning their bodies into machines. On part #3 of our technocracy series, we take a look inside the new frontiers of digital Taylorism.

Plus, what is the future of technocracy? An emerging slew of Peter Thiel-funded neo-reactionaries want to install a Silicon Valley CEO as our new techno-monarch. We discuss Thiel and Blake Masters, their broader intellectual trajectory from seasteaders to techno-populists, and the technocratic liberal disinformation machine that wants to defeat the neo-reactionaries.

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Josh Bowsher, "The Informational Logic of Human Rights" (Edinburgh UP, 2022)

19 oktober 2022 | 52 min

Robert P. Crease, "The Leak: Politics, Activists, and Loss of Trust at Brookhaven National Laboratory" (MIT Press, 2022)

18 oktober 2022 | 91 min

Lilie Chouliaraki and Myria Georgiou, "The Digital Border: Migration, Technology, Power" (NYU Press, 2022)

17 oktober 2022 | 50 min

How do digital technologies shape the experiences and meanings of migration?

As the numbers of people fleeing war, poverty, and environmental disaster reach unprecedented levels worldwide, states also step up their mechanisms of border control. In this, they rely on digital technologies, big data, artificial intelligence, social media platforms, and institutional journalism to manage not only the flow of people at crossing-points, but also the flow of stories and images of human mobility that circulate among their publics. What is the role of digital technologies is shaping migration today? How do digital infrastructures, platforms, and institutions control the flow of people at the border? And how do they also control the public narratives of migration as a “crisis”? Finally, how do migrants themselves use these same platforms to speak back and make themselves heard in the face of hardship and hostility?

Taking their case studies from the biggest migration event of the twenty-first century in the West, the 2015 European migration “crisis” and its aftermath up to 2020, Lilie Chouliaraki and Myria Georgiou offer a holistic account of the digital border as an expansive assemblage of technological infrastructures (from surveillance cameras to smartphones) and media imaginaries (stories, images, social media posts) to tell the story of migration as it unfolds in Europe’s outer islands as much as its most vibrant cities.

The Digital Border: Migration, Technology, Power (NYU Press, 2022) is a story of exclusion, marginalization, and violence, but also of care, conviviality, and solidarity. Through it, the border emerges neither as strictly digital nor as totally controlling. Rather, the authors argue, the digital border is both digital and pre-digital; datafied and embodied; automated and self-reflexive; undercut by competing emotions, desires, and judgments; and traversed by fluid and fragile social relationships—relationships that entail both the despair of inhumanity and the promise of a better future.

Lilie Chouliaraki is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics, where she also serves as the department’s Doctoral Program Director. She is the author of several books, including The Spectatorship of Suffering and The Ironic Spectator, Solidarity in the Age of Post-Humanitarianism and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Humanitarian Communication

Myria Georgiou is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics, where she also serves as Research Director. She is the author, editor, and co-editor of five books, including Diaspora, Identity and the Media; Media and the City: Cosmopolitanism and Difference; and the Sage Handbook of Media and Migration.

Padmapriya Vidhya-Govindarajan is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at NYU Steinhardt. Her research interests lie at the intersection of environmental justice, digital and film cultures, and community media-use practices.

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Scott Moore, "China's Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology Are Reshaping China's Rise and the World's Future" (Oxford UP, 2022)

13 oktober 2022 | 51 min

“We’ll compete with confidence; we’ll cooperate wherever we can; we’ll contest where we must.” That’s the new China strategy as outlined by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier this year. But just exactly how countries should deal with China—including working with it, when the times call for it—is perhaps the thorniest question in international relations right now, at least in the West.

Scott Moore gives his framework on the U.S. and China in China's Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology are Reshaping China's Rise and the World's Future (Oxford University Press, 2022). With reference to issues like public health, A.I and biotechnology, he gives his views on how the U.S. should approach China–cooperation, competition or conflict.

In this interview, Scott and I talk about the U.S.-China relationship, how it’s changed–and how U.S.-China competition could, under the right circumstances, still lead to global progress.

Scott M. Moore is Director of China Programs and Strategic Initiatives in the Office of the Provost as well as a Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Moore was previously a Young Professional with the World Bank Group and served as Environment, Science, Technology, and Health Officer for China at the U.S. Department of State. He is also the author of Subnational Hydropolitics: Conflict, Cooperation, and Institution-Building in Shared River Basins (Oxford University Press: 2018). You can follow Scott on Twitter at @water_futures.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of China’s Next Act. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

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Geert Lovink, "Stuck on the Platform: Reclaiming the Internet" (Valiz, 2022)

13 oktober 2022 | 61 min

We’re all trapped. No matter how hard you try to delete apps from your phone, the power of seduction draws you back. Doom scrolling is the new normal of a 24/7 online life. What happens when your home office starts to feel like a call center and you’re too fried to log out of Facebook? We’re addicted to large-scale platforms, unable to return to the frivolous age of decentralized networks. How do we make sense of the rising disaffection with the platform condition? Zoom fatigue, cancel culture, crypto art, NFTs and psychic regression comprise core elements of a general theory of platform culture. Geert Lovink argues that we reclaim the internet on our own terms. Stuck on the Platform: Reclaiming the Internet (Valiz 2022) is a relapse-resistant story about the rise of platform alternatives, built on a deep understanding of the digital slump.

Geert Lovink is a Dutch media theorist, internet critic and author of Uncanny Networks (2002), Dark Fiber (2002), My First Recession (2003), Zero Comments (2007), Networks Without a Cause (2012), Social Media Abyss (2016), Organisation after Social Media (with Ned Rossiter, 2018) and Sad by Design (2019). In 2004 he founded the Institute of Network Cultures at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA). His center organizes conferences, publications and research networks such as Video Vortex (online video), The Future of Art Criticism and MoneyLab (internet-based revenue models in the arts). Recent projects deal with digital publishing experiments, critical meme research, participatory hybrid events and precarity in the creative sector. In December, 2021 he was appointed Professor of Art and Network Cultures at the Art History Department, Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam for one day a week.

Reuben Niewenhuis is interested in philosophy, theory, technology, and interdisciplinary topics. Subscribe to his interviews here.

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Christopher Lukman, "Control Machines: Toward a Dispositive Theory of Computer Games" (Lit Verlag, 2022)

11 oktober 2022 | 31 min

Technocracy Now! Part 2: Exploring Technocracy through Cybernetics

10 oktober 2022 | 68 min

Virtual Reality as Immersive Enclosure, with Paul Roquet (EF, JP)

6 oktober 2022 | 39 min

Paul Roquet is an MIT associate professor in media studies and Japan studies; his earlier work includes Ambient Media. It was his recent mind-bending The Immersive Enclosure that prompted John and Elizabeth to invite him to discuss the history of "head-mounted media" and the perceptual implications of virtual reality.

Paul Elizabeth and John discuss the appeal of leaving actuality aside and how the desire to shut off immediate surroundings shapes VR's rollout in Japan. The discussion covers perceptual scale-change as part of VR's appeal--is that true of earlier artwork as well? They explore moral panic in Japan and America, recap the history of early VR headset adapters on trains and compare various Japanese words for "virtual" and their antonyms. Paul wonders if the ephemerality of the views glimpsed in a rock garden served as guiding paradigm for how VR is experienced.

Mentioned in the episode

Yoshikazu Nango, "A new form of 'solitary space'...." (2021)
Haruki Murakami's detailed fictional worlds of the 1980's onwards: real-feeling yet not actual history.
Walter Scott's Waverley novels: can we also understand the novel as an immersive machine that leaves readers half in their actual world?
Lewis Carrol's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), with its interplay between enclosure and expansion, and its shrinking/expanding motif)
Ian Bogost on e-readers
C S Lewis's wardrobe as portal in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950)
Lukacs focuses on the dizzying and transformative scale in Naturalism in "Narrate or Describe?" (1936)
Wearable heart monitors as feedback machines for watching scary movies.
The pre-history of Pokemon Go is various games played by early users of VR headsets on trains.
Sword Art Online is a breakout popular example of Japanese stories of players trapped inside a game-world
Thomas Boellstroff, Coming of Age in Second Life
We Met in Virtual Reality
Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992) coined the concept of the metaverse.

Recallable Books

Madeline L'Engle The Wind in the Door (1973).
Cervantes, Don Quixote (1606/1615)
Futari Okajima Klein Bottle (1989)
Collections such as Immersed in Technology, Future Visions, Virtual Realities and their Discontents; also, other early VR criticism of the 1990s including early feminist critique, scattered across journals in the early to mid 1990s . Paul feels someone should put together those germane articles into a new collection.

Read the transcript here.

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Elizabeth Ellcessor, "In Case of Emergency: How Technologies Mediate Crisis and Normalize Inequality" (NYU Press, 2022)

5 oktober 2022 | 57 min

Dr. Elizabeth Ellcessor presents a much-needed look at the growth of emergency media and its impact on our lives in In Case of Emergency: How Technologies Mediate Crisis and Normalize Inequality (NYU Press, 2022).

In an emergency, we often look to media: to contact authorities, to get help, to monitor evolving situations, or to reach out to our loved ones. Sometimes we aren’t even aware of an emergency until we are notified by one of the countless alerts, alarms, notifications, sirens, text messages, or phone calls that permeate everyday life. Yet most people have only a partial understanding of how such systems make sense of and act upon an “emergency.” In Case of Emergency argues that emergency media are profoundly cultural artifacts that shape the very definition of “emergency” as an opposite of “normal.” Looking broadly across a range of contemporary emergency-related devices, practices, and services, Dr. Ellcessor illuminates the cultural and political underpinnings and socially differential effects of emergency media.

By interweaving in-depth interviews with emergency-operation and app-development experts, archival materials, and discursive and technological readings of hardware and infrastructures, Dr. Ellcessor demonstrates that emergency media are powerful components of American life that are rarely, if ever, neutral. The normalization of ideologies produced and reinforced by emergency media result in unequal access to emergency services and discriminatory assumptions about who or what is a threat and who deserves care and protection. As emergency media undergo massive growth and transformation in response to digitization and attendant entrepreneurial cultures, Dr. Ellcessor asks where access, equity, and accountability fit in all of this.

The first book to develop a typology of emergency media, In Case of Emergency opens a much-needed conversation around the larger cultural meanings of “emergency,” and what an ethical and care-based approach to emergency could entail.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Technocracy Now! Part 1: Noam Chomsky on Intellectuals and Expertise

2 oktober 2022 | 68 min

Alex Williams and Jeremy Gilbert, "Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (And How We Win it Back)" (Verso, 2022)

29 september 2022 | 63 min

Social Media and Political Participation in the Philippines

29 september 2022 | 26 min

Tripp Mickle, "After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul" (William Morrow, 2022))

28 september 2022 | 40 min

Steve Jobs called Jony Ive his "spiritual partner at Apple." The London-born genius was the second-most powerful person at Apple and the creative force who most embodies Jobs's spirit, the man who designed the products adopted by hundreds of millions the world over: the iPod, iPad, MacBook Air, the iMac G3, and the iPhone. In the wake of his close collaborator's death, the chief designer wrestled with grief and initially threw himself into his work designing the new Apple headquarters and the Watch before losing his motivation in a company increasingly devoted more to margins than to inspiration.

In many ways, Cook was Ive's opposite. The product of a small Alabama town, he had risen through the ranks from the supply side of the company. His gift was not the creation of new products. Instead, he had invented countless ways to maximize a margin, squeezing some suppliers, persuading others to build factories the size of cities to churn out more units. He considered inventory evil. He knew how to make subordinates sweat with withering questions.

Jobs selected Cook as his successor, and Cook oversaw a period of tremendous revenue growth that has lifted Apple's valuation to $2 trillion. He built a commanding business in China and rapidly distinguished himself as a master politician who could forge global alliances and send the world's stock market into freefall with a single sentence.

Author Tripp Mickle spoke with more than 200 current and former Apple executives, as well as figures key to this period of Apple's history, including Trump administration officials and fashion luminaries such as Anna Wintour while writing After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul (William Morrow, 2022). His research shows the company's success came at a cost. Apple lost its innovative spirit and has not designed a new category of device in years. Ive's departure in 2019 marked a culmination in Apple's shift from a company of innovation to one of operational excellence, and the price is a company that has lost its soul.

Tripp Mickle is a technology and corporate reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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Digital Lethargy

27 september 2022 | 16 min

Charlton D. McIlwain, "Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, from AfroNet to Black Lives Matter" (Oxford UP, 2020)

22 september 2022 | 51 min

Amber Sinha, "The Networked Public: How Social Media is Changing Democracy" (Rupa Publications, 2019)

20 september 2022 | 54 min

Amber Sinha works at the intersection law, technology and society, and studies the impact of digital technologies on socio-political processes and structures. His research aims to further the discourse on regulatory practices around internet, technology, and society. He is currently a Senior Fellow-Trustworthy AI at Mozilla Foundation studying models for algorithmic transparency.

Networks, whether in the form of Facebook and Twitter or WhatsApp groups, are exerting immense, unchecked power in subverting political discourse and polarizing the public in India. If people’s understandings of their political reality can be so easily manipulated through misinformation, then what role can they play in fostering deliberative democracies? Amber Sinha asks this much ignored and often-misunderstood question in his book The Networked Public: How Social Media is Changing Democracy (Rupa Publications, 2019). In search for an answer, he investigates the history of misinformation and the biases that make the public susceptible to it, how digital platforms and their governance impacts the public’s behaviour on them, as well as the changing face of political targeting in this data-driven world.

The book weaves sharp analysis with academic rigour to show that while the public can be irrational and gullible, their actions—be it mob violence or spreading fake news—are symptoms of deeper social malaise and products of their technological contexts.The Networked Public is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how social media and the Internet is transforming democracy not only in India, but across the world.

Alok Prasanna Kumar is Co-Founder and Lead, Vidhi Karnataka. Sarayu Natarajan is the Founder of Aapti Institute. In the past, she has worked in management consulting and the venture fund industry before the plunge into researching politics.

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The Future of Nuclear Weapons: A Conversation with Fred Kaplan

20 september 2022 | 61 min

Alex Nathanson, "A History of Solar Power Art and Design" (Routledge, 2021)

19 september 2022 | 23 min

Stefan Höltgen, "Open History: The Archaeology of Retrocomputing" (Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2021)

16 september 2022 | 47 min

Today I talked to Stefan Höltgen about his book Open History: The Archaeology of Retrocomputing (Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2021).

How can historical computers be described properly from the viewpoint of computer science? By considering media archaeology’s theory of operative and thus a-historical media computer archaeology combines an interdisciplinary set of theories and methods to answer this question. At first, the problems of computer historiography (technical inaccuracy, inconsistency, and idiosyncrasy) will be deconstructed with the help of history criticism (H. Whyte, R. G. Collingwood), discourse archaeology (M. Foucault), and media archaeology (W. Ernst). Following that, technology–oriented tools and methods are gathered for describing ‘old’ computers within an ‘archaeography’ and analyzing them within a mid-range theory. Methods of computer science (from theoretical, practical, and technical c.s.), electronics, logics, mathematics, and diagrammatics supersede hermeneutical methods of historiography. Additional tools (re-enactment, demonstration, computer philology) from media science and other disciplines complement this set of methods. The objects of the following analyzation are early microcomputers (1975-95).

Retro computing, that has been practiced for decades as a hobbyistic way of computer archaeology, sets the frame for four computer archaeological projects that had been implemented within media scientific seminars (and other occasions): 1. a computer philological analysis of a ‘traditional’ computer demo (simulating a jumping ball) on different platforms and in different programming languages since the 1960s; 2. the development of a “Game of Life” on an 8-bit platform to examine the didactical and ‘historiographical’ potentialities of cellular automata; 3. the development of a new computer game for a 1978 gaming console to examine the differences between software emulation and material hardware; 4. the reparation of an 8-bit computer from 1976 done by a hardware hacker to analyze the tools, methods and knowledge-gaining process of such a non-professional approach.

These projects are discussed afterwards to gain the specific didactical modus operandi of retro computing hobbyists. Just like historical home computing (starting from the late 1970s) retro computing autodidactically gathers theoretical, historical, and practical knowledge by trial and error, gamification, and e-learning through a “learning by doing” procedure. The confrontation of three historical examples with three actual retro computing projects will prove this. The didactical reflection of retro computing projects describes a ‘retro didactic’ that would be useful for a broad application of historic sensitive, computer scientific knowledge with the help of less complex systems (like early microcomputers are).

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science and editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture.

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Felicia Wu Song, "Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence, and Place in the Digital Age" (InterVarsity Press, 2021)

14 september 2022 | 24 min

Esther Wright, "Rockstar Games and American History: Promotional Materials and the Construction of Authenticity" (de Gruyter, 2022)

13 september 2022 | 36 min

For two decades, Rockstar Games have been making games that interrogate and represent the idea of America, past and present. Commercially successful, fan-beloved, and a frequent source of media attention, Rockstar’s franchises are positioned as not only game-changing, ground-breaking interventions in the games industry, but also as critical, cultural histories on America and its excesses.

But what does Rockstar’s version of American history look like, and how is it communicated through critically acclaimed titles like Red Dead Redemption (2010) and L.A. Noire (2011)? By combining analysis of Rockstar’s games and a range of official communications and promotional materials, Rockstar Games and American History: Promotional Materials and the Construction of Authenticity (de Gruyter, 2022) offers critical discussion of Rockstar as a company, their video games, and ultimately, their attempts at creating new narratives about U.S. history and culture. It explores the ways in which Rockstar’s brand identity and their titles coalesce to create a new kind of video game history, how promotional materials work to claim the "authenticity" of these products, and assert the authority of game developers to perform the role of historian.

By working at the intersection of historical game studies, U.S. history, and film and media studies, this book explores what happens when contemporary demands for historical authenticity are brought to bear on the way we envisage the past – and whose past it is deemed to be. Ultimately, this book implores those who research historical video games to consider the oft-forgotten sources at the margins of these games as importance spaces where historical meaning is made and negotiated.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science and editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture.

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Josh Chin and Liza Lin, "Surveillance State: Inside China's Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control" (St. Martin's Press, 2022)

9 september 2022 | 58 min

As we build the AI-powered digital economy, how far do we want to go? Surveillance State: Inside China's Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control (St. Martin's Press, 2022) explores how China’s Communist Party is harnessing new technologies in an effort to achieve an unprecedented level of social control. The authors outline the most brutal and extreme applications of these technologies to the Uighur people of western China. They contrast this with the relatively benign-seeming applications to traffic control, crime, and public order in the prosperous Han Chinese heartland, where a little loss of privacy can feel like a small price to pay.

They also make clear that these developments are not isolated to China. They show how America faces similar tradeoffs between using the benefits these tools can bring for crime fighting and other goals, against the risks of losing privacy and potentially making our criminal justice system even less fair. They examine the role of US companies in selling crucial elements of the technology package to Chinese firms and government agencies and challenge their defense that they had no way of knowing how or where these technologies would be used. And they examine China’s export of surveillance technologies to other countries around the world.

This book is essential reading for anyone thinking about how the digitization of the economy and our lives can benefit us or be turned against us.

Authors Josh Chin and Liza Lin are award-winning journalists with the Wall Street Journal. The book grows out of years of reporting on these developments within China, as well as an extensive investigation into the roots of these trends and their connections around the world.

Host Peter Lorentzen is the Chair of the Economics Department at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new Master's program in Applied Economics focused on the digital economy. His research focus is the political economy of governance in China.

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Lucía Fernández-Amaya, "A Linguistic Overview of Whatsapp Communication" (Brill, 2022)

5 september 2022 | 36 min

Truck Nuts: The Political History of Trucks and Trucking

5 september 2022 | 80 min

Justin Grimmer et al., "Text as Data: A New Framework for Machine Learning and the Social Sciences" (Princeton UP, 2022)

5 september 2022 | 57 min

J. Bradford DeLong, "Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century" (Basic Books, 2020)

5 september 2022 | 60 min

Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone, "Social Media, Freedom of Speech, and the Future of Our Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2022)

1 september 2022 | 44 min

Property Technology

30 augusti 2022 | 23 min

Jennifer Jill Fellows and Lisa Smith, "Gender, Sex, and Tech!: An Intersectional Feminist Guide" (Canadian Scholars, 2022)

29 augusti 2022 | 51 min

Don’t Hate the Player: The World of E-Sports

26 augusti 2022 | 35 min

Julie A. Turnock, "The Empire of Effects: Industrial Light and Magic and the Rendering of Realism" (U Texas Press, 2022)

26 augusti 2022 | 78 min

Enter the Zuckerverse: On the Metaverse and its Corporatization

25 augusti 2022 | 47 min

The term “metaverse” was coined in a 1993 science fiction novel. Since then, it’s grown from a dystopian literary concept to a reality that corporations want to sell you. Strap on some VR goggles and escape your tired analog life! Except that the systemic issues we already have seem to be creeping into the metaverse, too.

As the lines between virtuality and physicality continue to blur, companies like Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta are setting their sights on virtual worlds. It’s a new frontier, full of potential – and full of our valuable data. Metaverses like Second Life or World of Warcraft can be positive and even game-changing experiences on the individual level, but when it comes to navigating a virtual society with a capitalist backdrop…things get a bit dicey.

On this episode, guest host and producer Ren Bangert explores the metaverse. First, we hear a love story from the glory days of Second Life, told to us by Sandrine Han – a scholar of virtual worlds and a long-time Second Lifer. Then, writer and game developer Ian Bogost takes us on a deep dive into the corporatization of the metaverse. We’ll hear how the metaverse has grown from a dystopian warning from science fiction to a sinister data-mining reality – and how even the shiniest of tech utopias are still functioning under the same old capitalism.

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Cassidy Puckett, "Redefining Geek: Bias and the Five Hidden Habits of Tech-Savvy Teens" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

25 augusti 2022 | 67 min

Picture a typical computer geek. Likely white, male, and someone you’d say has a “natural instinct” for technology. Yet, after six years teaching technology classes to first-generation, low-income middle school students in Oakland, California, Cassidy Puckett has seen firsthand that being good with technology is not something people are born with—it’s something they learn. In Redefining Geek: Bias and the Five Hidden Habits of Tech-Savvy Teens (U Chicago Press, 2022), she overturns the stereotypes around the digitally savvy and identifies the habits that can help everyone cultivate their inner geek.

Drawing on observations and interviews with a diverse group of students around the country, Puckett zeroes in on five technology learning habits that enable tech-savvy teens to learn new technologies: a willingness to try and fail, management of frustration and boredom, use of models, and the abilities to use design logic and identify efficiencies. In Redefining Geek, she shows how to measure and build these habits, and she demonstrates how many teens historically marginalized in STEM are already using these habits and would benefit from recognition for their talent, access to further learning opportunities, and support in career pathways. She argues that if we can develop, recognize, and reward these technological learning habits in all kids—especially girls and historically marginalized racial and ethnic groups—we can address many educational inequities and disparities in STEM.

Revealing how being good with technology is not about natural ability but habit and persistence, Redefining Geek speaks to the ongoing conversation on equity in technology education and argues for a more inclusive technology learning experience for all students.

Joao Souto-Maior is PhD Candidate in Sociology of Education at the New York University.

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Brett Scott, "Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets" (Harper Business, 2022)

24 augusti 2022 | 65 min

In Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets (Harper Business, 2022), Brett Scott tells an urgent and revelatory story about how the fusion of Big Finance and Big Tech requires “cloudmoney”—digital money underpinned by the banking sector—to replace physical cash. He dives beneath the surface of the global financial system to uncover a long-established lobbying infrastructure: an alliance of partners waging a covert war on cash. He explains the technical, political, and cultural differences between our various forms of money and shows how the cash system has been under attack for decades, as banking and tech companies promote a cashless society under the banner of progress.

Cloudmoney takes us to the front lines of a war for our wallets that is also about our freedom, from marketing strategies against cash to the weaponization of COVID-19 to push fintech platforms, and from there to the rise of the cryptocurrency rebels and fringe groups pushing back. It asks the most pressing questions:

Who benefits from a cashless society and who gets left behind?
Is the end of cash the end of true privacy?
And is our cloudmoney future closer than we think it is?

Brett Scott is an economic anthropologist, financial activist, and former broker. In 2013 he published The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money, and since then has spoken at hundreds of events across the globe and has appeared across international media, including BBC World News and Sky News. He has written extensively on financial reform, digital finance, alternative currency, blockchain technology, and the cashless society for publications like the Guardian, New Scientist, Huffington Post, Wired, and CNN.com, and also publishes the Altered States of Monetary Consciousness newsletter. He has worked on financial reform campaigns and alternative currency systems with a wide range of groups and is a Senior Fellow of the Finance Innovation Lab (UK). He currently resides in Berlin.

Utsav Saksena is a Research Fellow at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP), an autonomous institute under the Ministry of Finance, Government of India. He can be reached at [email protected]. Note: opinions expressed in this podcast are purely personal and do not reflect the official position of NIPFP or the Ministry of Finance, Government of India.

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Gamify Everything: Turning Work Into Play . . . for Better and for Worse

24 augusti 2022 | 51 min

Alfie Bown, "Dream Lovers: The Gamification of Relationships" (Pluto Press, 2022)

24 augusti 2022 | 60 min

Ann Blair et al., "Information: A Historical Companion" (Princeton UP, 2021)

23 augusti 2022 | 79 min

Save the Whales: The Addictive Psychology Behind Video Games

23 augusti 2022 | 61 min

Postscript: How the Supreme Court Overturned a Century-Old Gun Law…and Changed American Jurisprudence

22 augusti 2022 | 61 min

Today’s Postscript (a special series that allows scholars to comment on pressing contemporary issues) focuses on the US Supreme Court and the Second Amendment. It is hard to exaggerate the extent to which the most recent term of the U.S. Supreme Court changed the substance of the laws Americans live by and the method by which the Court determines whether a law is unconstitutional. The Court upended 50 years of abortion jurisprudence, challenged laws that govern tribal sovereignty, and undercut the power of Congress to make and implement laws regarding climate change. The abortion ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson consumed much of the press coverage and public outrage but our podcast conversation focuses New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. The Supreme Court not only overturned a century-old statute regulating the concealed carrying of guns in public – it changed the rules for determining what is or is not protected by the US Constitution under the Second Amendment. The podcast engages the relationship between state gun policy and this new originalist methodology, the origins of so-called originalism in the 1980s, the role of secondary scholarship, Duke Center for Firearms Law searchable database’s role in providing evidence for legal claims, and whether analogical reasoning (or politics) have triumphed at the SCOTUS – and how to teach that to law students.

Joseph Blocher, Lanty L. Smith ’67 Professor of Law at Duke University School of Law and one of the attorneys who helped write the brief for the District of C in Heller. He co-authored The Positive Second Amendment: Rights, Regulation, and the Future of Heller (Cambridge University Press, 2018) with Darrell Miller and his numerous influential law review articles are complemented by nuanced public facing scholarship.

Andrew Willinger is the Executive Director of the Duke Center for Firearms Law at Duke University Law School – and now writes commentary for the Center’s Second Thoughts blog. He joined the Center in June 2022, after practicing as a litigation associate at Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler in New York. At Patterson, Willinger litigated complex commercial disputes and false advertising and defamation cases. He previously clerked for Judge William L. Osteen, Jr. of the Middle District of North Carolina.

Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

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Moral Kombat: How Mortal Kombat Caused Moral Outrage

22 augusti 2022 | 68 min

Johanna Drucker, "Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

17 augusti 2022 | 59 min

The Future of Net Zero: A Discussion with Eric Lonergan

16 augusti 2022 | 48 min

Paris Marx, "Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation" (Verso, 2022)

16 augusti 2022 | 99 min

Eswar S. Prasad, "The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance" (Harvard UP, 2021)

16 augusti 2022 | 40 min

The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution is Transforming Currencies and Finance (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021) provides a cutting-edge look at how accelerating financial change, from the end of cash to the rise of cryptocurrencies, will transform economies for better and worse. We think we have seen financial innovation. We bank from laptops and buy coffee with the wave of a phone. But these are minor miracles compared with the dizzying experiments now underway around the globe, as businesses and governments alike embrace the possibilities of new financial technologies. As Eswar Prasad explains, the world of finance is at the threshold of major disruption that will affect corporations, bankers, states, and indeed all of us. The transformation of money will fundamentally rewrite how ordinary people live. Above all, Prasad foresees the end of physical cash. The driving force won't be phones or credit cards but rather central banks, spurred by the emergence of cryptocurrencies to develop their own, more stable digital currencies. Meanwhile, cryptocurrencies themselves will evolve unpredictably as global corporations like Facebook and Amazon join the game. The changes will be accompanied by snowballing innovations that are reshaping finance and have already begun to revolutionize how we invest, trade, insure, and manage risk. Prasad shows how these and other changes will redefine the very concept of money, unbundling its traditional functions as a unit of account, medium of exchange, and store of value. The promise lies in greater efficiency and flexibility, increased sensitivity to the needs of diverse consumers, and improved market access for the unbanked. The risk is instability, lack of accountability, and erosion of privacy. A lucid, visionary work, The Future of Money shows how to maximize the best and guard against the worst of what is to come.

Eswar Prasad is the Tolani Senior Professor of Trade Policy at Cornell University. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he holds the New Century Chair in International Economics, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He was previously chief of the Financial Studies Division in the International Monetary Fund's Research Department and, before that, was the head of the IMF's China Division.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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Made of Corn: How Genetically Modified Corn Changed Science, Academia and Indigenous Rights in Mexico (Part 2 of 2)

12 augusti 2022 | 46 min

Modifying Maize: How Genetically Modified Corn Changed Science, Academia and Indigenous Rights in Mexico (Part 1 of 2)

11 augusti 2022 | 56 min

Christian Wolmar, "British Rail: A New History" (Michael Joseph, 2022)

11 augusti 2022 | 50 min

Minh-Ha T. Pham, "Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Social Media's Influence on Fashion, Ethics, and Property" (Duke UP, 2022)

10 augusti 2022 | 51 min

Sébastien Philippe and Tomas Statius, "Toxique: Enquête sur les essais nucléaires français en Polynésie" (Companyédition PUF/Disclose, 2021)

8 augusti 2022 | 64 min

What happens when you bring together an important collection of previously secret archival documents dealing with France's nuclear detonations in the Pacific from 1966 to 1996, a nuclear scientist, and an investigative journalist? Working together beginning in early 2020, Sébastien Philippe and Tomas Statius, the authors of Toxique: Enquête sur les essais nucléaires français en Polynésie (Presses universitaires de France and Disclose, 2021) have now shared with readers the meaningful and provocative results of just such a collaboration. Revisiting the history of France's nuclear weapons program over a period of three decades (following an initial set of atmospheric and underground detonations in the Algerian Sahara from 1960 to 1966), Toxique is a scientific and journalistic interrogation of the immediate and long-term health and environmental effects of the 193 bombs the French military exploded in the region, exposing civilians, as well as French military and other personnel to the fallout and radiation emitted by these explosions.

The significance of this interdisciplinary investigation cannot be overstated. As Toxique shows, these nuclear detonations continue to have harmful effects on the everyday lives of thousands of local residents, along with those veterans who served in the area. As Philippe and Statius have shown, the toxicity of these nuclear blasts has been consistently underestimated and misrepresented by the French military and state. Holding important implications for the victims of these detonations in terms of both recognition and financial compensation, the book and its accompanying online platform, Moruroa Files, have made a huge impact. I was thrilled to have the chance to speak with these remarkable researchers and writers and hope listeners will learn from and enjoy our conversation. The more people within and beyond the field of French Studies who are aware of this damaging past and present, the better.

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American Chernobyl, Part 2: The Most Poisonous Place in the USA

5 augusti 2022 | 59 min

America's Chernobyl, Part 1: Living in a Poison Town

4 augusti 2022 | 53 min

Ellis Jones, "DIY Music and the Politics of Social Media" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

3 augusti 2022 | 91 min

Socialise the Series of Tubes: Toward a Democratic Internet

2 augusti 2022 | 57 min

Lost Utopias: A History of World’s Fairs

1 augusti 2022 | 73 min

Techno-utopianism is everywhere. It’s driven by a new tech-bro/crypto culture, supported by online hordes of true believers, and couched in philosophies of meritocracy and technocracy. But this thinking is not new, and World’s Fairs are a perfect example.

One of our ongoing series within Darts and Letters is techno utopias, and we do mean that with all the skepticism it’s due. Silicon Valley is trying to change the world with NFTs and metaverses and electric cars and all kinds of nonsense technologies that will do nothing to improve the lives of the world’s poor, but will increase the wealth of Zuckerburg and Musk, probably while destroying the planet in the process.

To start that series off we decided to go to the original techno-utopia: The World’s Fair. Host Gordon Katic talks to a historian of world’s fairs, and then to a photographer who spends her time in the dilapidated abandoned glory of former world’s fair sites. We’ve got loads of really fun historical footage in this episode too… it’s funny and nostalgic, I think you’re gonna love it.

It’s not all world’s fairs though. We also explore the nature of technology itself… like what actually is a technology?

So that seemed a good place to start off this week’s theme of the politics of technology and techno utopias. We’re doing a different theme every week until we relaunch the show on September 18th.

So here it is… Lost Utopias: A History of World’s Fairs.

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If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too.

——————-FURTHER READING AND LISTENING——————

Check out Rob Rydell’s books on the history of world’s fairs: All the World’s a Fair, World’s Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions, and Fair America: World’s Fairs in the United States. Plus, see more of his work on ResearchGate.
Visit Jade Daskow’s photography project Lost Utopias to see what remains once the fair leaves town. Then, visit her homepage to have a look at her other projects, including The Architecture of Activism.
Have a look at Jennifer Slack’s co-written book Culture and Technology: A Primer. Then, see her faculty page at Michigan Tech to peruse more of her work.

—————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————-

You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button.

If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too.

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Stuart Ellis-Gorman, "The Medieval Crossbow: A Weapon Fit to Kill a King" (Pen & Sword Military, 2022)

28 juli 2022 | 54 min

Nic Maclellan, "Grappling with the Bomb: Britain’s Pacific H-Bomb Tests" (ANU Press, 2017)

27 juli 2022 | 108 min

James Steinhoff, "Automation and Autonomy: Labour, Capital and Machines in the Artificial Intelligence Industry" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021)

27 juli 2022 | 63 min

Felix Schniz, "Genre and Video Game: Introducing an Impossible Taxonomy" (Springer, 2021)

26 juli 2022 | 83 min

Jason Resnikoff, "Labor's End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work" (U Illinois Press, 2021)

21 juli 2022 | 59 min

Lisa Jean Moore, "Our Transgenic Future: Spider Goats, Genetic Modification, and the Will to Change Nature" (NYU Press, 2022)

20 juli 2022 | 43 min

Rachael Pells, "Genomics: How Genome Sequencing Will Change Healthcare" (Random House, 2022)

15 juli 2022 | 56 min

Nicole Erin Morse, "Selfie Aesthetics: Seeing Trans Feminist Futures in Self-Representational Art" (Duke UP, 2022)

13 juli 2022 | 65 min

Elena Conis, "How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT" (Bold Type Books, 2022)

13 juli 2022 | 47 min

The story of DDT as you’ve never heard it before: a fresh look at the much-maligned chemical compound as a cautionary tale of how powerful corporations have stoked the flames of science denialism for their own benefit In the 1940s, DDT helped the Allies win the Second World War by wiping out the insects that caused malaria, with seemingly no ill effects on humans. After the war, it was sprayed willy-nilly across fields, in dairy barns, and even in people's homes. Thirty years later the U.S. would ban the use of DDT—only to reverse the ban in the 1990s when calls arose to bring it back to fight West Nile and malaria. What changed?

How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT (Bold Type Books, 2022) traces the surprising history of DDT’s rapid rise, infamous fall, and controversial revival to reveal to show that we’ve been taking the wrong lesson from DDT’s cautionary tale. Historian Elena Conis uncovers new evidence that it was not the shift in public opinion following the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring that led to the ban but in fact the behind-the-scenes political machinations of Big Business. She makes a compelling case that the real threat was not DDT itself but the prioritization of profits over public health. If we don't change the ways we make decisions about new scientific discoveries and technologies, Conis argues, we’re doomed to keep making the same mistakes and putting people at risk—both by withholding technologies that could help them and by exposing them to dangerous chemicals without their knowledge or consent. In an age when corporations and politicians are shaping our world behind closed doors and deliberately stoking misinformation around public health issues, from pesticides to vaccines to COVID-19 to climate change, we need greater transparency and a new way of communicating about science—as a discipline of discovery that's constantly evolving, rather than a finite and immutable collection of facts—in order to combat the war on facts and protect ourselves and our environment.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine.

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Jamie Susskind, "The Digital Republic: On Freedom and Democracy in the 21st Century" (Pegasus Books, 2022)

11 juli 2022 | 43 min

From one of the leading intellectuals of the digital age, The Digital Republic: On Freedom and Democracy in the 21st Century (Pegasus Books, 2022) is the definitive guide to the great political question of our time: how can freedom and democracy survive in a world of powerful digital technologies? A Financial Times “Book to Read” in 2022. Not long ago, the tech industry was widely admired, and the internet was regarded as a tonic for freedom and democracy. Not anymore. Every day, the headlines blaze with reports of racist algorithms, data leaks, and social media platforms festering with falsehood and hate. In The Digital Republic, acclaimed author Jamie Susskind argues that these problems are not the fault of a few bad apples at the top of the industry. They are the result of our failure to govern technology properly. The Digital Republic charts a new course. It offers a plan for the digital age: new legal standards, new public bodies and institutions, new duties on platforms, new rights and regulators, new codes of conduct for people in the tech industry. Inspired by the great political essays of the past, and steeped in the traditions of republican thought, it offers a vision of a different type of society: a digital republic in which human and technological flourishing go hand in hand.

Jamie Susskind is a barrister and the author of the award-winning bestseller Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech (Oxford University Press, 2018), which received the Estoril Global Issues Distinguished Book Prize 2019, and was an Evening Standard and Prospect Book of the Year. He has fellowships at Harvard and Cambridge and currently lives in London.

Austin Clyde is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science. He researches artificial intelligence and high-performance computing for developing new scientific methods. He is also a visiting research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Science, Technology, and Society program, where my research addresses the intersection of artificial intelligence, human rights, and democracy.

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Trevor Boffone, "TikTok Cultures in the United States" (Routledge, 2022)

11 juli 2022 | 37 min

Jayita Sarkar, "Ploughshares and Swords: India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War" (Cornell UP, 2022)

11 juli 2022 | 66 min

Ploughshares and Swords: India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022) by Jayita Sarkar challenges this received wisdom by narrating a global story of India's nuclear program during its first forty years. The book foregrounds the program's civilian and military features by probing its close relationship with the space program. Through nuclear and space technologies, India's leaders served the technopolitical aims of economic modernity and the geopolitical goals of deterring adversaries.

The politically savvy, transnationally connected scientists and engineers who steered the program obtained technologies, materials, and information through a variety of state and nonstate actors from Europe and North America, including both superpowers. They thus maneuvered around Cold War politics and the choke points of the nonproliferation regime. Hyperdiversification increased choices for the leaders of the nuclear program but reduced democratic accountability at home. The nuclear program became a consensus-enforcing device in the name of the nation.

Ploughshares and Swords is a provocative new history with global implications. It shows how geopolitical and technopolitical visions influence decisions about the nation after decolonization.

Thanks to generous funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellopen.org) and other repositories. You can access the ebook here.

Jayita Sarkar is Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University Of Glasgow and the Founding Director of the Global Decolonization Initiative. Follow her on Twitter @DrJSarkar or check out her website (www.JayitaSarkar.com).

Shatrunjay Mall is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He works on transnational Asian history, and his dissertation explores intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities that emerged between Indian anti-colonialism and imperial Japan in the twentieth century.

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Samuel Ulbricht, "Ethics of Computer Gaming: A Groundwork" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022)

8 juli 2022 | 45 min

Jody Rosen, "Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle" (Crown, 2022)

8 juli 2022 | 51 min

The bicycle is a vestige of the Victorian era, seemingly at odds with our age of smartphones and ride-sharing apps and driverless cars. Yet we live on a bicycle planet. Across the world, more people travel by bicycle than any other form of transportation. Almost anyone can learn to ride a bike--and nearly everyone does.

In Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle (Crown Publishing, 2022), journalist and critic Jody Rosen reshapes our understanding of this ubiquitous machine, an ever-present force in humanity's life and dream life--and a flash point in culture wars--for more than two hundred years. Combining history, reportage, travelogue, and memoir, Rosen's book sweeps across centuries and around the globe, unfolding the bicycle's saga from its invention in 1817 to its present-day renaissance as a "green machine," an emblem of sustainability in a world afflicted by pandemic and climate change. Readers meet unforgettable characters: feminist rebels who steered bikes to the barricades in the 1890s, a prospector who pedaled across the frozen Yukon to join the Klondike gold rush, a Bhutanese king who races mountain bikes in the Himalayas, a cycle-rickshaw driver who navigates the seething streets of the world's fastest-growing megacity, astronauts who ride a floating bicycle in zero gravity aboard the International Space Station.

Two Wheels Good examines the bicycle's past and peers into its future, challenging myths and clichés while uncovering cycling's connection to colonial conquest and the gentrification of cities. But the book is also a love letter: a reflection on the sensual and spiritual pleasures of bike riding and an ode to an engineering marvel--a wondrous vehicle whose passenger is also its engine.

Jody Rosen is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. His work has appeared in Slate, New York, The New Yorker, and many other publications. He lives in Brooklyn with his family.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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Roberto J. González, "War Virtually: The Quest to Automate Conflict, Militarize Data, and Predict the Future" (U California Press, 2022)

1 juli 2022 | 63 min

A critical look at how the US military is weaponizing technology and data for new kinds of warfare—and why we must resist. War Virtually: The Quest to Automate Conflict, Militarize Data, and Predict the Future (University of California Press, 2022) is the story of how scientists, programmers, and engineers are racing to develop data-driven technologies for fighting virtual wars, both at home and abroad. In this landmark book, Roberto J. González gives us a lucid and gripping account of what lies behind the autonomous weapons, robotic systems, predictive modeling software, advanced surveillance programs, and psyops techniques that are transforming the nature of military conflict. González, a cultural anthropologist, takes a critical approach to the techno-utopian view of these advancements and their dubious promise of a less deadly and more efficient warfare.

With clear, accessible prose, this book exposes the high-tech underpinnings of contemporary military operations—and the cultural assumptions they're built on. Chapters cover automated battlefield robotics; social scientists' involvement in experimental defense research; the blurred line between political consulting and propaganda in the internet era; and the military's use of big data to craft new counterinsurgency methods based on predicting conflict. González also lays bare the processes by which the Pentagon and US intelligence agencies have quietly joined forces with Big Tech, raising an alarming prospect: that someday Google, Amazon, and other Silicon Valley firms might merge with some of the world's biggest defense contractors. War Virtually takes an unflinching look at an algorithmic future—where new military technologies threaten democratic governance and human survival.

Dr. Gonzalez is Professor and Chair of the San Jose State University Anthropology Department. He has authored four books including Connected: How a Mexican Village Built Its Own Cell Phone Network and Militarizing Culture: Essays on the Warfare State. You can learn more about his work here.

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Mark Andrejevic, "Automated Media" (Routledge, 2019)

24 juni 2022 | 109 min

Jonathan Crary, "Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World" (Verso, 2022)

22 juni 2022 | 66 min

In this uncompromising essay, Jonathan Crary presents the obvious but unsayable reality: our ‘digital age’ is synonymous with the disastrous terminal stage of global capitalism and its financialisation of social existence, mass impoverishment, ecocide, and military terror. Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World (Verso, 2022) surveys the wrecking of a living world by the internet complex and its devastation of communities and their capacities for mutual support.

This polemic by the author of 24/7 dismantles the presumption that social media could be an instrument of radical change and contends that the networks and platforms of transnational corporations are intrinsically incompatible with a habitable earth or with the human interdependence needed to build egalitarian post-capitalist forms of life.

Dr. Jonathan Crary is the Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University in the Art history and Archeology Department. He is a prolific art and culture critic and is the co-founder (and co-editor) of Zone Books. Professor Crary has been the recipient of Guggenheim, Getty, Mellon, and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 2005, his teaching and mentoring were recognized with a Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award. Dr. Crary is also the author of Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (winner of the 2001 Lionel Trilling Book Award), and 24/7 (a finalist for the 2016 Terzani International Literary Prize).

Cody Skahan ([email protected]) is an anthropologist by training, starting an MA program in Anthropology at the University of Iceland in August 2022 as a Leifur Eriksson Fellow. His work focuses on the intersections of queerness, environmentalisms, and tourism in Iceland. Cody has a blog here where he sometimes writes about Games User Research and will totally, 100% in the future post the podcast and other projects he is working on.

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Drone Life

22 juni 2022 | 19 min

Artificial Intelligence with Chinese Characteristics

17 juni 2022 | 25 min

What is artificial intelligence (AI) with Chinese characteristics? Why is the Chinese Government labelling AI as a matter of security? How has AI been empowering China’s authoritarian governance? Jinghan Zeng, Professor of China and International Studies at Lancaster University, talks about his latest book Artificial Intelligence (AI) with Chinese Characteristics: National Strategy, Security and Authoritarian Governance (Palgrave, 2022) at the Nordic Asia Podcast.

In his conversation with Joanne Kuai, PhD candidate at Karlstad University, Sweden and affiliated PhD at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Jinghan Zeng introduces his book which argues that China’s AI approach is sophisticated and multifaceted, and it has brought about both considerable benefits and challenges to China. The book suggests that a more accurate understanding of AI with Chinese characteristics is essential in order to inform the debate regarding what lessons can be learnt from China’s AI approach and how to respond to China’s rise as the AI leader, if not a superpower.

Jinghan Zeng is Professor of China and International Studies at Lancaster University. He is also Academic Director of China Engagement and Director of Lancaster University Confucius Institute. He plays a key role in supporting the development and implementation of the University’s China strategy. He is the author of Slogan Politics: Understanding Chinese Foreign Policy Concepts (2020) and The Chinese Communist Party's Capacity to Rule: Ideology, Legitimacy and Party Cohesion (2015). He is also the co-editor of One Belt, One Road, One Story?: Towards an EU-China Strategic Narrative (2021).

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

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David L. Sloss, "Tyrants on Twitter: Protecting Democracies from Information Warfare" (Stanford UP, 2022)

17 juni 2022 | 64 min

When Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram were first introduced to the public, their mission was simple: they were designed to help people become more connected to each other. Social media became a thriving digital space by giving its users the freedom to share whatever they wanted with their friends and followers. Unfortunately, these same digital tools are also easy to manipulate. As exemplified by Russia's interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, authoritarian states can exploit social media to interfere with democratic governance in open societies.

Tyrants on Twitter: Protecting Democracies from Information Warfare (Stanford UP, 2022) is the first detailed analysis of how Chinese and Russian agents weaponize Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube to subvert the liberal international order. In addition to examining the 2016 U.S. election, David L. Sloss explores Russia's use of foreign influence operations to threaten democracies in Europe, as well as China's use of social media and other digital tools to meddle in Western democracies and buttress autocratic rulers around the world. Sloss calls for cooperation among democratic governments to create a new transnational system for regulating social media to protect Western democracies from information warfare. Drawing on his professional experience as an arms control negotiator, he outlines a novel system of transnational governance that Western democracies can enforce by harmonizing their domestic regulations. And drawing on his academic expertise in constitutional law, he explains why that system―if implemented by legislation in the United States―would be constitutionally defensible, despite likely First Amendment objections. With its critical examination of information warfare and its proposal for practical legislative solutions to fight back, this book is essential reading in a time when disinformation campaigns threaten to undermine democracy.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter.

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Andrew Simon, "Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt" (Stanford UP, 2022)

16 juni 2022 | 74 min

John Wills, "Gamer Nation: Video Games and American Culture" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019)

15 juni 2022 | 56 min

In 1975, design engineer Dave Nutting completed work on a new arcade machine. A version of Taito's Western Gun, a recent Japanese arcade machine, Nutting's Gun Fight depicted a classic showdown between gunfighters. Rich in Western folklore, the game seemed perfect for the American market; players easily adapted to the new technology, becoming pistol-wielding pixel cowboys. One of the first successful early arcade titles, Gun Fight helped introduce an entire nation to video-gaming and sold more than 8,000 units.

In Gamer Nation: Video Games and American Culture (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019), John Wills examines how video games co-opt national landscapes, livelihoods, and legends. Arguing that video games toy with Americans' mass cultural and historical understanding, Wills show how games reprogram the American experience as a simulated reality. Blockbuster games such as Civilization, Call of Duty, and Red Dead Redemption repackage the past, refashioning history into novel and immersive digital states of America. Controversial titles such as Custer's Revenge and 08.46 recode past tragedies. Meanwhile, online worlds such as Second Life cater to a desire to inhabit alternate versions of America, while Paperboy and The Sims transform the mundane tasks of everyday suburbia into fun and addictive challenges.

Working with a range of popular and influential games, from Pong, Civilization, and The Oregon Trail to Grand Theft Auto, Silent Hill, and Fortnite, Wills critically explores these gamic depictions of America. Touching on organized crime, nuclear fallout, environmental degradation, and the War on Terror, Wills uncovers a world where players casually massacre Native Americans and Cold War soldiers alike, a world where neo-colonialism, naive patriotism, disassociated violence, and racial conflict abound, and a world where the boundaries of fantasy and reality are increasingly blurred. Ultimately, Gamer Nation reveals not only how video games are a key aspect of contemporary American culture, but also how games affect how people relate to America itself.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design at the IU International University of Applied Science.

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Albert Folch, "Hidden in Plain Sight: The History, Science, and Engineering of Microfluidic Technology" (MIT Press, 2022)

15 juni 2022 | 62 min

Gian Maria Campedelli, "Machine Learning for Criminology and Crime Research: At the Crossroads" (Routledge, 2022)

14 juni 2022 | 45 min

Machine Learning for Criminology and Crime Research: At the Crossroads (Routledge, 2022) reviews the roots of the intersection between machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and research on crime; examines the current state of the art in this area of scholarly inquiry; and discusses future perspectives that may emerge from this relationship.

As machine learning and AI approaches become increasingly pervasive, it is critical for criminology and crime research to reflect on the ways in which these paradigms could reshape the study of crime. In response, this book seeks to stimulate this discussion. The opening part is framed through a historical lens, with the first chapter dedicated to the origins of the relationship between AI and research on crime, refuting the novelty narrative that often surrounds this debate. The second presents a compact overview of the history of AI, further providing a nontechnical primer on machine learning. The following chapter reviews some of the most important trends in computational criminology and quantitatively characterizing publication patterns at the intersection of AI and criminology, through a network science approach. This book also looks to the future, proposing two goals and four pathways to increase the positive societal impact of algorithmic systems in research on crime. The sixth chapter provides a survey of the methods emerging from the integration of machine learning and causal inference, showcasing their promise for answering a range of critical questions.

With its transdisciplinary approach, Machine Learning for Criminology and Crime Research is important reading for scholars and students in criminology, criminal justice, sociology, and economics, as well as AI, data sciences and statistics, and computer science.

Geert Slabbekoorn works as an analyst in the field of public security. In addition he has published on different aspects of dark web drug trade in Belgium. Find him on twitter, tweeting all things drug related @GeertJS.

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Thomas J. Misa, "Leonardo to the Internet: Technology and Culture from the Renaissance to the Present" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022)

6 juni 2022 | 75 min

David B. Goldstein, "The End of Genetics: Designing Humanity's DNA" (Yale UP, 2022)

6 juni 2022 | 56 min

Shara Rambarran, "Virtual Music: Sound, Music, and Image in the Digital Era" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

3 juni 2022 | 65 min

Virtuality has entered our lives making anything we desire possible. We are, as Gorillaz once sang, in an exciting age where 'the digital won't let [us] go…' Technology has revolutionized music, especially in the 21st century where the traditional rules and conventions of music creation, consumption, distribution, promotion, and performance have been erased and substituted with unthinkable and exciting methods in which absolutely anyone can explore, enjoy, and participate in creating and listening to music.

Virtual Music: Sound, Music, and Image in the Digital Era (Bloomsbury, 2021) explores the interactive relationship of sound, music, and image, and its users (creators/musicians/performers/audience/consumers). Areas involving the historical, technological, and creative practices of virtual music are surveyed including its connection with creators, musicians, performers, audience, and consumers. Shara Rambarran looks at the fascination and innovations surrounding virtual music, and illustrates key artists (such as Grace Jones, The Weeknd), creators (such as King Tubby, Kraftwerk, MadVillain, Danger Mouse), audiovisuals in video games and performances (such as Cuphead and Gorillaz), audiences, and consumers that contribute in making this musical experience a phenomenon. Whether it is interrogating the (un)realness of performers, modified identities of artists, technological manipulation of the Internet, music industry and music production, or accessible opportunities in creativity, the book offers a fresh understanding of virtual music and appeals to readers who have an interest in this digital revolution.

Shara Rambarran is Assistant Professor of Music at Bader International Study Centre, UK (Queen’s University, Canada). She co-runs the Art of Record Production conferences and is an editor on the Journal on the Art of Record Production and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality (2016). Shara Rambarran on Twitter.

Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley Morgan on Twitter.

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Margie Meacham, "AI in Talent Development: Capitalize on the AI Revolution to Transform the Way You Work, Learn, and Live" (ASTD, 2020)

2 juni 2022 | 50 min

Jessamyn Abel, "Dream Super-Express: A Cultural History of the World's First Bullet Train" (Stanford UP, 2022)

2 juni 2022 | 65 min

Adam M. Romero, "Economic Poisoning: Industrial Waste and the Chemicalization of American Agriculture" (U California Press, 2021)

30 maj 2022 | 44 min

Should Scholars Trust Machine Translation of their Articles?

30 maj 2022 | 43 min

Aniket Aga, "Genetically Modified Democracy: Transgenic Crops in Contemporary India" (Yale UP, 2022)

30 maj 2022 | 59 min

Alice Dailey, "How to Do Things with Dead People: History, Technology, and Temporality from Shakespeare to Warhol" (Cornell UP, 2022)

20 maj 2022 | 58 min

Pandemic Perspectives 11: The Covid Pandemic and Learning about Learning

18 maj 2022 | 54 min

Elena Esposito, "Artificial Communication: How Algorithms Produce Social Intelligence" (MIT Press, 2022)

18 maj 2022 | 54 min

Gijs Mom, "Globalizing Automobilism: Exuberance and the Emergence of Layered Mobility, 1900–1980" (Berghahn Books, 2020)

17 maj 2022 | 48 min

Simon Peter Rowberry, "Four Shades of Gray: The Amazon Kindle Platform" (MIT Press, 2022)

15 maj 2022 | 69 min

Four Shades of Gray: The Amazon Kindle Platform (MIT Press, 2022) is the first book-length analysis of Amazon's Kindle explores the platform's technological, bibliographical, and social impact on publishing.

Dr. Simon Peter Rowberry recounts how Amazon built the infrastructure for a new generation of digital publications, then considers the consequences of having a single company control the direction of the publishing industry. Exploring the platform from the perspectives of technology, texts, and uses, he shows how the Kindle challenges traditional notions of platforms as discrete entities. Dr. Rowberry argues that Amazon's influence extends beyond “disruptive technology” to embed itself in all aspects of the publishing trade; yet despite industry pushback, he says, the Kindle has had a positive influence on publishing.

Dr. Rowberry documents the first decade of the Kindle with case studies of Kindle Popular Highlights, an account of the digitization of books published after 1922, and a discussion of how Amazon's patent filings reflect a shift in priorities. Rowberry argues that while it was initially convenient for the book trade to outsource ebook development to Amazon, doing so has had adverse consequences for publishers in the mid- and long term, limiting opportunities for developing an inclusive and forward-thinking digital platform. While it has forced publishers to embrace digital forms, the Kindle has also empowered some previously marginalized readerships. Although it is still too early to judge the long-term impact of ebooks compared with that of the older technologies of clay tablets, the printing press, and offset printing, the shockwaves of the Kindle continue to shape publishing.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Sangeet Kumar, "The Digital Frontier: Infrastructures of Control on the Global Web" (Indiana UP, 2021)

10 maj 2022 | 47 min

Computational Creativity

6 maj 2022 | 21 min

John Zerilli, "A Citizen's Guide to Artificial Intelligence" (MIT Press, 2022)

4 maj 2022 | 66 min

Artificial intelligence, or AI for short, has generated a staggering amount of hype in the past several years. Is it the game-changer it's been cracked up to be? If so, how is it changing the game? How is it likely to affect us as customers, tenants, aspiring homeowners, students, educators, patients, clients, prison inmates, members of ethnic and sexual minorities, and voters in liberal democracies? Authored by experts in fields ranging from computer science and law to philosophy and cognitive science, A Citizen's Guide to Artificial Intelligence (MIT Press, 2022) offers a concise overview of moral, political, legal and economic implications of AI. It covers the basics of AI's latest permutation, machine learning, and considers issues such as transparency, bias, liability, privacy, and regulation.

Both business and government have integrated algorithmic decision support systems into their daily operations, and the book explores the implications for our lives as citizens. For example, do we take it on faith that a machine knows best in approving a patient's health insurance claim or a defendant's request for bail? What is the potential for manipulation by targeted political ads? How can the processes behind these technically sophisticated tools ever be transparent? The book discusses such issues as statistical definitions of fairness, legal and moral responsibility, the role of humans in machine learning decision systems, “nudging” algorithms and anonymized data, the effect of automation on the workplace, and AI as both regulatory tool and target.

Dr John Zerilli is a philosopher with particular interests in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and the law. He is currently a Leverhulme Fellow at the University of Oxford, a Research Associate in the Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI, and an Associate Fellow in the Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge.

Frances Sacks is a journalist and graduate of Wesleyan University where she studied in the Science and Society Program.

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Daniel J. Solove and Woodrow Hartzog, "Breached!: Why Data Security Law Fails and How to Improve It" (Oxford UP, 2022)

2 maj 2022 | 45 min

Digital connections permeate our lives-and so do data breaches. Given that we must be online for basic communication, finance, healthcare, and more, it is alarming how difficult it is to create rules for securing our personal information. Despite the passage of many data security laws, data breaches are increasing at a record pace. In Breached!: Why Data Security Law Fails and How to Improve It (Oxford UP, 2022), Daniel Solove and Woodrow Hartzog, two of the world's leading experts on privacy and data security, argue that the law fails because, ironically, it focuses too much on the breach itself.

Drawing insights from many fascinating stories about data breaches, Solove and Hartzog show how major breaches could have been prevented or mitigated through a different approach to data security rules. Current law is counterproductive. It pummels organizations that have suffered a breach but doesn't address the many other actors that contribute to the problem: software companies that create vulnerable software, device companies that make insecure devices, government policymakers who write regulations that increase security risks, organizations that train people to engage in risky behaviors, and more.

Although humans are the weakest link for data security, policies and technologies are often designed with a poor understanding of human behavior. Breached! corrects this course by focusing on the human side of security. Drawing from public health theory and a nuanced understanding of risk, Solove and Hartzog set out a holistic vision for data security law-one that holds all actors accountable, understands security broadly and in relationship to privacy, looks to prevention and mitigation rather than reaction, and works by accepting human limitations rather than being in denial of them. The book closes with a roadmap for how we can reboot law and policy surrounding data security.

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Amanda D. Lotz, "Media Disrupted: Surviving Pirates, Cannibals, and Streaming Wars" (MIT Press, 2021)

27 april 2022 | 76 min

Delinda Collier, "Media Primitivism: Technological Art in Africa" (Duke UP, 2020)

20 april 2022 | 58 min

Gavin Mueller, "Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job" (Verso, 2021)

20 april 2022 | 76 min

Nicole Starosielski, "Media Hot and Cold" (Duke UP, 2021)

20 april 2022 | 62 min

David Nemer, "Technology of the Oppressed: Inequity and the Digital Mundane in Favelas of Brazil" (MIT Press, 2022)

19 april 2022 | 44 min

In Technology of the Oppressed: Inequity and the Digital Mundane in Favelas of Brazil (MIT Press, 2022), David Nemer draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork to provide a rich account of how favela residents engage with technology in community technology centers and in their everyday lives. Their stories reveal the structural violence of the information age. But they also show how those oppressed by technology don’t just reject it, but consciously resist and appropriate it, and how their experiences with digital technologies enable them to navigate both digital and nondigital sources of oppression—and even, at times, to flourish. Nemer uses a decolonial and intersectional framework called Mundane Technology as an analytical tool to understand how digital technologies can simultaneously be sites of oppression and tools in the fight for freedom. Building on the work of the Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire, he shows how the favela residents appropriate everyday technologies—technological artifacts (cell phones, Facebook), operations (repair), and spaces (Telecenters and Lan Houses)—and use them to alleviate the oppression in their everyday lives. He also addresses the relationship of misinformation to radicalization and the rise of the new far right. Contrary to the simplistic techno-optimistic belief that technology will save the poor, even with access to technology these marginalized people face numerous sources of oppression, including technological biases, racism, classism, sexism, and censorship. Yet the spirit, love, community, resilience, and resistance of favela residents make possible their pursuit of freedom.

David Nemer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies and in the Latin American Studies program at the University of Virginia. He is also a Faculty Associate at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center and Princeton University's Brazil Lab. His research and teaching interests cover the intersection of Science and Technology Studies (STS), Anthropology of Technology, ICT for Development (ICT4D), and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Nemer is an ethnographer whose fieldworks include the Slums of Vitória, Brazil; Havana, Cuba; Guadalajara, Mexico; and Eastern Kentucky, Appalachia. Nemer is the author of Technology of the Oppressed (MIT Press, 2022) and Favela Digital: The other side of technology (Editora GSA, 2013).

Austin Clyde is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science. He researches artificial intelligence and high-performance computing for developing new scientific methods. He is also a visiting research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Science, Technology, and Society program, where my research addresses the intersection of artificial intelligence, human rights, and democracy.

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Susanne A. Wengle, "Black Earth, White Bread: A Technopolitical History of Russian Agriculture and Food" (U Wisconsin Press, 2022)

15 april 2022 | 62 min

In Black Earth, White Bread: A Technopolitical History of Russian Agriculture and Food (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022), Dr. Susanne A. Wengle shows how agrotechnology served—and undermined—Soviet and Russian political projects. “The book emphasises a tight connection between political change, technological change in food systems, and the transformation of everyday lives - a connection that we can grasp and understand through the lens of technopolitics.”

Like all facets of daily life, the food that Russian farms produced and citizens ate—or, in some years, didn’t eat—underwent radical shifts in the century between the Bolshevik Revolution and Vladimir Putin’s presidency. The modernization of agriculture during this time is usually understood in terms of advances in farming methods. Dr. Susanne A. Wengle’s important interdisciplinary history of Russia’s agriculture and food systems, however, documents a far more complex story of the interactions between political policies, daily cultural practices, and technological improvements.

“A central augment of this book is that politics and technologies together drive a change in food systems and that we should think of food systems as technopolitical regimes. Technopolitics refers to the support of and reliance on agricultural technologies - from tractors to CRISPR techniques - in policy regimes that seek to realise particular political goals and utopias. A technopolitical regime is forged by privileged agents of change and the technologies they employ to grow crops and raise animals.”

Examining governance, production, consumption, nature, and the ensuing vulnerabilities of the agrifood system, Dr. Wengle reveals the intended and unintended consequences of Russian agricultural policies since 1917. Ultimately, Black Earth, White Bread calls attention to Russian technopolitics and how macro systems of government impact life on a daily, quotidian level. “Food systems can be a lens to track interactions between domains of life that are too often seen as discrete and disconnected, such as rural production and urban consumption. They can also tell us about the interactions between human realms and the nonhuman realms of crops, livestock, climate and soil conditions.”

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Jonathan Beller, "The World Computer: Derivative Conditions of Racial Capitalism" (Duke UP, 2021)

15 april 2022 | 59 min

Susanne A. Wengle, "Black Earth, White Bread: A Technopolitical History of Russian Agriculture and Food" (U Wisconsin Press, 2022)

15 april 2022 | 62 min

In Black Earth, White Bread: A Technopolitical History of Russian Agriculture and Food (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022), Dr. Susanne A. Wengle shows how agrotechnology served—and undermined—Soviet and Russian political projects. “The book emphasises a tight connection between political change, technological change in food systems, and the transformation of everyday lives - a connection that we can grasp and understand through the lens of technopolitics.”

Like all facets of daily life, the food that Russian farms produced and citizens ate—or, in some years, didn’t eat—underwent radical shifts in the century between the Bolshevik Revolution and Vladimir Putin’s presidency. The modernization of agriculture during this time is usually understood in terms of advances in farming methods. Dr. Susanne A. Wengle’s important interdisciplinary history of Russia’s agriculture and food systems, however, documents a far more complex story of the interactions between political policies, daily cultural practices, and technological improvements.

“A central augment of this book is that politics and technologies together drive a change in food systems and that we should think of food systems as technopolitical regimes. Technopolitics refers to the support of and reliance on agricultural technologies - from tractors to CRISPR techniques - in policy regimes that seek to realise particular political goals and utopias. A technopolitical regime is forged by privileged agents of change and the technologies they employ to grow crops and raise animals.”

Examining governance, production, consumption, nature, and the ensuing vulnerabilities of the agrifood system, Dr. Wengle reveals the intended and unintended consequences of Russian agricultural policies since 1917. Ultimately, Black Earth, White Bread calls attention to Russian technopolitics and how macro systems of government impact life on a daily, quotidian level. “Food systems can be a lens to track interactions between domains of life that are too often seen as discrete and disconnected, such as rural production and urban consumption. They can also tell us about the interactions between human realms and the nonhuman realms of crops, livestock, climate and soil conditions.”

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Kris Ruijgrok, "Internet Use and Protest in Malaysia and Other Authoritarian Regimes" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021)

15 april 2022 | 35 min

Robert A Jacobs, "Nuclear Bodies: The Global Hibakusha" (Yale UP, 2022)

13 april 2022 | 71 min

Robert Jacob’s book Nuclear Bodies: The Global Hibakusha (Yale UP, 2022) re‑envisions the history of the Cold War as a slow nuclear war, fought on remote battlegrounds against populations powerless to prevent the contamination of their lands and bodies. Jacobs’s book put these “nuclear bodies” and the legacy of our eighty years history of nuclear weapon and power use at the center of his inquiry. The contaminated bodies of the hibakusha and the contaminated grounds on which they live (or in many cases lived. As many lost their homes), Jacobs argues, are largely invisible because of the colonial and post -colonial power relations that made these communities a target to begin with. Nuclear weapon tests and power stations usually were set at remote places, and the harm was done to people with no political power. Furthermore, it is not just contemporary communities that were harmed, but also future generations. “Plutonium will remain dangerous for over two hundred thousand years, and uranium particles for more than one million years”. Eighty years of tests and nuclear power have saddled our future descendants with radiative waste, most of which is still not safely stored, “a global legacy currently sitting in spent fuel pools and dry storage casks, waiting.” The invisibility of the problem and people affected by it, Jacobs argues, is manufactured in science and politics. Furthermore, the way we study the problem historically further obscured its scope. Different sites have been studied through different national historical “silos,” Jacobs, however, takes a global approach, and look at sites from Nevada to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Kazakhstan to Xinjian, and the various Pacific sites that were sites of nuclear tests and accidents since 1945 to make the invisible global hibakusha visible.

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Nic Marsh et al., "Indefensible: Seven Myths that Sustain the Global Arms Trade" (Zed Books, 2017)

7 april 2022 | 41 min

Robert Buderi, "Where Futures Converge: Kendall Square and the Making of a Global Innovation Hub" (MIT Press, 2022)

5 april 2022 | 56 min

Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been called “the most innovative square mile on the planet.” It's a life science hub, hosting Biogen, Moderna, Pfizer, Takeda, and others. It's a major tech center, with Google, Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple all occupying big chunks of pricey office space. Kendall Square also boasts a dense concentration of startups, with leading venture capital firms conveniently located nearby. And of course, MIT is just down the block. In Where Futures Converge: Kendall Square and the Making of a Global Innovation Hub (MIT Press, 2022), Robert Buderi offers the first detailed account of the unique ecosystem that is Kendall Square, chronicling the endless cycles of change and reinvention that have driven its evolution.

Buderi, who himself has worked in Kendall Square for the past twenty years, tells fascinating stories of great innovators and their innovations that stretch back two centuries. Before biotech and artificial intelligence, there was railroad car innovation, the first long-distance telephone call, the Polaroid camera, MIT's once secret, now famous Radiation Laboratory, and much more. Buderi takes readers on a walking tour of the square and talks to dozens of innovators, entrepreneurs, urban planners, historians, and others. He considers Kendall Square's limitations—it's “gentrification gone rogue,” by one description, with little affordable housing, no pharmacy, and a scarce middle class—and its strengths: the “human collisions” that spur innovation.

What's next for Kendall Square? Buderi speculates about the next big innovative enterprises and outlines lessons for aspiring innovation districts. More important, he asks how Kendall Square can be both an innovation hub and a diversity, equity, and inclusion hub. There's a lot of work still to do.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Thomas Haigh and Paul E. Ceruzzi, "A New History of Modern Computing" (MIT Press, 2021)

30 mars 2022 | 49 min

In A New History of Modern Computing (MIT Press, 2021), Thomas Haigh and Paul Ceruzzi trace changes leading to the computer becoming a ubiquitous technology. Over the past fifty years, the computer has been transformed from a hulking scientific super tool and data processing workhorse, remote from the experiences of ordinary people to a diverse family of devices that billions rely on to play games, shop, stream music, and movies, communicate, and count their steps. A comprehensive reimagining of Ceruzzi's A History of Modern Computing, this new volume uses each chapter to recount one such transformation, describing how a particular community of users and producers remade the computer into something new. Haigh and Ceruzzi ground their accounts of these computing revolutions in the longer and deeper history of computing technology. They begin with the story of the 1945 ENIAC computer, which introduced the vocabulary of "programs" and "programming," and proceed through email, pocket calculators, personal computers, the World Wide Web, videogames, smartphones, and our current world of computers everywhere--in phones, cars, appliances, watches, and more. Finally, they consider the Tesla Model S as an object that simultaneously embodies many strands of computing.

Dr. Thomas Haigh is a Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Comenius Visiting Professor at Siegen University. He has been researching the history of computing for more than twenty years and is a past chair of SIGCIS, the group for historians of information technology. He is the lead author, with Mark Priestley and Crispin Rope, of ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer, about the design, construction, and use of the first general-purpose programmable electronic computer, the ENIAC. His new book, with Paul Ceruzzi, is New History of Modern Computing: a comprehensive history of computing from ENIAC to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Austin Clyde is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science. He researches artificial intelligence and high-performance computing for developing new scientific methods. He is also a visiting research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Science, Technology, and Society program, where my research addresses the intersection of artificial intelligence, human rights, and democracy.

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Hannah Star Rogers, "Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies" (Routledge, 2021))

30 mars 2022 | 45 min

I spoke with Hannah Star Rogers, one of the editors of the Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies (Routledge, 2021). Art and science work is experiencing a dramatic rise coincident with burgeoning Science and Technology Studies (STS) interest in this area. Science has played the role of muse for the arts, inspiring imaginative reconfigurations of scientific themes and exploring their cultural resonance. Conversely, the arts are often deployed in the service of science communication, illustration, and popularization. STS scholars have sought to resist the instrumentalization of the arts by the sciences, emphasizing studies of theories and practices across disciplines and the distinctive and complementary contributions of each. The manifestation of this commonality of creative and epistemic practices is the emergence of Art, Science, and Technology Studies (ASTS) as the interdisciplinary exploration of art–science.

This handbook defines the modes, practices, crucial literature, and research interests of this emerging field. It explores the questions, methodologies, and theoretical implications of scholarship and practice that arise at the intersection of art and STS. Further, ASTS demonstrates how the arts are intervening in STS. Drawing on methods and concepts derived from STS and allied fields including visual studies, performance studies, design studies, science communication, and aesthetics, and the knowledge of practicing artists and curators, ASTS is predicated on the capacity to see both art and science as constructions of human knowledge-making. Accordingly, it posits a new analytical vernacular, enabling new ways of seeing, understanding, and thinking critically about the world.

This book provides scholars and practitioners already familiar with the themes and tensions of art–science with a means of connecting across disciplines. It proposes organizing principles for thinking about art–science across the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and arts. Encounters with art and science become meaningful in relation to practices and materials manifest as perceptual habits, background knowledge, and cultural norms. As the chapters in this book demonstrate, a variety of STS tools can be brought to bear on art–science so that systematic research can be conducted on this unique set of knowledge-making practices.

Hannah Star Rogers is Visiting Scholar at the University of Edinburgh in Science, Technology, and Innovation Studies (STIS) and lead editor of the Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies.

Frances Sacks is a journalist and graduate of Wesleyan University, where she studied in the Science and Society Program. She is also a drummer who has studied Gamelan in Bali, Berber in Morocco, and most traditional Ga patterns with master drummers in Ghana.

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Christopher Ali, "Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity" (MIT, 2021)

29 mars 2022 | 53 min

As much of daily life migrates online, broadband—high-speed internet connectivity—has become a necessity. The widespread lack of broadband in rural America has created a stark urban–rural digital divide. In Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity (MIT Press, 2021), Dr. Christopher Ali analyzes the promise and the failure of national rural broadband policy in the United States and proposes a new national broadband plan. He examines how broadband policies are enacted and implemented, explores business models for broadband providers, surveys the technologies of rural broadband, and offers case studies of broadband use in the rural Midwest.

Ali argues that rural broadband policy is both broken and incomplete: broken because it lacks coordinated federal leadership and incomplete because it fails to recognize the important roles of communities, cooperatives, and local providers in broadband access. For example, existing policies favor large telecommunication companies, crowding out smaller, nimbler providers. Lack of competition drives prices up—rural broadband can cost 37 percent more than urban broadband. The federal government subsidizes rural broadband by approximately $6 billion. Where does the money go? Ali proposes democratizing policy architecture for rural broadband, modeling it after the wiring of rural America for electricity and telephony. Subsidies should be equalized, not just going to big companies. The result would be a multi-stakeholder system, guided by thoughtful public policy and funded by public and private support.

Dr. Christopher Ali is Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia and is also the author of Media Localism: The Policies of Place. He is a Knight News Innovation Fellow with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and former Fellow with the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant,” was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, placemaking, and media representations of social life at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on a book titled Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River. You can learn more about Dr. Johnston on his website, Google Scholar, on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected].

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Scott Timcke, "Algorithms and the End of Politics: How Technology Shapes 21st-Century American Life" (Bristol UP, 2021)

28 mars 2022 | 56 min

Howard Burton, "Pandemic Perspectives: A Filmmaker's Journey in 10 Essays" (Open Agenda, 2022)

22 mars 2022 | 67 min

Kate Crawford, "The Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence" (Yale UP, 2021)

21 mars 2022 | 57 min

Ori Schwarz, "Sociological Theory for Digital Society: The Codes That Bind Us Together" (Polity Press, 2021)

16 mars 2022 | 31 min

Florian Jaton, "The Constitution of Algorithms: Ground-Truthing, Programming, Formulating" (MIT Press, 2021)

16 mars 2022 | 51 min

Lydia Pyne, "Postcards: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Social Network" (Reaktion Books, 2021)

15 mars 2022 | 43 min

Silvia M. Lindtner, "Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation" (Princeton UP, 2020)

10 mars 2022 | 62 min

Alan Rubel et al., "Algorithms and Autonomy: The Ethics of Automated Decision Systems" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

8 mars 2022 | 53 min

Sarah Brayne, "Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing" (Oxford UP, 2020)

4 mars 2022 | 55 min

Police use of advanced data collection and analysis technologies—or, "big data policing"—continues to receive both positive and negative attention through media, activism, and politics. While some high-profile cases illustrate its potential to hasten investigations or even solve previously unsolved crimes, and others showcase risks to individual liberties and vulnerable communities, we know surprisingly little about how and why police departments actually adopt and deploy these tools.

Sarah Brayne's new book, Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing (Oxford UP, 2021) provides the first in-depth study of these questions. Dr. Brayne recorded observations and interviews over a 5-year period of ethnographic fieldwork and follow-up with the LAPD. In the book, she examines the roles of extra- and intra-departmental factors in the uptake of big data tools, their relationship to the practice and culture of policing, and the impacts and reactions they've precipitated among captains, sworn officers, civilian analysts, and policed communities.

A major theme of the book is the role of discretion: While data-driven decision-making tools may promise to replace biased human judgment, in practice they can instead displace human judgment—to earlier and less visible steps in the process, exacerbating the problem they are invoked to solve. Conversely, i was also interested in how Dr. Brayne suggests we shift our perspectives on these tools: She proposes to think of a "big data environment" that shapes our social behavior, and she flips the analogy of data as capital to describe a "cumulative disadvantage" that accrues to those with less access to and control over the data collected on them.

Dr. Brayne's study has legal and scholarly as well as policy implications, and it will be of interest to anyone interested in the societal role of data or in that of police. I hope that it becomes part of the foundation for urgently needed future work at their intersection.

Suggested companion work: Ballad of the Bullet by Forrest Stuart (listen to Stuart's interview with Sarah E. Patterson here)

Sarah Brayne is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at The University of Texas at Austin. Prior to joining the faculty at UT-Austin, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research. Dr. Brayne is the founder and director of the Texas Prison Education Initiative, a group of faculty and students who volunteer to teach college classes in prisons throughout Texas.

Cory Brunson is an Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida. His research focuses on geometric and topological approaches to the analysis of medical and healthcare data.

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Firmin Debrabander, "Life After Privacy: Reclaiming Democracy in a Surveillance Society" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

3 mars 2022 | 49 min

Shameen Prashantham, "Gorillas Can Dance: Lessons from Microsoft and Other Corporations on Partnering with Startups" (Wiley, 2021)

17 februari 2022 | 33 min

Michael Luca and Max H. Bazerman, "The Power of Experiments: Decision Making in a Data-Driven World" (MIT Press, 2021)

16 februari 2022 | 54 min

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. Once an esoteric tool for academic research, the randomized controlled trial has gone mainstream. No tech company worth its salt (or its share price) would dare make major changes to its platform without first running experiments to understand how they would influence user behavior. In The Power of Experiments: Decision Making in a Data-Driven World (MIT Press, 2021), Michael Luca and Max Bazerman explain the importance of experiments for decision-making in a data-driven world.

Luca and Bazerman describe the central role experiments play in the tech sector, drawing lessons and best practices from the experiences of such companies as StubHub, Alibaba, and Uber. Successful experiments can save companies money—eBay, for example, discovered how to cut $50 million from its yearly advertising budget—or bring to light something previously ignored, as when Airbnb was forced to confront rampant discrimination by its hosts. Moving beyond tech, Luca and Bazerman consider experimenting for the social good—different ways that governments are using experiments to influence or “nudge” behavior ranging from voter apathy to school absenteeism. Experiments, they argue, are part of any leader's toolkit.

In this show, Peter Lorentzen interviews economist Michael Luca about this new book on how organizations—including Google, StubHub, Airbnb, and Facebook—learn from experiments in a data-driven world.

Michael Luca, a professor of business administration at Harvard University, is an expert on the design of online platforms and the use of data to inform managerial and policy decision-making.

Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new digital economy-focused Master's program in Applied Economics.

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Tony Veale, "Your Wit Is My Command: Building AIs with a Sense of Humor" (MIT Press, 2021)

16 februari 2022 | 66 min

Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick, "Designing Motherhood: Things that Make and Break Our Births" (MIT Press, 2021)

15 februari 2022 | 67 min

Jun Liu, "Shifting Dynamics of Contention in the Digital Age: Mobile Communication and Politics in China" (Oxford UP, 2020)

11 februari 2022 | 26 min

How has digital communication technologies impacted the dynamics of political contention in China? What is the role of mobile technology in the country with the world’s largest number of mobile and internet users? Why is there little domestic resistance about surveillance and technology-related privacy risks in China during the pandemic? Jun Liu, Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, shares his book Shifting Dynamics of Contention in the Digital Age: Mobile Communication and Politics in China (Oxford UP, 2020) with the Nordic Asia Podcast.

In his talk with Joanne Kuai, PhD candidate at Karlstad University, Sweden and affiliated PhD at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Jun Liu introduces his work on mobile communication and political activism based on first-hand in-depth interview and fieldwork data. He also draws on one of his latest papers to explain how China’s unprecedented measures to mobilise its diverse surveillance apparatus played a crucial part in the country’s containment of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

Jun Liu’s research stands at the intersection of communication, technology, politics, and society, with particular attention to the social, cultural, and political implications of digital communication. Drawing upon theories from communication, sociology, and political science, his research focuses on how digital technology interacts with socio-cultural forms and settings and generates new power dynamics in politics in specific cultural and institutional contexts such as authoritarian regimes like China.

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

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Kevin Coe and Joshua M. Scacco, "The Ubiquitous Presidency: Presidential Communication and Digital Democracy in Tumultuous Times" (Oxford UP, 2021)

10 februari 2022 | 59 min

The Ubiquitous Presidency: Presidential Communication and Digital Democracy in Tumultuous Times (Oxford UP, 2021) is part of the Oxford Studies in Digital Politics book series, and it makes an important contribution to the literature on the American presidency and the understanding of presidential rhetoric. There are decades of literature on the concept of the rhetorical presidency, dating back to the 1960s and 1970s. This area of study of executive politics focuses on public communication by the president, which is distinct from examining the powers and norms of the presidency itself. The media environment in which the president operates and in which the presidency exists has shifted and changed rather dramatically over the past century, moving the presidency to a position that is often or regularly the focus of news media, however consumed or delivered.

Josh Scacco and Kevin Coe’s new book examines this changed and continuing to change media landscape and to re-assess the capacity of presidential rhetoric, but they have also expanded and reconceptualized the idea of presidential communication, positioning it within important political contexts and goals that presidents often pursue. The Ubiquitous Presidency posits that accessibility, personalization, and pluralism (read as either exclusion or inclusion, depending on the president) are the dominant contexts in which to examine presidential communication. And that the goals that most presidents pursue within these contexts include visibility, adaptability, and control. Thus, Scacco and Coe have written about what has changed about the contemporary presidency, how it has adapted to changing circumstances, evolving digital spaces, and the need to seek audiences in these new spaces. They have also explained, within the research, how the president’s words may have more of an impact than is often considered to be the case. Given the changing environment in which presidential communication transpires, and the results that we have observed as individuals and group make choices and engage in activities based on communication from the president, there may, indeed, be significant effects connected to presidential rhetoric and communication.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @gorenlj.

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Rashmi Sadana, "The Moving City: Scenes from the Delhi Metro and the Social Life of Infrastructure" (U California Press, 2021)

9 februari 2022 | 67 min

Diane Coyle, "Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be" (Princeton UP, 2021)

8 februari 2022 | 35 min

Paul A. Offit, "You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation" (Basic Book, 2021)

7 februari 2022 | 40 min

Where the Wild Things Are: Reimagining the More-Than-Human City

4 februari 2022 | 25 min

Amidst accelerating environmental change and intense urbanisation, there is growing enthusiasm for building sustainable and ‘natural’ cities. Yet, when a flourishing eco-futuristic urban imaginary is enacted, it is often driven by a specific version of sustainability that is tied to high-tech futurism and persistent economic growth. In a Southeast Asian context, no city or country better encapsulates this than Singapore. But the pursuit of a singular narrative of progress has very specific consequences, particularly when that progress benefits some but not all beings. In this episode, Dr Natali Pearson is joined by Dr Jamie Wang to shed more light on the implications of Singapore’s growth fetish, and its implications for humans and non-humans.

About Jamie Wang:

Dr Jamie Wang is a Sydney Southeast Asia Centre Writing Fellow, a research affiliate in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, and an editor of the journal Feminist Review. She has a PhD in Environmental Humanities and Cultural Studies from the University of Sydney. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on the intersections of environmental humanities, urban geography, more-than-human studies and sustainable development in the context of planetary urbanism, climate change and environmental injustice. Jamie’s recent project ‘Reimagining the More-than-Human cities, stories of Singapore’ has explored the multifaceted pressing urban environmental issues, from urban greenery to housing development projects, transportation, water infrastructure, and urban agriculture, with a geographic focus in Singapore. It asks how we might develop ways of re-thinking, re-seeing and re-storying cities through foregrounding their more-than-human worlds. Jamie is also a writer and poet.

For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac.

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Peter Cappelli, "The Future of the Office: Work from Home, Remote Work, and the Hard Choices We All Face" (Wharton School Press, 2021)

3 februari 2022 | 45 min

In this episode I spoke to Professor Peter Cappelli about his new book The Future of the Office: Work from Home, Remote Work, and the Hard Choices We All Face (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). The COVID-19 pandemic forced an unprecedented experiment that reshaped white-collar work and turned remote work into a kind of "new normal." Now comes the hard part.

Many employees want to continue that normal and keep working remotely, and most at least want the ability to work occasionally from home. But for employers, the benefits of employees working from home or hybrid approaches are not so obvious. What should both groups do?

In a prescient new book, Cappelli lays out the facts in an effort to provide both employees and employers with a vision of their futures. Cappelli unveils the surprising tradeoffs both may have to accept to get what they want. Cappelli illustrates the challenges we face in drawing lessons from the pandemic and deciding what to do moving forward. Do we allow some workers to be permanently remote? Do we let others choose when to work from home? Do we get rid of their offices? What else has to change, depending on the approach we choose?

His research reveals there is no consensus among business leaders. Even the most high-profile and forward-thinking companies are taking divergent approaches:

Facebook, Twitter, and other tech companies say many employees can work remotely on a permanent basis. Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and others say it is important for everyone to come back to the office.

Ford is redoing its office space so that most employees can work from home at least part of the time, and GM is planning to let local managers work out arrangements on an ad-hoc basis.

As Cappelli examines, earlier research on other types of remote work, including telecommuting offers some guidance as to what to expect when some people will be in the office and others work at home, and also what happened when employers tried to take back offices. Neither worked as expected.

In a call to action for both employers and employees, Cappelli explores how we should think about the choices going forward as well as who wins and who loses. As he implores, we have to choose soon.

Peter Cappelli is the George W. Taylor Professor of Management at The Wharton School of Business and Director of Wharton’s Center for Human Resources. He teaches awesome sounding courses like How to be the boss and Managing and motivating. Some of his areas of research are human resource practices, public policy related to employment, talent, and performance management. He publishes in journals like theAcademy of Management Journal and Harvard Business Review and op-eds in many magazines like The New Yorker or the Atlantic magazine.

Paula De La Cruz-Fernandez is a consultant, historian, and digital editor. Editor New Books Network en español. Edita CEO.

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Grant Tavinor, "The Aesthetics of Virtual Reality" (Routledge, 2021)

28 januari 2022 | 53 min

73 Teletherapy with Hannah Zeavin (High Theory Crossover, Saronik)

27 januari 2022 | 20 min

Stephanie A. Martin, "Decoding the Digital Church: Evangelical Storytelling and the Election of Donald J. Trump" (U Alabama Press, 2021)

27 januari 2022 | 51 min

Dr. Stephanie (Sam) A. Martin’s new book, Decoding the Digital Church: Evangelical Storytelling and the Election of Donald J. Trump (U Alabama Press, 2021), is a fascinating exploration of the way that sermons, particularly those delivered by white evangelical pastors with sizeable congregations, link together storytelling, patriotism, conservative and Republican politics, and American exceptionalism. Martin’s work is a rich and deep textual and rhetorical analysis of sermons that are delivered both in person and online. These sermons—delivered over the course of more than a decade—reach many listeners and believers since they are given by pastors who preside over churches with congregations of at least 2000 members. And Martin teases out the focus of so many of these sermons, which are not always directly discussing or addressing politics, but have and continue to create an understanding of the white evangelical individual within American society.

Decoding the Digital Church explains that part of the thrust of this understanding is to position white Evangelicals as both insiders and outsiders simultaneously. Part of this context, as explained via these sermons, is that the American Founders were the original evangelicals, thus contemporary evangelicals have an original claim to the benefits of being the first true Americans. This is also combined with the nostalgic rendering of America’s past—building on the concept of American exceptionalism as well. At the same time, the content of these sermons opens the pathway for Evangelicals to disavow the ill-effects of their political choices, absolving them of the responsibility for their votes or those they support for elected office. Martin provides a “digital rhetorical ethnography” to understand the narratives that are coming through the white evangelical megachurches. To unpack the threads of these narratives, Martin uses a variety of methodological and disciplinary perspectives for her research, including approaches from political science, rhetoric and communication, sociology and ethnography, and religious studies. This is an accessible and important study of the connection between evangelical storytelling and the evangelical community’s understanding of its place and role in American society.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @gorenlj.

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Juan Manuel del Nido, "Taxis Vs. Uber: Courts, Markets and Technology in Buenos Aires" (Stanford UP, 2021)

25 januari 2022 | 64 min

Helga Nowotny, "In AI We Trust: Power, Illusion and Control of Predictive Algorithms" (Polity, 2021)

20 januari 2022 | 48 min

Thomas Huckle and Tobias Neckel, "Bits and Bugs: A Scientific and Historical Review of Software Failures in Computational Science" (SIAM, 2019)

17 januari 2022 | 64 min

A true understanding of the pervasive role of software in the world demands an awareness of the volume and variety of real-world software failures and their consequences. No more thorough survey of these events may be available than Thomas Huckle and Tobias Neckel's Bits and Bugs: A Scientific and Historical Review of Software Failures in Computational Science (SIAM, 2019). Their book organizing an extensive collection of episodes into eight chapters that expand on an array of flavors of failures, increasing in intricacy from precision and rounding errors to the software–hardware interface and problems that emerge from complexity.

As I see it, this book serves three audiences: Instructors of computer engineering or numerical methods will find an educational text uniquely suited to a focus on software failures; software engineers will find an equally unique reference text; and students of the practice or the history of computational science will find a fully blazed trail through these complicated stories. Dr. Huckle joined me to discuss his and his coauthor's motivations for assembling the book, a sampler of the chapter headliners, and some of his thoughts on new and evolving computational tools with their own attendant opportunities for failure.

Technical readers will appreciate the mathematical excursions that rigorously introduce topics essential to understanding each chapter's headlining episodes, the exercises and MATLAB code provided at the book's website, and links to sources at Dr. Huckle's website. I found value in the recurring lesson that real-world failures arise from the coincidence of multiple, often multitudinous errors, as well as in the authors' consistent emphasis on the real human toll that the study of these errors is driven to prevent. That said, all readers may appreciate the fanciful taxonomy given in the introduction and the amusing (though sometimes apocryphal) idiosyncratic failures surveyed in the appendix.

Suggested companion works:

Thomas Huckle completed a degree program in mathematics and physics education and in pure mathematics, received a doctorate in 1985, and acquired his postdoctoral teaching qualification (habiliation) in 1991 at the University of Würzburg. A German research Foundation (DFG) grant enabled him to spend time performing research at Stanford University (1993–1994). In 1995 Professor Huckle joined TUM as professor of scientific computing. He has also been a member of the Mathematics Faculty since 1997. His primary research area is numerical linear algebra and its application in fields such as informatics and physics. His work focuses on solving linear problems on parallel computers, image processing and reconstruction, partial differential equations, and structured matrices.

Tobias Neckel has studied applied mathematics at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and received a doctorate in Computer Science at TUM in 2009. He is currently senior researcher in scientific computing at TUM and has conducted research at the École Polytechnique, France (2003), the Tokyo Institute of Technology (2008), and the Australian National University (2017). His research interests include the numerical solution of differential equations, hierarchic and adaptive methods, uncertainty quantification, and various aspects of high-performance computing.

Cory Brunson is an Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida. His research focuses on geometric and topological approaches to the analysis of medical and healthcare data.

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Janneke Adema, "Living Books: Experiments in the Posthumanities" (MIT Press, 2021)

22 december 2021 | 57 min

Joseph Reagle on H. G. Wells's "World Brain" (1937)

22 december 2021 | 60 min

Jessica Hurley, "Infrastructures of Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex" (U Minnesota Press, 2020)

20 december 2021 | 63 min

Andrew Piper, "Can We Be Wrong? The Problem of Textual Evidence in a Time of Data" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

14 december 2021 | 47 min

Arnold Pacey and Francesca Bray, "Technology in World Civilization" (MIT Press, 2021)

10 december 2021 | 73 min

Winka Dubbeldam, "Strange Objects, New Solids and Massive Forms" (Actar, 2022)

9 december 2021 | 32 min

The object as solid, having three dimensions, is not just a different formal trend, but a paradigm shift; a reconceiving of how the architectural object is produced and experienced, changing the very concept of objectivity and meaning of architecture. This book celebrates the potential of the strange object, which finds its origin in the proto-space―the moment between the becoming of the idea and the ultimate shape it takes; the state of the still obscure and ‘uninhibited’ object outside the established framework of signification. As seen through an examination of 10 projects by Archi-Tectonics, this strange object is proof of the very capacity of the object to generate new habits and meanings.

For close to a century, modernism was the norm, presented to culturally aware citizens as the expression of modern life. It arrived hand in hand with medical advances, mass standardization, and a shared ideal of what the ease and speed of the modern lifestyle could offer. Only in the early years of the 21st century did our widespread allegiance begin to shift away from modernism and towards a new social realm. The digital revolution introduced online societies, niche cultures, and digital design. Digital manufacturing facilitated opportunities of surface patterning and the fabrication of one-off special building components, removing the constraints of standardization in the construction industry and celebrating the experimental. Testing designs through prototypes allows for a much more informed decision-making process. The focus is on precise, rigorous research and development, rather than representational models.

Now, after nearly two decades of implementing digital tools, we have reached a new platform where digital design and robotic production are the norm, and by extension, digital craft and integral design are as the future. This has been particularly important in the rethinking of advanced digital design processes. As showcased and examined in Strange Objects, New Solids and Massive Forms (Actar, 2022), from the earliest projects and regardless of scale, Archi-Tectonics has valued performance over form, design intelligence over style. Through prototypes and mock-ups, process documentation and testimonials, the book presents 10 current and recent projects that celebrate the particular and singular over the ideal and universal.

Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Assistant Professor at Alfred State College and has served as the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture.

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Herbert Lin, "Cyber Threats and Nuclear Weapons" (Stanford UP, 2021)

22 november 2021 | 54 min

Kenneth O'Reilly, "Asphalt: A History" (U Nebraska Press, 2021)

22 november 2021 | 89 min

Chinese Digital Vigilantism: The Mediated and Mediatised Justice-Seeking

19 november 2021 | 29 min

Gabriella Lukács, "Invisibility by Design: Women and Labor in Japan's Digital Economy" (Duke UP, 2020)

18 november 2021 | 59 min

68 Martin Puchner: Writing and Reading from Gilgamesh to Amazon

18 november 2021 | 43 min

Book Industry Month continues with a memory-lane voyage back to a beloved early RtB episode. This conversation with Martin Puchner about the very origins of writing struck us as perfect companion to Mark McGurl's wonderful insights (in RtB 67, published earlier this month) about the publishing industry's in 2021, or as Mark tells it, the era of "adult diaper baby love."

Aside from being a fabulous conversation about Martin's wonderful history of book production through the ages (The Written World) this episode brings back happy memories of Elizabeth and John piling their guests into a cozy sound booth at Brandeis, the kind of place that's utterly taboo in Pandemic America.So travel with us back to 2019 for a close encounter with the epic of Gilgamesh. The three friends discuss the different stages of world writing--from the time of the scribes to the time of great teachers like Confucius, Socrates and Jesus Christ, who had a very complicated relationship to writing.

In Recallable Books, Martin recommends the fan fiction website Wattpad; Elizabeth recommends "No Reservations: Narnia," in which Anthony Bourdain goes through the wardrobe. John feints at recommending Dennis Tenen's book on the writing within coding before recommending the Brautigan Library.

Come for the discussion of writing, stay for the impressions of Gollum!

Discussed in this episode:

The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History and Civilization, Martin Puchner
Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse, David Ferry
Wattpad
"No Reservations: Narnia," Edonohana
Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation, David Tenen
The Brautigan Library

Episode transcript available here: Episode 6 Puchner 3.28.19

Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: [email protected]. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: [email protected].

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Robert Brooks, "Artificial Intimacy: Virtual Friends, Digital Lovers, and Algorithmic Matchmakers" (Columbia UP, 2021)

15 november 2021 | 64 min

What happens when the human brain, which evolved over eons, collides with twenty-first-century technology? Machines can now push psychological buttons, stimulating and sometimes exploiting the ways people make friends, gossip with neighbors, and grow intimate with lovers. Sex robots present the humanoid face of this technological revolution―yet although it is easy to gawk at their uncanniness, more familiar technologies based in artificial intelligence and virtual reality are insinuating themselves into human interactions. Digital lovers, virtual friends, and algorithmic matchmakers help us manage our feelings in a world of cognitive overload. Will these machines, fueled by masses of user data and powered by algorithms that learn all the time, transform the quality of human life?

Robert Brooks, Artificial Intimacy: Virtual Friends, Digital Lovers, and Algorithmic Matchmakers (Columbia UP, 2021) offers an innovative perspective on the possibilities of the present and near future. The evolutionary biologist Rob Brooks explores the latest research on intimacy and desire to consider the interaction of new technologies and fundamental human behaviors. He details how existing artificial intelligences can already learn and exploit human social needs―and are getting better at what they do. Brooks combines an understanding of core human traits from evolutionary biology with analysis of how cultural, economic, and technological contexts shape the ways people express them. Beyond the technology, he asks what the implications of artificial intimacy will be for how we understand ourselves.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected].

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Herman Cappelen and Josh Dever, "Making AI Intelligible: Philosophical Foundations" (Oxford UP, 2021)

11 november 2021 | 73 min

Jeffrey J. Hall, "Japan's Nationalist Right in the Internet Age: Online Media and Grassroots Conservative Activism" (Routledge, 2021)

11 november 2021 | 60 min

Sima Shakhsari, "Politics of Rightful Killing: Civil Society, Gender, and Sexuality in Weblogistan" (Duke UP, 2020)

10 november 2021 | 66 min

In the early 2000s, mainstream international news outlets celebrated the growth of Weblogistan—the online and real-life transnational network of Iranian bloggers—and depicted it as a liberatory site that gave voice to Iranians. As Sima Shakhsari argues in Politics of Rightful Killing: Civil Society, Gender, and Sexuality in Weblogistan (Duke UP, 2020), the common assumptions of Weblogistan as a site of civil society consensus and resistance to state oppression belie its deep internal conflicts. While Weblogistan was an effective venue for some Iranians to “practice democracy,” it served as a valuable site for the United States to surveil bloggers and express anti-Iranian sentiment and policies. At the same time, bloggers used the network to self-police and enforce gender and sexuality norms based on Western liberal values in ways that unwittingly undermined Weblogistan's claims of democratic participation. In this way, Weblogistan became a site of cybergovernmentality, where biopolitical security regimes disciplined and regulated populations. Analyzing online and off-line ethnography, Shakhsari provides an account of digital citizenship that raises questions about the internet's relationship to political engagement, militarism, and democracy.

Sima Shakhsari is Associate Professor in the Department of Gender, Women & Sexualities Studies at the University of Minnesota. They are interested in transnational feminist theory, transnational sexuality studies, non-Eurocentric queer and transgender studies, Middle East studies, empire, militarism, neoliberal governmentality, biopolitics, digital media, refugees, diasporas, and political anthropology. They earned their PhD in Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford University and have held postdoctoral positions at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wolf Humanities Center and the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at the University of Houston. Before joining UMN, they were Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Wellesley College.

Sohini Chatterjee is a PhD Student in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Western University, Canada. Her work has recently appeared in South Asian Popular Culture and Fat Studies.

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Andrew Leigh, "What's the Worst That Could Happen?: Existential Risk and Extreme Politics" (MIT Press, 2021)

10 november 2021 | 42 min

Did you know that you're more likely to die from a catastrophe than in a car crash? The odds that a typical US resident will die from a catastrophic event—for example, nuclear war, bioterrorism, or out-of-control artificial intelligence—have been estimated at 1 in 6. That's fifteen times more likely than a fatal car crash and thirty-one times more likely than being murdered. In What's the Worst That Could Happen?: Existential Risk and Extreme Politics (MIT Press, 2021), Andrew Leigh looks at catastrophic risks and how to mitigate them, arguing provocatively that the rise of populist politics makes catastrophe more likely.

Leigh explains that pervasive short-term thinking leaves us unprepared for long-term risks. Politicians sweat the small stuff—granular policy details of legislation and regulation—but rarely devote much attention to reducing long-term risks. Populist movements thrive on short-termism because they focus on their followers' immediate grievances. Leigh argues that we should be long-termers: broaden our thinking and give big threats the attention and resources they need.

Leigh outlines the biggest existential risks facing humanity and suggests remedies for them. He discusses pandemics, considering the possibility that the next virus will be more deadly than COVID-19; warns that unchecked climate change could render large swaths of the earth uninhabitable; describes the metamorphosis of the arms race from a fight into a chaotic brawl; and examines the dangers of runaway superintelligence. Moreover, Leigh points out, populism (and its crony, totalitarianism) not only exacerbates other dangers but is also a risk factor in itself, undermining the institutions of democracy as we watch.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected].

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Yuri Kostenko, "Ukraine's Nuclear Disarmament: A History" (HURI, 2020)

9 november 2021 | 31 min

67 Everything and Less: Mark McGurl on Books in the Age of Amazon

4 november 2021 | 44 min

Caitlin Ring Carlson, "Hate Speech" (MIT Press, 2021)

29 oktober 2021 | 67 min

Roberto J. González, "Connected: How a Mexican Village Built Its Own Cell Phone Network" (U California Press, 2020)

26 oktober 2021 | 67 min

Alex Pentland and Alexander Lipton, "Building the New Economy: Data As Capital" (MIT Press, 2021)

25 oktober 2021 | 60 min

Ashley Hinck, "Politics for the Love of Fandom: Fan-Based Citizenship in a Digital World" (LSU Press, 2019)

22 oktober 2021 | 59 min

Rebecca L. Stein, "Screen Shots: State Violence on Camera in Israel and Palestine" (Stanford UP, 2021)

20 oktober 2021 | 63 min

Andrew Dodd and Matthew Ricketson, "Upheaval: The Great Digital Disruption in Journalism and Its Aftermath" (NewSouth, 2021)

19 oktober 2021 | 63 min

Katherine Chandler, "Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare" (Rutgers UP, 2020)

19 oktober 2021 | 58 min

Catherine Knight Steele, "Digital Black Feminism" (NYU Press, 2021)

18 oktober 2021 | 37 min

Luci Marzola, "Engineering Hollywood: Technology, Technicians, and the Science of Building the Studio System" (Oxford UP, 2021)

13 oktober 2021 | 69 min

Luci Marzola's book Engineering Hollywood: Technology, Technicians, and the Science of Building Studio System (Oxford University Press, 2021) tells the story of the formation of the Hollywood studio system not as the product of a genius producer, but as an industry that brought together creative practices and myriad cutting-edge technologies in ways that had never been seen before.

Using extensive archival research, Marzola's book examines the role of technicians, engineers, and trade organizations in creating a stable technological infrastructure on which the studio system rested for decades. Here, the studio system is seen as a technology-dependent business with connections to the larger American industrial world. By focusing on the role played by technology, we see a new map of the studio system beyond the backlots of Los Angeles and the front offices in New York. In this study, Hollywood includes the labs of industrial manufacturers, the sales routes of independent firms, the garages of tinkerers, and the clubhouses of technicians' societies. Rather than focusing on the technical improvements in any particular motion picture tool, this book centers on the larger systems and infrastructures for dealing with technology in this creative industry. Engineering Hollywood argues that the American industry was stabilized and able to dominate the motion picture field for decades through collaboration over technologies of everyday use. Hollywood's relationship to its essential technology was fundamentally one of interdependence and cooperation-with manufacturers, trade organizations, and the competing studios. As such, Hollywood could be defined as an industry by participation in a closed system of cooperation that allowed a select group of producers and manufacturers to dominate the motion picture business for decades.

Luci Marzola is a film and media historian who writes about the technology, labor, and infrastructure of the American film industry in the silent and classical eras. She teaches in the Department of Film and Media Studies at University of California Irvine and at Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts.

Joel Tscherne is an Adjunct History Professor at Southern New Hampshire University. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne.

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Cait McKinney, "Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies" (Duke UP, 2020)

8 oktober 2021 | 48 min

Deanna Marcum and Roger C. Schonfeld, "Along Came Google: A History of Library Digitization" (Princeton UP, 2021)

7 oktober 2021 | 61 min

Paul Milgrom, "Discovering Prices: Auction Design in Markets with Complex Constraints" (Columbia UP, 2017)

6 oktober 2021 | 47 min

Paul Thagard, "Bots and Beasts: What Makes Machines, Animals, and People Smart?" (MIT Press, 2021)

6 oktober 2021 | 62 min

Jaap-Henk Hoepman, "Privacy Is Hard and Seven Other Myths: Achieving Privacy Through Careful Design" (MIT Press, 2021)

5 oktober 2021 | 62 min

Elaine Yuan, "The Web of Meaning: The Internet in a Changing Chinese Society" (U Toronto Press, 2021)

1 oktober 2021 | 26 min

What is the impact of Internet technology communication in China? How do Chinese people view "privacy" differently from the western perspective? How is the newly passed China's Personal Information Protection Law going to impact people's lives? In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, a visiting PhD Candidate at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Elaine Yuan, an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois, Chicago, talks about her recent book, The Web of Meaning: the Internet in a Changing Chinese Society (University of Toronto Press, 2021).

Elaine Yuan's research focuses on how new and emerging forms of communication mediate various social institutions and relations. She has extensively researched the subjects of network and mobile communication, social media, digital infrastructure, and cultural change processes. Her latest book examines the role of the Internet as symbolic fields for reproducing the cultural practices of privacy, nationalism, and the network market in China.

Through three empirical cases – online privacy, cyber-nationalism, and the network market – the book traces how different social actors negotiate the practices, social relations, and power structures that define these evolving institutions in Chinese society. Examining rich user-generated social media data with innovative methods such as semantic network analysis and topic modelling, The Web of Meaning provides a solid empirical base to critique for critiquing the power relationships embedded in Chinese society's very fibre.

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

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Eric. S. Hintz, "American Independent Inventors in an Era of Corporate R&D" (MIT Press, 2021)

28 september 2021 | 81 min

Wonder how America's individual inventors persisted alongside corporate R&D labs as an important source of inventions beginning at the turn of the early twentieth century?

American Independent Inventors in an Era of Corporate R&D (MIT Press, 2021) by Eric S. Hintz presents a candid look into the history behind the phenomenon.

During the nineteenth century, heroic individual inventors such as Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell created entirely new industries while achieving widespread fame. However, by 1927, a New York Times editorial suggested that teams of corporate scientists at General Electric, AT&T, and DuPont had replaced the solitary "garret inventor" as the wellspring of invention. But these inventors never disappeared. In this book, Eric Hintz argues that lesser-known inventors such as Chester Carlson (Xerox photocopier), Samuel Ruben (Duracell batteries), and Earl Tupper (Tupperware) continued to develop important technologies throughout the twentieth century. Moreover, Hintz explains how independent inventors gradually fell from public view as corporate brands increasingly became associated with high-tech innovation.

Focusing on the years from 1890 to 1950, Hintz documents how American independent inventors competed (and sometimes partnered) with their corporate rivals, adopted a variety of flexible commercialization strategies, established a series of short-lived professional groups, lobbied for fairer patent laws, and mobilized for two world wars. After 1950, the experiences of independent inventors generally mirrored the patterns of their predecessors, and they continued to be overshadowed during corporate R&D's postwar golden age. The independents enjoyed a resurgence, however, at the turn of the twenty-first century, as Apple's Steve Jobs and Shark Tank's Lori Greiner heralded a new generation of heroic inventor-entrepreneurs. By recovering the stories of a group once considered extinct, Hintz shows that independent inventors have long been—and remain—an important source of new technologies.

Nathan Moore is a history Ph.D. candidate and graduate assistant at Auburn University.

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Chris Bleakley, "Poems That Solve Puzzles: The History and Science of Algorithms" (Oxford UP, 2020)

27 september 2021 | 84 min

As algorithms become ever more significant to and embedded in our everyday lives, ever more accessible introductions to them are needed. While several excellent technical and critical treatments have emerged in recent years, i had not come across a book for the general public that would provide a deep sense for the intuitions and motivations behind their development. Chris Bleakley's new book offers this and more: conceptual rigor woven into historical vignettes in a style that i believe general readers will find truly enjoyable to read.

Poems that Solve Puzzles: The History and Science of Algorithms (Oxford UP, 2020) is itself a quite poetic book, in which echoes of ideas and variations on themes can be heard throughout. Its stories encompass the early hypothetical and mechanical computers, the charactered rise of weather forecasting, the origins (and lulls) of machine learning, and the sensational competitions between master game players and artificial intelligence. The book traverses a long historical arc, but each episode is a quick read, remarkable in their ability to convey depth and rigor in crisp, plain language. It was a delight to talk with Chris about these and other aspects of his book.

Suggested companion works:

--Simon Singh, The Code Book

--George Dyson, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

--Greg Kohs (director), "AlphaGo"

Chris Bleakley is Head of the School of Computer Science at University College Dublin. He graduated with a BSc (Hons) degree in Computer Science from Queen's University, Belfast, and a PhD degree in Electronic Engineering from Dublin City University. After college, he was employed as a software consultant by Accenture and, later, as a senior telecommunications researcher at Broadcom Eireann Research.

Cory Brunson is an Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida. His research focuses on geometric and topological approaches to the analysis of medical and healthcare data.

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Shannon Mattern, "A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences" (Princeton UP, 2021)

24 september 2021 | 47 min

Computational models of urbanism—smart cities that use data-driven planning and algorithmic administration—promise to deliver new urban efficiencies and conveniences. Yet these models limit our understanding of what we can know about a city. A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences (Princeton UP, 2021) reveals how cities encompass myriad forms of local and indigenous intelligences and knowledge institutions, arguing that these resources are a vital supplement and corrective to increasingly prevalent algorithmic models.

Shannon Mattern begins by examining the ethical and ontological implications of urban technologies and computational models, discussing how they shape and in many cases profoundly limit our engagement with cities. She looks at the methods and underlying assumptions of data-driven urbanism, and demonstrates how the “city-as-computer” metaphor, which undergirds much of today’s urban policy and design, reduces place-based knowledge to information processing. Mattern then imagines how we might sustain institutions and infrastructures that constitute more diverse, open, inclusive urban forms. She shows how the public library functions as a steward of urban intelligence, and describes the scales of upkeep needed to sustain a city’s many moving parts, from spinning hard drives to bridge repairs.

Incorporating insights from urban studies, data science, and media and information studies, A City Is Not a Computer offers a visionary new approach to urban planning and design.

Shannon Mattern is professor of anthropology at the New School for Social Research. Her books include Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media and The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities. She lives in New York City. Website wordsinspace.net Instagram @atlas.sounds Twitter @shannonmattern

Alize Arıcan is a Postdoctoral Associate at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Analysis. She is an anthropologist whose research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography.

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Ruth Aylett and Patricia A. Vargas, "Living with Robots: What Every Anxious Human Needs to Know" (MIT Press, 2021)

21 september 2021 | 66 min

Firmin DeBrabander, "Life after Privacy: Reclaiming Democracy in a Surveillance Society" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

20 september 2021 | 47 min

Caitlin Petre, "All the News That’s Fit to Click: How Metrics Are Transforming the Work of Journalists" (Princeton UP, 2021)

10 september 2021 | 52 min

Over the past 15 years, journalism has experienced a rapid proliferation of data about online reader behavior in the form of web metrics. These newsroom metrics influence which stories are written, how news is promoted, and which journalists get hired and fired. Some argue that metrics help journalists better serve their audiences. Others worry that metrics are the contemporary equivalent of a stopwatch-wielding factory manager. In All the News That's Fit to Click: How Metrics Are Transforming the Work of Journalists (Princeton UP 2021), Caitlin Petre offers a rare behind-the-scenes look at how metrics are reshaping the work of journalism.

The book is based on Petre's interviews and ethnographic observations at Chartbeat, Gawker, and the New York Times. Across the organizations, she finds that newsroom metrics are a powerful form of managerial surveillance and discipline. However, unlike the manager's stopwatch that preceded them, digital metrics are designed to gain the trust of wary journalists by providing a habit-forming user experience that mimics key features of addictive games. She details how metrics intersect with newsroom hierarchies and norms, as well as how their ambiguity leads to seemingly arbitrary interpretations of success. As performance analytics spread to virtually every professional field, Petre's findings speak to the future of expertise and labor relations in contexts far beyond journalism.

Caitlin Petre is an assistant professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University. Jenna Spinelle is an instructor in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State and host of the Democracy Works podcast.

Jenna Spinelle is a journalism instructor at Penn State's Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications. She's also the communications specialist for the university's McCourtney Institute for Democracy, where she hosts and produces the Democracy Works podcast.

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Angelica Malin, "She Made It: The Toolkit for Female Founders in the Digital Age" (Kogan Page, 2021)

9 september 2021 | 33 min

Silvia Casini, "Giving Bodies Back to Data: Image Makers, Bricolage, and Reinvention in Magnetic Resonance Technology" (MIT Press, 2021)

9 september 2021 | 62 min

Our bodies are scanned, probed, imaged, sampled, and transformed into data by clinicians and technologists. In Giving Bodies Back to Data: Image Makers, Bricolage, and Reinvention in Magnetic Resonance Technology (MIT Press, 2021), Silvia Casini reveals the affective relations and materiality that turn data into image–and in so doing, gives bodies back to data. Opening the black box of MRI technology, Casini examines the bodily, situated aspects of visualization practices around the development of this technology. Reframing existing narratives of biomedical innovation, she emphasizes the important but often overlooked roles played by aesthetics, affectivity, and craft practice in medical visualization.

Combining history, theory, laboratory ethnography, archival research, and collaborative art-science, Casini retrieves the multiple presences and agencies of bodies in data visualization, mapping the traces of scientists’ body work and embodied imagination. She presents an in-depth ethnographic study of MRI development at the University of Aberdeen’s biomedical physics laboratory, from the construction of the first whole-body scanner for clinical purposes through the evolution of the FFC-MRI. Going beyond her original focus on MRI, she analyzes a selection of neuroscience- or biomedicine-inspired interventions by artists in media ranging from sculpture to virtual reality. Finally, she presents a methodology for designing and carrying out small-scale art-science projects, describing a collaboration that she herself arranged, highlighting the relational and aesthetic-laden character of data that are the product of craftsmanship and affective labor at the laboratory bench.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected].

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Audrey Watters, "Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning" (MIT Press, 2021)

7 september 2021 | 49 min

Andrew Flachs, "Cultivating Knowledge: Biotechnology, Sustainability, and the Human Cost of Cotton Capitalism in India" (U Arizona Press, 2019)

27 augusti 2021 | 59 min

Carol Anderson, "The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

20 augusti 2021 | 56 min

Throughout American history to the twenty-first century, regardless of the laws, court decisions, and changing political environment, the Second Amendment has consistently meant this: That the second a Black person exercises this right, the second they pick up a gun to protect themselves (or the second that they don't), their life--as surely as Philando Castile's, Tamir Rice's, Alton Sterling's--may be snatched away in that single, fatal second.

In The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomsbury, 2021) historian Carol Anderson powerfully illuminates the history and impact of the Second Amendment, how it was designed, and how it has consistently been constructed to keep African Americans powerless and vulnerable. The Second is neither a “pro-gun” nor an “anti-gun” book; the lens is the citizenship rights and human rights of African Americans.

Through compelling historical narrative merging into the unfolding events of today, Anderson's penetrating investigation shows that the Second Amendment is not about guns but about anti-Blackness, shedding shocking new light on another dimension of racism in America.

Dr. Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Emory University. She is the author of One Person, No Vote, longlisted for the National Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award; White Rage, a New York Times bestseller and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; Bourgeois Radicals; and Eyes off the Prize. She was named a Guggenheim Fellow for Constitutional Studies. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia. Connect on Twitter @ProfCAnderson

Dr. Lee Pierce (they & she) is Assistant Professor of Rhetorical Communication at State University of New York at Geneseo and host of the podcast RhetoricLee Speaking. Connect with Lee on Twitter, Instagram, and Gmail @rhetoriclee

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Matthew Flisfeder, "Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media" (Northwestern UP, 2021)

20 augusti 2021 | 89 min

One of the most fundamental aspects of modern life is that much of it is lived on and through social media. We create profiles, post pictures, update stories, and even find new careers and lovers on various sites and apps. But is all this good for us? Our always-online way of living has been called into question for quite some time now, with many people, young and old, finding themselves burned out and disconnected in a world with no shortage of connections. So what does this prevalence of social media mean for our society at large?

This question is one of the starting points for my guest today, Matthew Flisfeder, in his new book Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media (Northwestern UP, 2021). While he is curious about the affects of social media on society, he also spends much of the book trying to flip the question around and ask: what does the structure of our society mean for social media? Flisfeder is interested in thinking of social media in it’s social, political and economic context, seeing the form our current social media takes as a gateway into broader social and economic structures. This broad Marxist vision is brought together with the theories of subjectivity developed in recent critical theory, particularly of Slavoj Žižek, to better understand both the ways social media hooks us into exploitative mechanisms, but it also gives us some offramps for possible resistance. Flisfeder is no luddite; not only is he himself an enthusiastic user of social media, but his critique here is meant as a course-correction rather than an all-out condemnation. If social media today produces alienation rather than true connection, then what does that tell us about society more broadly? And, more provocatively, what does it mean for broader social critique to take the social in social media seriously?

Matthew Flisfeder is an associate professor of rhetoric and communications at the University of Winnipeg. He is also the author of Postmodern Theory and Bladerunner and The Symbolic, the Sublime, and Slavoj Žižek’s Theory of Film. You can follow him on Twitter.

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Craig Robertson, "The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)

20 augusti 2021 | 61 min

The history of how a deceptively ordinary piece of office furniture transformed our relationship with information The ubiquity of the filing cabinet in the twentieth-century office space, along with its noticeable absence of style, has obscured its transformative role in the histories of both information technology and work.

In The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information (U Minnesota Press, 2021), Craig Robertson explores how the filing cabinet profoundly shaped the way that information and data have been sorted, stored, retrieved, and used. Invented in the 1890s, the filing cabinet was a result of the nineteenth-century faith in efficiency. Previously, paper records were arranged haphazardly: bound into books, stacked in piles, curled into slots, or impaled on spindles. The filing cabinet organized loose papers in tabbed folders that could be sorted alphanumerically, radically changing how people accessed, circulated, and structured information. Robertson's unconventional history of the origins of the information age posits the filing cabinet as an information storage container, an "automatic memory" machine that contributed to a new type of information labor privileging manual dexterity over mental deliberation. Gendered assumptions about women's nimble fingers helped to naturalize the changes that brought women into the workforce as low-level clerical workers. The filing cabinet emerges from this unexpected account as a sophisticated piece of information technology and a site of gendered labor that with its folders, files, and tabs continues to shape how we interact with information and data in today's digital world.

Nushelle de Silva is a PhD candidate in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work examines museums and exhibitions, and how the dissemination of visual culture is politically mediated by international organizations in the twentieth century.

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James W. Cortada, "IBM: The Rise and Fall and Reinvention of a Global Icon" (MIT Press, 2019)

18 augusti 2021 | 43 min

P. J. Boczkowski and E. Mitchelstein, "The Digital Environment: How We Live, Learn, Work, and Play Now" (MIT Press, 2021)

17 augusti 2021 | 66 min

Increasingly we live through our personal screens; we work, play, socialize, and learn digitally. The shift to remote everything during the pandemic was another step in a decades-long march toward the digitization of everyday life made possible by innovations in media, information, and communication technology. In The Digital Environment: How We Live, Learn, Work, and Play Now (MIT Press, 2021), Pablo Boczkowski and Eugenia Mitchelstein offer a new way to understand the role of the digital in our daily lives, calling on us to turn our attention from our discrete devices and apps to the array of artifacts and practices that make up the digital environment that envelops every aspect of our social experience.

Boczkowski and Mitchelstein explore a series of issues raised by the digital takeover of everyday life, drawing on interviews with a variety of experts. They show how existing inequities of gender, race, ethnicity, education, and class are baked into the design and deployment of technology, and describe emancipatory practices that counter this--including the use of Twitter as a platform for activism through such hashtags as #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo. They discuss the digitization of parenting, schooling, and dating--noting, among other things, that today we can both begin and end relationships online. They describe how digital media shape our consumption of sports, entertainment, and news, and consider the dynamics of political campaigns, disinformation, and social activism. Finally, they report on developments in three areas that will be key to our digital future: data science, virtual reality, and space exploration.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected].

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James Ladyman and K. Wiesner, "What Is a Complex System?" (Yale UP, 2020)

30 juli 2021 | 74 min

While i find it pretty easy to recognize when i'm reading articles in complexity science, i've never been satisfied by definitions of complexity and related concepts. I'm not alone! Researchers' own attempts to define complex systems incorporate a mix of folk wisdom and fraught assumptions anchored to a menagerie of contested examples. The field was ripe for a 2013 article proposing a unified account of complexity, and it's no less ripe today for this book-length expansion.

In What Is a Complex System? (Yale UP, 2020), philosopher of science James Ladyman and physicist and mathematician Karoline Wiesner systematically interrogate popular definitions. They break the most commonly cited features into three bins: truisms on which there is universal agreement, the conditions necessary for complexity to arise, and various emergent products of complexity. A key insight of their account, for me, was to understand emergence as a relation between features rather than one feature among many.

The book is compact, accessible, and at times profound. Indeed, James and Karoline bring the lessons of their account to some of the most consequential complex systems of our time, including Earth's climate and biosphere as well as our global social media ecosystem. I was honored to host them in conversation on this episode, and i encourage listeners to pick up the book itself for deeper dives into the topics we discussed.

James Ladyman is professor of philosophy at the University of Bristol and works mainly in the philosophy of science. Karoline Wiesner is professor of physics at the University of Potsdam and uses information theory to understand complex systems.

Cory Brunson is a Research Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida. His research focuses on geometric and topological approaches to the analysis of medical and healthcare data. He welcomes book suggestions, listener feedback, and transparent supply chains.

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Rahul Mukherjee, "Radiant Infrastructures: Media, Environment, and Cultures of Uncertainty" (Duke UP, 2020)

23 juli 2021 | 60 min

John Troyer, "Technologies of the Human Corpse" (MIT Press, 2020)

19 juli 2021 | 68 min

Death and the dead body have never been more alive in the public imagination--not least because of current debates over modern medical technology that is deployed, it seems, expressly to keep human bodies from dying, blurring the boundary between alive and dead. In Technologies of the Human Corpse (MIT Press, 2020), John Troyer examines the relationship of the dead body with technology, both material and conceptual: the physical machines, political concepts, and sovereign institutions that humans use to classify, organize, repurpose, and transform the human corpse. Doing so, he asks readers to think about death, dying, and dead bodies in radically different ways.

Troyer explains, for example, how technologies of the nineteenth century including embalming and photography, created our image of a dead body as quasi-atemporal, existing outside biological limits formerly enforced by decomposition. He describes the "Happy Death Movement" of the 1970s; the politics of HIV/AIDS corpse and the productive potential of the dead body; the provocations of the Body Worlds exhibits and their use of preserved dead bodies; the black market in human body parts; and the transformation of historic technologies of the human corpse into "death prevention technologies." The consequences of total control over death and the dead body, Troyer argues, are not liberation but the abandonment of Homo sapiens as a concept and a species. In this unique work, Troyer forces us to consider the increasing overlap between politics, dying, and the dead body in both general and specifically personal terms.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected].

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Thomas D. Mullaney et al., "Your Computer Is on Fire" (MIT Press, 2021)

9 juli 2021 | 81 min

Nathan R. Johnson, "Architects of Memory: Information and Rhetoric in a Networked Archival Age" (U Alabama Press, 2020)

6 juli 2021 | 54 min

We are now living in the richest age of public memory. From museums and memorials to the vast digital infrastructure of the internet, access to the past is only a click away. Even so, the methods and technologies created by scientists, espionage agencies, and information management coders and programmers have drastically delimited the ways that communities across the globe remember and forget our wealth of retrievable knowledge.

In Architects of Memory: Information and Rhetoric in a Networked Archival Age (University of Alabama Press, 2020), Nathan R. Johnson charts turning points where concepts of memory became durable in new computational technologies and modern memory infrastructures took hold. He works through both familiar and esoteric memory technologies—from the card catalog to the book cart to Zatocoding and keyword indexing—as he delineates histories of librarianship and information science and provides a working vocabulary for understanding rhetoric’s role in contemporary memory practices.

This volume draws upon the twin concepts of memory infrastructure and mnemonic technê to illuminate the seemingly opaque wall of mundane algorithmic techniques that determine what is worth remembering and what should be forgotten. Each chapter highlights a conflict in the development of twentieth-century librarianship and its rapidly evolving competitor, the discipline of information science. As these two disciplines progressed, they contributed practical techniques and technologies for making sense of explosive scientific advancement in the wake of World War II. Taming postwar science became part and parcel of practices and information technologies that undergird uncountable modern communication systems, including search engines, algorithms, and databases for nearly every national clearinghouse of the twenty-first century.

Nathan R. Johnson is assistant professor of Rhetoric at the University of South Florida. His work has appeared in the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, Poroi, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology and enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture.

Connect with your host, Lee Pierce (they & she) on social and Gmail @rhetoriclee

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Sandeep Mertia, "Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India" (Institute of Networked Cultures, 2020)

5 juli 2021 | 83 min

Stuart Walker, "Design and Spirituality: A Philosophy of Material Cultures" (Routledge, 2021)

30 juni 2021 | 46 min

Design and Spirituality: A Philosophy of Material Cultures (Routledge, 2021) examines the philosophical context of our current situation and its implications for design. It explores how modernity and our constricted notions of progress have contributed to today’s crisis of values, and argues for a re-establishment and re-affirmation of self-transcending priorities, together with an ethos of moderation and sufficiency.

A wide range of topics are covered, including material culture and spiritual teachings; sustainability and the spiritual perspective; traditional and indigenous knowledge; technology and spirituality; notions of meaningful design; and how particular material things can have deeper, symbolic significance. There are also reflections on areas such as the language of design; busyness and its relationship to wisdom; design and social disparity; and traditional sacred practices. While not avoiding issues that are controversial, and sometimes hard-hitting, Design and Spirituality gets to the heart of the key issues affecting us today and presents them in a highly readable and accessible format.

The author is a leading thinker in the field and he presents his arguments in a manner that invites the reader to reflect and think about where we are going, why we are going there and what really matters.

Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Adjunct Professor at Alfred State College and the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture.

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Javier Guerrero C., "Narcosubmarines: Outlaw Innovation and Maritime Interdiction in the War on Drugs" (Palgrave, 2020)

15 juni 2021 | 39 min

Carla Diana, "My Robot Gets Me: How Social Design Can Make New Products More Human" (Harvard Business, 2021)

3 juni 2021 | 37 min

S. Livingstone and A. Blum-Ross, "Parenting for a Digital Future: How Hopes and Fears about Technology Shape Children's Lives" (Oxford UP, 2020)

3 juni 2021 | 50 min

Amy D. Finstein, "Modern Mobility Aloft: Elevated Highways, Architecture, and Urban Change in Pre-interstate America" (Temple UP, 2020)

2 juni 2021 | 54 min

Mikiya Koyagi, "Iran in Motion: Mobility, Space, and the Trans-Iranian Railway" (Stanford UP, 2021)

1 juni 2021 | 59 min

Completed in 1938, the Trans-Iranian Railway connected Tehran to Iran's two major bodies of water: the Caspian Sea in the north and the Persian Gulf in the south. Iran's first national railway, it produced and disrupted various kinds of movement—voluntary and forced, intended and unintended, on different scales and in different directions—among Iranian diplomats, tribesmen, migrant laborers, technocrats, railway workers, tourists and pilgrims, as well as European imperial officials alike. Iran in Motion: Mobility, Space, and the Trans-Iranian Railway (Stanford UP, 2021) tells the hitherto unexplored stories of these individuals as they experienced new levels of mobility.

Drawing on newspapers, industry publications, travelogues, and memoirs, as well as American, British, Danish, and Iranian archival materials, Mikiya Koyagi traces contested imaginations and practices of mobility from the conception of a trans-Iranian railway project during the nineteenth-century global transport revolution to its early years of operation on the eve of Iran's oil nationalization movement in the 1950s. Weaving together various individual experiences, this book considers how the infrastructural megaproject reoriented the flows of people and goods. In so doing, the railway project simultaneously brought the provinces closer to Tehran and pulled them away from it, thereby constantly reshaping local, national, and transnational experiences of space among mobile individuals.

This interview is part of an NBN special series on Mobilities and Methods.

Mikiya Koyagi is Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Alize Arıcan is an urban anthropologist and incoming Postdoctoral Scholar at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Studies. Her research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography.

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Zahi Zalloua, "Being Posthuman: Ontologies of the Future" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

31 maj 2021 | 48 min

The figure of the human looms large of the history of philosophy, from the ancient Greeks speculating about featherless bipeds to contemporary programmers wondering if they can recreate human intelligence with a series of algorithms. Much philosophical thought in the last few decades has involved much speculation about the human subject, even if it was often hostile to the idea that there is such a thing, rather than an odd effect of linguistic and cultural practices. Other critics have pointed out that the idea of a universal human subject has often been used to legitimate and cover up nefarious political ideas and practices.

Still, many thinkers today continue to argue for an ontology that includes a unique place for the human subject. One of these thinkers is my guest today, Zahi Zalloua, here to discuss his new book Being Posthuman: Ontologies of the Future (Bloomsbury, 2020). Written both as an introduction and intervention, it kicks off with a long history of humanism and its critics, which helps set the stage for the four chapters that make up the main book. The first explores cyborgs, and the ways technology is slowly becoming a part of our lives and what that might mean. The second explores animals and our treatment of them, and what our willingness to send them to slaughterhouses and consume them in enormous quantities says about us. The third explores new theoretical frameworks such as Object Oriented Ontology and New Materialism, and the place of the subject in these frameworks. The final chapter looks at race in Afropessimism, and what a true emancipation might look like. In all this, Zalloua combines theoretical frameworks with cultural analysis, giving the book a sense of accessibility and relevance to our current moment (as well as a couple plot-spoilers for Black Mirror and Sorry to Bother You). Those interested in philosophy and critical theory, and particularly the work of Slavoj Žižek will find this to be both an accessible and provocative text.

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Alex Wellerstein, "Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

24 maj 2021 | 62 min

Ellen Helsper, "The Digital Disconnect: The Social Causes and Consequences of Digital Inequalities" (Sage, 2021)

21 maj 2021 | 46 min

Rob Kitchin, "Data Lives: How Data Are Made and Shape Our World" (Policy Press, 2021)

20 maj 2021 | 56 min

Aaron Shapiro, "Design, Control, Predict: Logistical Governance in the Smart City" (U Minnesota Press, 2020)

19 maj 2021 | 66 min

The “smart” city of today looks little like what experts of yesteryear expected them to. In this book, Aaron Shapiro, Ph.D. takes readers on a behind the scenes tour of the smart city and shows the revolution in urban technology that is currently taking place in large metropolitan areas around the United States. Technology has fundamentally transformed urban life. Throughout Design, Control, Predict: Logistical Governance in the Smart City (U Minnesota Press, 2020), Shapiro develops a new lens called logistical governance in his effort to interpret and understand urban technologies. This lens was used to critique urban future based on extraction and rationalization.

Through ethnographic research, journalistic interviews, and his own hands-on experience, Shapiro helps readers peer through cracks of the façade that smart cities are bearing. He investigates the true price New Yorkers pay for “free,” ad-funded WiFi, finding that it is ultimately serving the ends of commercial media. Shapiro also builds on his experience as a bike courier delivering food for a startup company and examines how promises of “flexible employment” in the gig economy paves the way for strict managerial control. And he turns his discussion toward the current debates about police violence and new patrol technologies, asking whether algorithms are the answer to reforming the ongoing crises of criminal justice in large urban cities.

Through these gripping accounts of new technology in urban areas, Shapiro and Design, Control, Predict make vital contributions to conversations about data privacy and algorithmic governance. Shapiro provides a ground level account of a timely and important piece of research in Design, Control, Predict. This piece can be used when comprehending urbanism today and when identifying strategies to advance the critique and resistance to a dystopian future that is often viewed as inevitable.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant“, was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, and collective representation as it is presented in everyday social interactions. He is currently studying the social interactions that people engage in at two annual festivals that take place during the summer months along the banks of the Mississippi River. You can learn more about him on his website, Google Scholar, follow him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or email him at [email protected].

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L. Ayu Saraswati, "Pain Generation: Social Media, Feminist Activism, and the Neoliberal Selfie" (NYU Press, 2021)

19 maj 2021 | 69 min

Zoetanya Sujon, "The Social Media Age" (Sage, 2021)

18 maj 2021 | 43 min

Moya Bailey, "Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance" (NYU Press, 2021)

17 maj 2021 | 64 min

Where racism and sexism meet—an understanding of anti-Black misogyny. When Moya Bailey first coined the term misogynoir, she defined it as the ways anti-Black and misogynistic representation shape broader ideas about Black women, particularly in visual culture and digital spaces. She had no idea that the term would go viral, touching a cultural nerve and quickly entering into the lexicon. Misogynoir now has its own Wikipedia page and hashtag, and has been featured on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and CNN’s Cuomo Prime Time.

In Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (NYU Press, 2021), Bailey delves into her groundbreaking concept, highlighting Black women’s digital resistance to anti-Black misogyny on YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr, and other platforms. At a time when Black women are depicted as more ugly, deficient, hypersexual, and unhealthy than their non-Black counterparts, Bailey explores how Black women have bravely used social-media platforms to confront misogynoir in a number of courageous—and, most importantly, effective—ways. Focusing on queer and trans Black women, she shows us the importance of carving out digital spaces, where communities are built around queer Black webshows and hashtags like #GirlsLikeUs. Bailey shows how Black women actively reimagine the world by engaging in powerful forms of digital resistance at a time when anti-Black misogyny is thriving on social media. A groundbreaking work, Misogynoir Transformed highlights Black women’s remarkable efforts to disrupt mainstream narratives, subvert negative stereotypes, and reclaim their lives.

Dr. Moya Bailey she/her/hers is Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Northeastern University and is currently an MLK Visiting Professor at MIT. Connect with Moya on Instagram @transformisogynoir and on Twitter @moyazb

Dr. Lee Pierce (they & she) is Assistant Professor of Rhetorical Communication at State University of New York at Geneseo and host of the podcast RhetoricLee Speaking. Connect with Lee on Twitter, Instagram, and Gmail @rhetoriclee

Also mentioned in this episode is Zakiyyam Iman Jackson's interview with New Books Network about Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World

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T. Sanders et al., "Paying for Sex in a Digital Age: US and UK Perspectives" (Routledge, 2020)

10 maj 2021 | 78 min

Tetyana Lokot, "Beyond the Protest Square: Digital Media and Augmented Dissent" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021)

10 maj 2021 | 57 min

Pallavi Guha, "Hear #metoo in India: News, Social Media, and Anti-Rape and Sexual Harassment Activism" (Rutgers UP, 2021)

7 maj 2021 | 56 min

Jean Burgess and Nancy K. Baym, "Twitter: A Biography" (NYU Press, 2020)

6 maj 2021 | 40 min

Jillian C. York, "Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism" (Verso Book, 2021)

6 maj 2021 | 62 min

Daniel Greene, "The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope" (MIT Press, 2021)

3 maj 2021 | 67 min

Douglas M. O'Reagan, "Taking Nazi Technology: Allied Exploitation of German Science after the Second World War" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021)

23 april 2021 | 51 min

Joel Waldfogel, "Digital Renaissance: What Data and Economics Tell Us about the Future of Popular Culture" (Princeton UP, 2020)

21 april 2021 | 48 min

Carolyn J. Heinrich, et al., "Equity and Quality in Digital Learning: Realizing the Promise in K-12 Education" (Harvard Education Press, 2020)

20 april 2021 | 64 min

The COVID19 pandemic has profoundly changed the landscape of K-12 education in our society. Last March, many states closed their brick-and-mortar schools and shifted to remote education. The massive shift is historic and unprecedented. Until now, while we see the light at the end of the tunnel in our battle against the coronavirus, millions and millions of students are still learning at home via online platforms. It is also because of this shift that digital learning all of a sudden has drawn attention from not only educators but also the general public from families to policy makers. Over the past months we have seen concerted efforts to invest in digital learning and improve the required infrastructure. In spite of this unexpected yet much welcomed attention from the society at large, digital teaching and learning a field has existed for a long time. Experts in the field have been documenting and exploring the best practice of digital teaching and learning. Today I am going to talk with three researchers who have been working in this field for a long time, Carolyn Heinrich from Vanderbilt University, Jennifer Darling-Aduana from Georgia State University and Annalee G. Good from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Last year, they published their new book with Harvard Education Press, titled Equity and Quality in Digital Learning: Realizing the Promise in K-12 Education (2020). It systematically studies the implementation and best practice of using digital tools to reduce inequities in educational opportunities and improve student outcomes. Although the book was out right before the start of the pandemic, the lessons, best practice and insights they highlighted in their book have so much to offer for educators, policy makers and families to navigate a teaching-and-learning landscape during and after this pandemic.

Carolyn J. Heinrich is the Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Public Policy and Education and Chair of the Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations, and an affiliated Professor of Economics at Vanderbilt University.

Jennifer Darling-Aduana is an Assistant Professor of Learning Technologies in the Department of Learning Sciences, College of Education and Human Development, at Georgia State University.

Annalee G. Good is co-director of the Wisconsin Evaluation Collaborative and Director of the Clinical Program at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Pengfei Zhao is a critical researcher and qualitative research methodologist based at the University of Florida.

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David Wills, "Prosthesis" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)

15 april 2021 | 69 min

Can We Fix Social Media?: A Discussion with Christopher A. Bail

15 april 2021 | 45 min

In an era of increasing social isolation, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are among the most important tools we have to understand each other. We use social media as a mirror to decipher our place in society but, as Christopher A. Bail explains, it functions more like a prism that distorts our identities, empowers status-seeking extremists, and renders moderates all but invisible. Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing (Princeton University Press, 2021) challenges common myths about echo chambers, foreign misinformation campaigns, and radicalizing algorithms, revealing that the solution to political tribalism lies deep inside ourselves.

Drawing on innovative online experiments and in-depth interviews with social media users from across the political spectrum, this book explains why stepping outside of our echo chambers can make us more polarized, not less. Bail takes you inside the minds of online extremists through vivid narratives that trace their lives on the platforms and off—detailing how they dominate public discourse at the expense of the moderate majority. Wherever you stand on the spectrum of user behavior and political opinion, he offers fresh solutions to counter political tribalism from the bottom up and the top down. He introduces new apps and bots to help readers avoid misperceptions and engage in better conversations with the other side. Finally, he explores what the virtual public square might look like if we could hit “reset” and redesign social media from scratch through a first-of-its-kind experiment on a new social media platform built for scientific research.

Providing data-driven recommendations for strengthening our social media connections, Breaking the Social Media Prism shows how to combat online polarization without deleting our accounts.

Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at [email protected]

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Jürgen P. Melzer, "Wings for the Rising Sun: A Transnational History of Japanese Aviation" (Harvard UP, 2020)

15 april 2021 | 38 min

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, "Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are" (HarperCollins, 2017)

15 april 2021 | 55 min

Maria San Filippo, "Provocauteurs and Provocations: Screening Sex in 21st Century Media" (Indiana UP, 2021)

13 april 2021 | 72 min

Edward Ashford Lee, "The Coevolution: The Entwined Futures of Humans and Machines" (MIT Press, 2020)

2 april 2021 | 71 min

Katherine E. Standefer, "Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life" (Little, Brown Spark, 2020)

30 mars 2021 | 38 min

John Durham Peters et al., "Action at a Distance" (Meson Press, 2020)

26 mars 2021 | 72 min

Gascia Ouzounian, "Stereophonica: Sound and Space in Science, Technology, and the Arts" (MIT Press, 2021)

16 mars 2021 | 77 min

As common as it is today to speak of the relative “height” of musical pitches or of the sense of “vocal space” as it opened up by particular recording techniques, we did not always understand sound to be spatial. How did it become so? In Stereophonica: Sound and Space in Science, Technology, and the Arts (MIT Press, 2021), Gascia Ouzounian (Associate Professor of Music, Oxford University; Fellow and Tutor, Lady Margaret Hall) explores the answer, drawing on episodes drawn from the history of stereo technologies in the nineteenth century through to visual representations of and in sonic environments today. Ouzounian takes the reader from early innovations in the laboratory study of stereophony to the mobilization of the human hearing sense during World War I. Her account covers spectacular demonstrations of new sound-reproducing technologies in the inter-war period, the applications of new psychoacoustic theories of spatial hearing in both peacetime and in war, and right up to the 21st century, as the relation between sound and space are interrogated in contemporary sound installation art and radical interventions in the urban soundscapes of modern-day Beirut, Lebanon. This entry into sound studies and the history of technology deals with an array of historical, instrumental, and artistic cases in the long history of spatial sound. The reward of following its broad purview is a rich web of connections that disclose sound and listening as a long-fruitful site not only of aesthetics but also of the ethics of space and place, thereby opening up further study in the intersection between sound studies and sonic urbanism.

Eamonn Bell (@_eamonnbell) is a postdoctoral Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin in the Department of Music. His current research project examines the story of the compact disc from a viewpoint between musicology and media studies.

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Evan Friss, "The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s" (U Chicago Press, 2015)

5 mars 2021 | 57 min

Today on New Books in History, Dr. Evan Friss, associate professor of history at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia in the US to talk about The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s (University of Chicago Press, 2015). This book was originally released in 2015 by the University of Chicago press and we are chatting on the occasion of its paperback release in January.

Cycling has experienced a renaissance in the United States, as cities around the country promote the bicycle as an alternative means of transportation. In the process, debates about the nature of bicycles—where they belong, how they should be ridden, how cities should or should not accommodate them—have played out in the media, on city streets, and in city halls. Very few people recognize, however, that these questions are more than a century old.

The Cycling City is a sharp history of the bicycle’s rise and fall in the late nineteenth century. In the 1890s, American cities were home to more cyclists, more cycling infrastructure, more bicycle friendly legislation, and a richer cycling culture than anywhere else in the world. Evan Friss unearths the hidden history of the cycling city, demonstrating that diverse groups of cyclists managed to remap cities with new roads, paths, and laws, challenge social conventions, and even dream up a new urban ideal inspired by the bicycle. When cities were chaotic and filthy, bicycle advocates imagined an improved landscape in which pollution was negligible, transportation was silent and rapid, leisure spaces were democratic, and the divisions between city and country were blurred. Friss argues that when the utopian vision of a cycling city faded by the turn of the century, its death paved the way for today’s car-centric cities—and ended the prospect of a true American cycling city ever being built.

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Roland T. Rust and Ming-Hui Huang, "The Feeling Economy: How Artificial Intelligence Is Creating the Era of Empathy" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021)

4 mars 2021 | 35 min

Teresa Berger, "@Worship: Liturgical Practices in Digital Worlds" (Routledge, 2018)

26 februari 2021 | 32 min

Ronald J. Deibert, "Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society" (House of Anansi, 2020)

26 februari 2021 | 64 min

L. Vinsel and A. L. Russell, "The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most" (Currency, 2020)

24 februari 2021 | 54 min

Nicole Perlroth, "This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

18 februari 2021 | 59 min

Daniel B. Rood, "The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean" (Oxford UP, 2020)

16 februari 2021 | 41 min

The period of the "second slavery" was marked by geographic expansion of zones of slavery into the Upper US South, Cuba, and Brazil and chronological expansion into the industrial age. As The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean (Oxford UP, 2020) shows, ambitious planters throughout the Greater Caribbean hired a transnational group of chemists, engineers, and other "plantation experts" to assist them in adapting industrial technologies to suit their "tropical" needs and increase profitability. Not only were technologies reinvented so as to keep manufacturing processes local but slaveholders' adaptation of new racial ideologies also shaped their particular usage of new machines. Finally, these businessmen forged a new set of relationships with one another in order to sidestep the financial dominance of Great Britain and the northeastern United States.

In addition to promoting new forms of mechanization, the technical experts depended on the know-how of slaves alongside whom they worked. Bondspeople with industrial craft skills played key roles in the development of new production processes and technologies like sugar mills. While the very existence of such skilled slaves contradicted prevailing racial ideologies and allowed black people to wield power in their own interest, their contributions grew the slave economies of Cuba, Brazil, and the Upper South. Together reform-minded planters, technical experts, and enslaved people modernized sugar plantations in Louisiana and Cuba; brought together rural Virginia wheat planters and industrial flour-millers in Richmond with the coffee-planting system of southeastern Brazil; and enabled engineers and iron-makers in Virginia to collaborate with railroad and sugar entrepreneurs in Cuba.

Through his examination of the creation of these industrial bodies of knowledge, Daniel B. Rood demonstrates the deepening dependence of the Atlantic economy on forced labor after a few revolutionary decades in which it seemed the institution of slavery might be destroyed. The reinvention of this plantation world in the 1840s and 1850s brought a renewed movement in the 1860s, especially from enslaved people themselves in the United States and Cuba, to end chattel slavery.

This account of capitalism, technology, and slavery offers new perspectives on the nineteenth-century Americas.

Alejandra Bronfman is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies Latin American, Caribbean & U.S. Latino Studies at SUNY, Albany.

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James E. Baker, "The Centaur's Dilemma: US National Security Law for the Coming AI Revolution" (Brookings, 2020)

28 januari 2021 | 81 min

Michael Fisch, "An Anthropology of the Machine: Tokyo's Commuter Train Network" (U of Chicago Press, 2018)

8 januari 2021 | 83 min

Charles R. Acland, "American Blockbuster: Movies, Technology, and Wonder" (Duke UP, 2020)

29 december 2020 | 77 min

Paul Davies, "The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

24 december 2020 | 77 min

Eben Kirksey, "The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans" (St. Martin's Press, 2020)

23 december 2020 | 62 min

In The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans (St. Martin's Press, 2020), anthropologist Eben Kirksey visits the frontiers of genetics, medicine, and technology to ask: Whose values are guiding gene editing experiments? And what does this new era of scientific inquiry mean for the future of the human species?

At a conference in Hong Kong in November 2018, Dr. He Jiankui announced that he had created the first genetically modified babies—twin girls named Lulu and Nana—sending shockwaves around the world. A year later, a Chinese court sentenced Dr. He to three years in prison for “illegal medical practice.”

As scientists elsewhere start to catch up with China’s vast genetic research program, gene editing is fueling an innovation economy that threatens to widen racial and economic inequality. Fundamental questions about science, health, and social justice are at stake: Who gets access to gene editing technologies? As countries loosen regulations around the globe, from the U.S. to Indonesia, can we shape research agendas to promote an ethical and fair society?

Eben Kirksey takes us on a groundbreaking journey to meet the key scientists, lobbyists, and entrepreneurs who are bringing cutting-edge genetic engineering tools like CRISPR to your local clinic. He also ventures beyond the scientific echo chamber, talking to disabled scholars, doctors, hackers, chronically-ill patients, and activists who have alternative visions of a genetically modified future for humanity.

The Mutant Project empowers us to ask the right questions, uncover the truth, and navigate this brave new world.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected].

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Jeremy Black, "Tank Warfare" (Indiana UP, 2020)

16 december 2020 | 53 min

Virginia Postrel, "The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World" (Basic Books, 2020)

9 december 2020 | 63 min

In The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World (Basic Books, 2020), Virginia Postrel describes how humans coevolved with textiles.

The story begins with our distant ancestors who used string to fashion the earliest tools. Then, ten thousand years ago, humans began farming not only for food but also for fiber to make cloth. In the intervening millennia, for people everywhere, an inordinate amount of human time and energy went into the growing, harvesting, spinning, weaving, and dying of cloth for garments, bedding, blankets, rugs, hangings, tents, tarps, sails, sacks, and all manner of containers and fittings. Based on investigation and practice, Ms. Postrel explains the artisanal processes and sciences involved.

In addition, this book is about how textiles shaped our society more broadly: labor, trade, tribute, collaboration (and also exploitation), credit, banking, migration (some voluntary, some forced), style and cultural restrictions, all figure into the discussion. The Industrial Revolution that began when steam power replaced human toil in the spinning of thread and the weaving of cloth, changed our world. Cheap, high-quality, cloth became available to people everywhere. In the twentieth century, the advent of plastics, of synthetic fabrics, transformed our world again. All of this, Ms. Postrel achieves in 250 beautifully-written pages, with numerous helpful pictures and diagrams. She also has a blog filled with videos explaining the processes she investigates in the book at https://vpostrel.com/blog.

Virginia Postrel is a journalist, author, and independent scholar. Her books include author of The Substance of Style, The Power of Glamour, and The Future and its Enemies. She is currently a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and has been a columnist for the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times.

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Europe, the Spanish Empire, and the Atlantic World, specializing in sixteenth-century diplomacy and travel.

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Nicolas Petit, "Big Tech and the Digital Economy: The Moligopoly Scenario" (Oxford UP, 2020)

7 december 2020 | 49 min

Ben Tarnoff and Moira Weigel, "Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do and How They Do It" (FSG Originals, 2020)

7 december 2020 | 47 min

James D. Stein, "The Fate of Schrodinger's Cat: Using Math and Computers to Explore the Counterintuitive" (World Scientific, 2020)

7 december 2020 | 76 min

Richard Seymour, "The Twittering Machine" (Verso, 2020)

3 december 2020 | 64 min

Matthew H. Rafalow, "Digital Divisions: How Schools Create Inequality in the Tech Era" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

30 november 2020 | 50 min

Xiaowei Wang, "Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside" (FSG Originals, 2020)

25 november 2020 | 37 min

Most of our discussions about how “technology will change the world” focus on the global cities that drive the world economy. Even when we talk about China, we focus on its major cities: Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.

Xiaowei Wang corrects this metronormativity in their recent book Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside (FSG Originals: 2020), which explores how rural China is not just adapting the technology used around the world, but innovating on it.

In this interview, we talk about the frontiers of technology that are being charted in rural China, and why China’s countryside may be the best place to understand how technology, capitalism and society will intersect in the coming years — often in not altogether positive ways. We also talk about some of the more recent developments in how Chinese technology is treated in the United States, with reference to their recent articles: "WeChat Has Both Connected Families and Torn Them Apart" in Slate and "How the Theatrics of Banning TikTok Enables Repression at Home" in The Nation.

Xiaowei Wang is the creative director at Logic Magazine, whose work encompasses community-based and public art projects, data visualization, technology, ecology, and education. Their projects have been featured in The New York Times, the BBC, CNN, VICE, and elsewhere. You can follow them on Twitter at @xrw.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Blockchain Chicken Farm. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. In his day job, he’s a researcher and writer for a think tank in economic and sustainable development. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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C. Thi Nguyen, "Games: Agency as Art" (Oxford UP, 2020)

10 november 2020 | 67 min

Jamie Merisotis, "Human Work in the Age of Smart Machines" (RosettaBooks, 2020)

5 november 2020 | 33 min

Anthony Hodgson, "Systems Thinking for a Turbulent World" (Part 2) (Routledge, 2020)

4 november 2020 | 43 min

This is the second episode of a two-part conversation with Hodgson, and in it we pick up our conversation on anticipatory systems and the role they play in ‘decision integrity’. Hodgson then talks about the second half of the book which focuses on “developing latent capacities beyond the analytical rational” and offers possibilities for more enlightened co-creation in these hyper-turbulent times.

In the view of Anthony Hodgson, fragmentation of local and global societies is escalating, and this is aggravating vicious cycles. To heal the rifts, Hodgson believes we need to reintroduce the human element into our understandings – whether the context is civic or scientific – and strengthen truth-seeking in decision-making; and that the application of appropriate concepts and methods, will enable a switch from reaction to anticipation, even in the face of discontinuous change and high uncertainty. The intended outcome is the privileging of the positive human skills for collaborative navigation through uncertainty over the disjointed rationality of mechanism and artificial intelligence, which increasingly alienates us.

In Systems Thinking for a Turbulent World: A Search for New Perspectives out from Routledge in 2020, Hodgson’s readers are introduced to concepts new to systems thinking that integrate systems thinking and futures thinking. Guiding readers through the unfolding of the ideas and practices with a narrative based on the metaphor of search portrayed in the tradition of ox herding, found in traditional Far Eastern consciousness practice, the concept of anticipatory present moment (APM) serves as a basis for learning the cognitive skills that better enable navigation through turbulent times. In his conversation with guest interviewer, Kevin Lindsay, Hodgson pulls together many of the threads with which long-time listeners of this podcast will be familiar and builds upon the work of Robert Rosen, a currently somewhat neglected pioneer of the systems field whose ideas about anticipatory systems has much to offer us in our current turbulent times.

This is the second episode of a two-part conversation with Hodgson, and in it we pick up our conversation on anticipatory systems and the role they play in ‘decision integrity’. Hodgson then talks about the second half of the book which focuses on “developing latent capacities beyond the analytical rational” and offers possibilities for more enlightened co-creation in these hyper-turbulent times.

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Doug Specht, "Mapping Crisis: Participation, Datafication and Humanitarianism in the Age of Digital Mapping" (U London Press, 2020)

29 oktober 2020 | 75 min

The digital age has thrown questions of representation, participation and humanitarianism back to the fore, as machine learning, algorithms and big data centres take over the process of mapping the subjugated and subaltern. Since the rise of Google Earth in 2005, there has been an explosion in the use of mapping tools to quantify and assess the needs of those in crisis, including those affected by climate change and the wider neo-liberal agenda. Yet, while there has been a huge upsurge in the data produced around these issues, the representation of people remains questionable. Some have argued that representation has diminished in humanitarian crises as people are increasingly reduced to data points. In turn, this data has become ever more difficult to analyse without vast computing power, leading to a dependency on the old colonial powers to refine the data collected from people in crisis, before selling it back to them.

Mapping Crisis: Participation, Datafication and Humanitarianism in the Age of Digital Mapping (University of London Press, 2020) brings together critical perspectives on the role that mapping people, knowledges and data now plays in humanitarian work, both in cartographic terms and through data visualisations, and questions whether, as we map crises, it is the map itself that is in crisis.

Doug Sprecht is a Chartered Geographer (CGeog. FRGS), a Senior Lecturer (SFHEA) and the Director of Teaching and Learning in the School of Media and Communication at the University of Westminster. His research examines how knowledge is constructed and codified through digital and cartographic artefacts, focusing on development issues in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, where he has carried out extensive fieldwork. He also writes and researches on pedagogy, and is author of the Media and Communications Student Study Guide. He speaks and writes on topics of data ethics, development, education and mapping practices at conferences and invited lectures around the world. He is a member of the editorial board at Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, and the journal Anthropocenes – Human, Inhuman, Posthuman. He is also Chair of the Environmental Network for Central America.

Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Early Modern European History at King’s College London

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Margaret Heffernan, "Uncharted: How to Map and Navigate the Future Together" (Simon and Schuster, 2020)

12 oktober 2020 | 36 min

Today I spoke with Dr Margaret Heffernan about her latest book, Uncharted: How to Map and Navigate the Future Together (Simon and Schuster, 2020). Margaret produced programmes for the BBC for 13 years. She then moved to the US where she became a businesswomen. She is the author of six books and a successful TED Talk speaker. She is also a Professor of Practice at the University of Bath.

In her 2012 TED Talk, ‘Dare to disagree’, she told the story Alice Stewart. This is the story of how clear, certain medical data, are not always enough to change rapidly our professional rules and personal habits.

In her 2019 TED Talk she argued that the more we rely on technology to make us efficient, the fewer skills we have to confront the unexpected. That’s why we need less technology and ‘more messy human skills - imagination, humility, bravery - to solve problems in business, government and life in an unpredictable age’.

In her new book, she explores the people and organizations who aren’t daunted by uncertainty: ‘We are addicted to prediction, desperate for certainty about the future. But the complexity of modern life won’t allow that; experts in forecasting are reluctant to look more than 400 days out’.

Uncertainty is clearly an important construct in both macroeconomics and behavioural economics. This book starts with an anecdote on the early life of a great American economist, Irving Fisher. His swimming accident and the discovery of his tuberculosis contributed to the development his research interest in stability and monetary economics.

Ranging freely through history and from business to science, government to friendships, this refreshing book challenges us to resist the false promises of technology and efficiency and instead to mine our own creativity and humanity for the capacity to create the futures we want and can believe in.

Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milano-Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Co-operative economy and collective ownership. Currently he is associate editor of The Review of Evolutionary Political Economy (REPE)

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Anthony Hodgson, "Systems Thinking for a Turbulent World: A Search for New Perspectives" (Routledge, 2020)

7 oktober 2020 | 47 min

In the view of Anthony Hodgson, fragmentation of local and global societies is escalating, and this is aggravating vicious cycles. To heal the rifts, Hodgson believes we need to reintroduce the human element into our understandings – whether the context is civic or scientific – and strengthen truth-seeking in decision-making; and that the application of appropriate concepts and methods, will enable a switch from reaction to anticipation, even in the face of discontinuous change and high uncertainty. The intended outcome is the privileging of the positive human skills for collaborative navigation through uncertainty over the disjointed rationality of mechanism and artificial intelligence, which increasingly alienates us.

In Systems Thinking for a Turbulent World: A Search for New Perspectives out from Routledge in 2020, Hodgson’s readers are introduced to concepts new to systems thinking that integrate systems thinking and futures thinking. Guiding readers through the unfolding of the ideas and practices with a narrative based on the metaphor of search portrayed in the tradition of ox herding, found in traditional Far Eastern consciousness practice, the concept of anticipatory present moment (APM) serves as a basis for learning the cognitive skills that better enable navigation through turbulent times. In his conversation with guest interviewer, Kevin Lindsay, Hodgson pulls together many of the threads with which long-time listeners of this podcast will be familiar and builds upon the work of Robert Rosen, a currently somewhat neglected pioneer of the systems field whose ideas about anticipatory systems has much to offer us in our current turbulent times.

Our guest interviewer, Keven Lindsay, is a 25 year veteran of the software industry, currently with Adobe, who recently began graduate work in Transformative Leadership at the California Institute of Integral Studies where he encountered Dr. Hodgson and his work first hand. While it was in this recent coursework that he was formally introduced to systems thinking, Kevin is rapidly becoming a systems enthusiast—recognizing the significant potential for the application of systems thinking in addressing big issues ranging from customer experience (CX), to social justice reform and climate action. We look forward to having Kevin join the channel as a full-fledged co-host in the very near future.

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Jon Lindsay, "Information Technology and Military Power" (Cornell UP, 2020)

7 oktober 2020 | 63 min

Angèle Christin, "Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms" (Princeton UP, 2020)

14 september 2020 | 58 min

J. Kim and E. Maloney, "Learning Innovation and the Future of Higher Education and The Low-Density University" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020)

21 augusti 2020 | 31 min

T. Fischer and C.M. Herr, "Design Cybernetics: Navigating the New" (Springer, 2019)

20 augusti 2020 | 69 min

Those who have followed this podcast in the past, and those who follow developments in cybernetics in the present, will be no strangers to the name Ranulph Glanville. This brilliant, multiple-PhD holding polymath who co-mingled cybernetics with ethics, pedagogy, and, above all, design, has, through his voluminous body of ground-breaking papers, had a greater influence upon the field than, arguably, any scholar since Heinz von Foerster.

At the 2015 Conference of the International Society for the Systems Sciences in Berlin, a group of self-proclaimed “Glanvillians” made up largely of former students and collaborators of Glanville, and a few interlopers like myself, met over a breakfast table at the Scandic Hotel, Potzdammer Platz, Berlin and, at the prompting of Thomas Fischer and Candy Herr, committed themselves to consolidating Glanville’s legacy and pointing the way to future extensions and investigations of his central claim that design is the practice of cybernetics and cybernetics is theory for design.

The result is Design Cybernetics: Navigating the New (Springer) edited by Fischer and Herr. Featuring an eclectic blend of mid-career and senior scholars, the assembled chapters probe the vital relationship between conversation and design, the commitments of a radical constructivist epistemology, the virtues of being “out of control”, the embracing of error, and the seemingly paradoxical notion of getting “lost with rigour” across a wide array of artistic and scientific domains.

As both the interviewer and a contributor to the book, I have, in the sprit of “walking our talk”, eschewed the erasure of error by editing and left, in full view, the meandering trail of a wandering and, at times, stumbling conversational journey featuring prolonged gaps in thinking, confusion between different articles by the same author, technical miscues, and even a pitched battle between my two cats, in order to model our commitment to process over perfection and personify Glanville’s favourite Samuel Beckett quote: “Try again, fail again, fail better.” I hope you find the stops along the way of this meandering journey as stimulating as I did.

Thomas Fischer is a design researcher, epistemologist and cybernetician. He is a Professor and Director of Research at the Department of Architecture at XJTLU in Suzhou, China. Thomas is also a Visiting Associate Professor at the School of Design at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Christiane M. Herr is an architectural researcher and educator focusing on the areas of structural design, digitally supported design, radical constructivism, design pedagogy and traditional Chinese approaches to creative thinking. Christiane is a Senior Associate Professor at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in China, where she directs the Master of Architectural Design as well as the Bachelor of Architectural Engineering programmes.

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C. Besteman and H. Gusterson, "Life by Algorithms: How Roboprocesses Are Remaking Our World" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

18 augusti 2020 | 50 min

Katie Day Good, "Bring the World to the Child: Technologies of Global Citizenship in American Education" (MIT Press, 2020)

17 augusti 2020 | 39 min

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, boosters of digital educational technologies emphasized that these platforms are vital tools for cultivating global citizenship, connecting students across borders, and creating a participatory learning environment.

In Bring the World to the Child: Technologies of Global Citizenship in American Education (MIT Press), Katie Day Good amply illustrates that there is little new about these promises of tech-enhanced education. She demonstrates that already at the turn of the twentieth century, education reformers and technology entrepreneurs promoted emerging media as the necessary tools for preparing America’s children for a century of movement, interconnection, and rapid change.

Good examines the promulgation of both hi-tech gadgets, such as lantern slides and stereoscopes, and low-tech innovations that reformers believed would open the wide world to children’s senses and liberate them from provincial ignorance. Good’s analytical focus is on how these purportedly cosmopolitan technological applications served to strengthen American power on the world stage and masked, reinforced, and excused domestic racial and ethnic disparities instead of confronting them.

Bring the World to the Child is a thought-provoking and necessary read for anyone concerned about how the present necessity of online instruction exacerbates inequalities in education and technological access.

Katie Day Good is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Journalism, and Film at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the pedagogical applications of the digital humanities and the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine. More at http://empiresprogeny.org.

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Nadia Eghbal, "Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software" (Stripe Press, 2020)

12 augusti 2020 | 66 min

Orit Kamir, "Betraying Dignity" (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2019)

7 augusti 2020 | 73 min

What do medieval knights, suicide bombers and "victimhood culture" have in common?

Betraying Dignity: The Toxic Seduction of Social Media, Shaming, and Radicalization (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press) argues that in the second decade of the twenty-first century, individuals, political parties and nations around the world are abandoning the dignity-based culture we established in the aftermath of two world wars, less than a century ago.

Disappointed or intimidated, many turn their backs on the humanitarian, universalistic culture that presumes our inherent human dignity and celebrates it as the basis of every individual's equal human rights. Instead, people and nations are returning to a much older, honor-based cultural structure.

Because its ancient logic and mentality take new forms (such as social network shaming and certain aspects of "victimhood culture") -- we fail to recognize them, and overlook the pitfalls of the old honor-based structure. Narrating the history of honor-based societies, this book distinguishes their underlying principle from the post-WWII notion of dignity that underlies human rights. It makes the case that in order to revive and strengthen dignity-based culture, the concept of human dignity must be defined narrowly and succinctly, and enhanced with the principle of respect.

Continuing its historical and cultural narrative, the book discusses contemporary phenomena such as al-Qaeda terrorists, shaming via social network, FoMO, and some features of the emerging "victimhood culture". The book pays homage to Erich Fromm's classic Escape from Freedom.

Orit Kamir is founder and academic head of the Center for Human Dignity in Israel, and has taught law and culture studies at universities in Israel, the United States, and Europe.

Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He is a Fulbright scholar and was a visiting professor of Religion at Northwestern University, the Shalom Hartman Institute and Harvard Divinity School. His books are Sexuality and the Body in New Religious Zionist Discourse (English/Hebrew and The Male Body in Jewish Lithuanian Ultra-Orthodoxy (Hebrew). He can be reached at: [email protected]

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Tanya Kant, "Making it Personal: Algorithmic Personalization, Identity, and Everyday Life" (Oxford UP, 2020)

7 augusti 2020 | 37 min

Philip Butler, "Black Transhuman Liberation Theology: Technology and Spirituality" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)

29 juli 2020 | 46 min

Sasha Costanza-Chock, "Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need" (MIT Press, 2020)

27 juli 2020 | 37 min

Philip Reid, "The Merchant Ship in the British Atlantic, 1600-1800" (Brill, 2020)

20 juli 2020 | 48 min

Christina Dunbar-Hester, "Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures" (Princeton UP, 2020)

20 juli 2020 | 37 min

Jeffery R. Young, "Beyond the MOOC Hype: A Guide to Higher Education’s High-Tech Disruption" (CHE, 2013)

16 juli 2020 | 30 min

Lizzie O’Shea, "Future Histories" (Verso, 2019)

13 juli 2020 | 70 min

When we talk about technology we always talk about the future—which makes it hard to figure out how to get there.

In Future Histories: What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine, and the Paris Commune Can Teach Us about Digital Technology (Verso), Lizzie O’Shea argues that we need to stop looking forward and start looking backwards. Weaving together histories of computing and social movements with modern theories of the mind, society, and self, O’Shea constructs a “usable past” that help us determine our digital future.

What, she asks, can the Paris Commune tell us about earlier experiments in sharing resources—like the Internet—in common? Can debates over digital access be guided by Tom Paine’s theories of democratic economic redistribution? And how is Elon Musk not a visionary but a throwback to Victorian-era utopians?

In engaging, sparkling prose, O’Shea shows us how very human our understanding of technology is, and what potential exists for struggle, for liberation, for art and poetry in our digital present. Future Histories is for all of us—makers, coders, hacktivists, Facebook-users, self-styled Luddites—who find ourselves in a brave new world.

Lizzie O’Shea is a lawyer, writer, and broadcaster. She is a founder and the chair of Digital Rights Watch, which advocates for human rights online, is a special advisor to the National Justice Project, and also sits on the board of Blueprint for Free Speech and the Alliance for Gambling Reform. At the National Justice Project, she worked with lawyers, journalists and activists to establish a Copwatch program, for which she received a Davis Projects for Peace Prize. In June 2019, she was named a Human Rights Hero by Access Now.

Dr Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is a visiting researcher at the British Museum and teaches Digital Humanities at University College London. Her research intersects intellectual history, digital humanities and cultural heritage studies. She can be reached at [email protected]

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Doron Galili, "Seeing by Electricity: The Emergence of Television, 1878-1939" (Duke UP, 2020)

2 juli 2020 | 55 min

Ainissa Ramirez, "The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another" (MIT Press, 2020)

25 juni 2020 | 40 min

Mariann Hardey, "The Culture of Women in Tech: An Unsuitable Job for a Woman" (Emerald, 2019)

22 juni 2020 | 43 min

Brian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020)

2 juni 2020 | 121 min

Nick Prior, "Popular Music, Digital Technology and Society" (SAGE, 2018)

18 maj 2020 | 71 min

Paul Harkins, "Digital Sampling: The Design and Use of Music Technologies" (Routledge, 2019)

14 maj 2020 | 47 min

Andre Brock, "Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures" (NYU Press, 2020)

1 maj 2020 | 46 min

Lee Vinsel, "Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019)

30 april 2020 | 48 min

Jathan Sadowski, "Too Smart" (MIT Press, 2020)

29 april 2020 | 49 min

Leslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019)

28 april 2020 | 60 min

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day.

The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education.

Today I spoke with Leslie Harris about the book. Dr. Harris is a professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the coeditor, with Ira Berlin, of Slavery in New York and the coeditor, with Daina Ramey Berry, of Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Georgia).

Adam McNeil is a History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

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Wade Roush, "Extraterrestrials" (MIT Press, 2020)

27 april 2020 | 55 min

Thor Magnusson, "Sonic Writing: Technologies of Material, Symbolic, and Signal Inscriptions" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)

15 april 2020 | 78 min

Theodora Varbouli and Olga Touloumi, "Computer Architectures: Constructing the Common Ground" (Routledge, 2019)

14 april 2020 | 59 min

Paul Nahin, "Hot Molecules, Cold Electrons" (Princeton UP, 2020)

3 april 2020 | 52 min

Arthur Asseraf, "Electric News in Colonial Algeria" (Oxford UP, 2019)

3 april 2020 | 61 min

Arthur Asseraf’s Electric News in Colonial Algeria (Oxford University Press, 2019) examines the workings of the “news ecosystem” in Algeria from the 1880s to the beginning of the Second World War. The study of a society divided between a dominant (European) settler minority and an Algerian Muslim majority, the book tracks the development and impact of new information technologies—the printing press, telegraph, cinema, radio (and later television)—in Algeria from the late-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. Throughout its chapters, readers are reminded to resist Eurocentric and teleological frameworks of “modernization” that do not apply to societies like Algeria’s where such technologies coexisted with other forms of news circulation including manuscripts, song, and rumor/word of mouth.

The book is grounded in an impressive range of sources in multiple languages. It challenges ideas about the relationship between print capitalism and nationalism over the course of this pivotal period in both Algerian and French history. Interrogating the history of colonial hegemony in and through the analysis of how Algerians accessed and interpreted the news in myriad ways often not anticipated by settler and state authorities, the book also has far-reaching implications for how we think about knowledge and power in imperial contexts more broadly. Its pages are rich with exciting and fascinating moments and stories—of surveillance, violence, and injustice, but also of the counterforces of the Algerian subversion of and resistance to colonial oppression.

*Special note in March 2020: I hope you are all keeping safe and healthy and that this conversation with Arthur might be helpful in some small way right now—with work, teaching and/or as a distraction in this period of global pandemic. Thanks so much to Arthur, who was SO much fun to speak with & to all the NBFS listeners out there!

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars(2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, '"No Hiroshima in Africa": The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara' appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada and hopes all listeners are keeping healthy and safe at this difficult time in our world. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email ([email protected]).

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Matt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020)

30 mars 2020 | 53 min

Neil Selwyn, "What is Digital Sociology?" (Polity, 2019)

27 mars 2020 | 55 min

The rise of digital technology is transforming the world in which we live. Our digitalized societies demand new ways of thinking about the social, and this short book introduces readers to an approach that can deliver this: digital sociology.

In What is Digital Sociology (Polity, 2019), Neil Selwyn examines the concepts, tools and practices that sociologists are developing to analyze the intersections of the social and the digital. Blending theory and empirical examples, the five chapters highlight areas of inquiry where digital approaches are taking hold and shaping the discipline of sociology today. The book explores key topics such as digital race and digital labor, as well as the fast-changing nature of digital research methods and diversifying forms of digital scholarship.

In this interview, Dr. Selwyn and I discuss the overarching question guiding this book: what is digital sociology? We go on to discuss how the classical figures in sociology wrote about, and engaged with, technology, the distinctiveness of contemporary digital sociology, key methodologies, and the research ethics related to digital sociological research. I highly recommend this book for students, professors, and anyone else interested in digital humanities, big data and computational methods, or science and technology studies. This would be a great book for both undergraduate and graduate courses related to digital media and social science.

Dr. Neil Selwyn is a professor in the Faculty of Education at Monash University. His research and teaching focuses on the place of digital media in everyday life, and the sociology of technology (non)use in educational settings. Neil has written extensively on a number of issues, including digital exclusion, education technology policymaking and the student experience of technology-based learning. You can find him on Twitter @Neil_Selwyn.

Krystina Millar is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. Her research interests include gender, sociology of the body, and sexuality. You can find her on Twitter at @KrystinaMillar.

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Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, "Übermensch: Plädoyer Für Einen Nietzscheanischen Transhumanismus" (Schwabe, 2019)

19 mars 2020 | 77 min

Jacob Turner, "Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)

12 mars 2020 | 77 min

Kate Devlin, "Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots" (Bloomsbury, 2018)

5 mars 2020 | 64 min

Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, "Data Feminism" (MIT Press, 2020)

3 mars 2020 | 38 min

Michael Rechtenwald, "Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom" (New English Review, 2019)

2 mars 2020 | 99 min

In his book about enormous sea changes brought about by digital technology, Michael Rectenwald begins and ends his Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom (New English Review, 2019) with the political, in particular with the objectives of the Big Digital conglomerates as global corporate monopoly capitalists or would-be-monopolies.

Google Archipelago argues that Big Digital technologies and their principals represent not only economic powerhouses but also new forms of governmental power. The technologies of Big Digital not only amplify, extend, and lend precision to the powers of the state, they may represent elements of a new corporate state power.

In contrast to academics who study digital media and bemoan such supposed horrors as digital exploitation, in Google Archipelago, Michael Rectenwald argues that the real danger posed by Big Digital is not digital capitalism as such, but leftist authoritarianism, a political outlook shared by academic leftists, who thus cannot recognize it in their object of study. Thus, while imagining that they are radical critics of Big Digital, academic digital media scholars (whom Rectenwald terms the "digitalistas") actually serve as ideological smokescreens that obscure its real character.

Michael Rectenwald is a recently retired Professor of Liberal Studies at New York University, where he taught cultural and social history as well as academic writing.

Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com.

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David J. Gunkel, "Robot Rights" (MIT Press, 2018)

27 februari 2020 | 89 min

Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020)

25 februari 2020 | 42 min

Virginia Eubanks, "Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor" (St. Martin's, 2018)

20 februari 2020 | 85 min

The State of Indiana denies one million applications for healthcare, foodstamps and cash benefits in three years―because a new computer system interprets any mistake as “failure to cooperate.” In Los Angeles, an algorithm calculates the comparative vulnerability of tens of thousands of homeless people in order to prioritize them for an inadequate pool of housing resources. In Pittsburgh, a child welfare agency uses a statistical model to try to predict which children might be future victims of abuse or neglect.

Since the dawn of the digital age, decision-making in finance, employment, politics, health and human services has undergone revolutionary change. Today, automated systems―rather than humans―control which neighborhoods get policed, which families attain needed resources, and who is investigated for fraud. While we all live under this new regime of data, the most invasive and punitive systems are aimed at the poor.

In Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor (St. Martin's, 2018), Virginia Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. The book is full of heart-wrenching and eye-opening stories, from a woman in Indiana whose benefits are literally cut off as she lays dying to a family in Pennsylvania in daily fear of losing their daughter because they fit a certain statistical profile.

The U.S. has always used its most cutting-edge science and technology to contain, investigate, discipline and punish the destitute. Like the county poorhouse and scientific charity before them, digital tracking and automated decision-making hide poverty from the middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhumane choices: which families get food and which starve, who has housing and who remains homeless, and which families are broken up by the state. In the process, they weaken democracy and betray our most cherished national values.

This deeply researched and passionate book could not be more timely.

John Danaher is a lecturer the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is also the host of the wonderful podcast Philosophical Disquisitions. You can find it here on Apple Podcasts.

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Angela Jones, "Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Work Industry" (NYU Press, 2020)

14 februari 2020 | 51 min

In her new book, Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Work Industry (NYU Press, 2020), Dr. Angela Jones engages readers in a five-year mixed-methods study she conducted on the erotic webcam industry where she tells a pornographic story about the multibillion-dollar online sex industry that is colloquially known as “camming.”

Through camming, millions of people from all over the globe have found decent wages, friendship, intimacy, community, empowerment, and pleasure. This interview is full of stories from a diverse sample of cam models from all over the world whom Jones interviewed and observed as part of her five-year mixed-methods study. Cam models, like all sex workers, must grapple with exploitation, discrimination, harassment, and stigmatization. Using an intersectional lens, Jones was attentive to how the overlapping systems of neoliberal capitalism, White supremacy, patriarchy, cissexism, heterosexism, and ableism shape all cam models’ experiences in camming as a new global sex industry.

This thorough examination of the camming industry provides a unique vantage point from which to understand and theorize around gender, sexuality, race, and labor in a time when workers globally face increasing economic precariousness and worsened forms of alienation, and desperately desire to recapture pleasure in work. Despite the serious issues cam models face, Jones’s focus on pleasure will help people better understand the motivations for engaging in online sex work, as well as the complex social interactions between cam models and customers. In Camming, Jones pioneers an entirely new subfield in sociology—the sociology of pleasure. The sociology of pleasure can provide new insights into the motivation for social behavior and assist sociologists in analyzing social interactions in everyday life.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He earned his doctoral degree in Public Policy and Public Administration from Walden University. He researches place and the process of place making as it presents in everyday social interactions. You can find more about him on his website, follow him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst or email him at [email protected].

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Francesca Minerva, "The Ethics of Cryonics: Is It Immoral to be Immortal" (Palgrave, 2018)

13 februari 2020 | 59 min

Germaine R. Halegoua, "The Digital City: Media and the Social Production of Place" (NYU Press, 2019)

12 februari 2020 | 52 min

In her new book, The Digital City: Media and the Social Production of Place (NYU Press, 2019), Germaine R. Halegoua rethinks everyday interactions that humans have with digital infrastructures, navigation technologies, and social media as we move through the world. Dr. Halegoua draws from five case studies from global and mid-sized cities to illustrate the concept of “re-placing." In this book, Dr. Halegoua shows have different populations employ urban broadband networks, social and locative media platforms, digital navigation, smart cities, and creative placemaking initiatives to create built environment into places with deep meaning and emotional attachments. She argues that people use digital media to create a unique sense of place within rapidly changing urban environments and that a sense of place is integral in understanding the complex relationships humans have with digital media.

In this interview, Dr. Halegoua talks about the multidisciplinary nature of her work as well as the distinct contribution she sees film and media studies providing her in studying the digital, place, place making, and the concept of “re-placing”. Dr. Halegoua shares that her research could be considered multidisciplinary and we agreed that value is added to the body of research when a topic is studies across multiple disciplines. She also shared that film and media studies contributes some unique aspects that other disciplines do not provide.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He earned his doctoral degree in Public Policy and Public Administration from Walden University. He researches place and the process of place making as it is presented in everyday social interactions. You can find more about him on his website, follow him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst or email him at [email protected].

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Shannon Vallor, "Technology and the Virtues" (Oxford UP, 2016)

6 februari 2020 | 72 min

The 21st century offers a dizzying array of new technological developments: robots smart enough to take white collar jobs, social media tools that manage our most important relationships, ordinary objects that track, record, analyze and share every detail of our daily lives, and biomedical techniques with the potential to transform and enhance human minds and bodies to an unprecedented degree.

Emerging technologies are reshaping our habits, practices, institutions, cultures and environments in increasingly rapid, complex and unpredictable ways that create profound risks and opportunities for human flourishing on a global scale. How can our future be protected in such challenging and uncertain conditions? How can we possibly improve the chances that the human family will not only live, but live well, into the 21st century and beyond?

Shannon Vallor's Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting (Oxford University Press, 2016) locates a key to that future in the distant past: specifically, in the philosophical traditions of virtue ethics developed by classical thinkers from Aristotle and Confucius to the Buddha. Each developed a way of seeking the good life that equips human beings with the moral and intellectual character to flourish even in the most unpredictable, complex and unstable situations--precisely where we find ourselves today.

Through an examination of the many risks and opportunities presented by rapidly changing technosocial conditions, Vallor makes the case that if we are to have any real hope of securing a future worth wanting, then we will need more than just better technologies. We will also need better humans.

Technology and the Virtues develops a practical framework for seeking that goal by means of the deliberate cultivation of technomoral virtues: specific skills and strengths of character, adapted to the unique challenges of 21st century life, that offer the human family our best chance of learning to live wisely and well with emerging technologies.

John Danaher is a lecturer the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is also the host of the wonderful podcast Philosophical Disquisitions. You can find it here on Apple Podcasts.

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Russell A. Newman, "The Paradoxes of Network Neutralities" (MIT Press, 2019)

3 februari 2020 | 42 min

Allison Ochs, "Would I Have Sexted Back in the 80s?" (Amsterdam UP, 2019)

31 januari 2020 | 67 min

K. Linder et al., "Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers" (Stylus Publishing, 2020)

30 januari 2020 | 38 min

Alexis Elder, "Friendship, Robots, and Social Media: False Friends and Second Selves" (Routledge, 2017)

30 januari 2020 | 73 min

Nancy D. Campbell, "OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose" (MIT Press, 2020)

24 januari 2020 | 41 min

For years, drug overdose was unmentionable in polite society. OD was understood to be something that took place in dark alleys―an ugly death awaiting social deviants―neither scientifically nor clinically interesting. But over the last several years, overdose prevention has become the unlikely object of a social movement, powered by the miracle drug naloxone. In OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose (MIT Press, 2020), Nancy D. Campbell charts the emergence of naloxone as a technological fix for overdose and describes the remaking of overdose into an experience recognized as common, predictable, patterned―and, above all, preventable. Naloxone, which made resuscitation, rescue, and “reversal” after an overdose possible, became a tool for shifting law, policy, clinical medicine, and science toward harm reduction. Liberated from emergency room protocols and distributed in take-home kits to non-medical professionals, it also became a tool of empowerment.

After recounting the prehistory of naloxone―the early treatment of OD as a problem of poisoning, the development of nalorphine (naloxone's predecessor), the idea of “reanimatology”―Campbell describes how naloxone emerged as a tool of harm reduction. She reports on naloxone use in far-flung locations that include post-Thatcherite Britain, rural New Mexico, and cities and towns in Massachusetts. Drawing on interviews with approximately sixty advocates, drug users, former users, friends, families, witnesses, clinicians, and scientists―whom she calls the “protagonists” of her story―Campbell tells a story of saving lives amid the complex, difficult conditions of an unfolding unnatural disaster.

Dr. Dorian Deshauer is a psychiatrist, historian, and assistant professor at the University of Toronto. He is associate editor for the Canadian Medical Association Journal, Canada’s leading peer-reviewed general medical journal and is one of the hosts of CMAJ Podcasts, a medical podcast for doctors and researchers.

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Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger, "Re-Engineering Humanity" (Cambridge UP, 2018)

23 januari 2020 | 89 min

Ben Green, "The Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future" (MIT Press, 2019)

20 januari 2020 | 34 min

James Schwartz, "The Ethics of Space Exploration" (Springer, 2016)

16 januari 2020 | 67 min

Neil McArthur, "Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications" (MIT Press, 2017)

9 januari 2020 | 70 min

John Danaher, "Automation and Utopia: Human Flourishing in a World without Work" (Harvard UP, 2019)

2 januari 2020 | 69 min

Angelina Callahan, "NASA in the World: Fifty Years of International Collaboration in Space" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)

27 december 2019 | 33 min

Evan Friss, "On Bicycles: A 200-Year History of Cycling in New York City" (Columbia UP, 2019)

26 december 2019 | 49 min

Phoebe Moore, "The Quantified Self in Precarity: Work, Technology and What Counts" (Routledge, 2017)

26 december 2019 | 62 min

Steve Fuller, "The Proactionary Imperative: A Foundation for Transhumanism" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)

19 december 2019 | 92 min

Laura Cabrera, "Rethinking Human Enhancement: Social Enhancement and Emergent Technologies" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)

12 december 2019 | 82 min

E. Jones-Imhotep and T. Adcock, "Made Modern: Science and Technology in Canadian History" (UBC Press, 2018)

10 december 2019 | 61 min

Science and technology have shaped not only economic empires and industrial landscapes, but also the identities, anxieties, and understandings of people living in modern times. The book I’m looking at today, Made Modern: Science and Technology in Canadian History (University of British Columbia Press, 2018) explores the complex interconnections between science, technology, and modernity in Canada. Edited by Edward Jones-Imhotep and Tina Adcock, it draws together leading scholars from a wide range of fields to enrich our understanding of history inside and outside Canada’s borders. Organized around three key themes – bodies, technologies, and environments – the book’s chapters examine how science and technology have allowed Canadians to imagine and reinvent themselves as modern. Focusing on topics as varied as colonial anthropology, scientific expeditions, electrotherapy, the occult sciences, industrial development, telephony, patents, neuroscience, aviation, space science, and infrastructure, the contributors explore Canadians’ modern engagements with science and technology and situate them within larger national and transnational contexts.

The first major collection of its kind in thirty years, Made Modern explores the place of science and technology in shaping Canadians’ experience of themselves and their place in the modern world.

Edward Jones-Imhotep is a cultural historian of science and technology and an associate professor of history at York University. He is the recipient of the Sidney Edelstein Prize in the history of technology for his book The Unreliable Nation: Hostile Nature and Technological Failure in the Cold War.

Tina Adcock is a cultural and environmental historian of modern Canada and an assistant professor of history at Simon Fraser University. She is an associate of the L.R. Wilson Institute for Canadian History at McMaster University.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City.

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Audrey Kurth Cronin, "Power to the People: How Open Technological Innovation is Arming Tomorrow’s Terrorists" (Oxford UP, 2019)

9 december 2019 | 47 min

Deborah Lupton, "The Quantified Self" (Polity, 2016)

5 december 2019 | 63 min

Lundy Braun, "Breathing Race into the Machine" (U Minnesota Press, 2014)

4 december 2019 | 43 min

“We cannot get answers to questions that cannot be asked.” Lundy Braun’s influential book, Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) documents the history and present-day use of an everyday medical instrument, the spirometer, which measures a person’s lung capacity. The instrument has a long history, but since the 1970s, this common medical device has been built with a switch that forces users to choose: are these the lungs of a person who is Black or a person who is White? In its materiality, the instrument forces racialized and individualized answers to the question: What explains human variation? In doing so, the people who have imagined, built, and refined the instrument have foreclosed structural, political explanations of human difference—and in doing so, foreclosed the possibility of holding governments and corporations accountable, including in recent workers’ compensation lawsuits.

Lundy Braun tells the long history of this instrument as it passed between “knowledge networks” in the United Kingdom, United States, and South Africa within the contexts of medicine, law, and education. Admirably, Braun documents how and in what terms experts (unsuccessfully) questioned the spirometer’s epistemic authority and its racialization, as well as how experts partnered with social justice groups to use the spirometer for liberatory ends. The book emphasizes the contexts of war and industrial labor, the importance of standardization, and, above all, the role of the spirometer in creating and maintaining the “white norm” in the body.

Lundy Braun is Professor of Medical Science in Pathology and Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University. The interview was conducted collaboratively by Laura Stark [insert www.laura-stark.com] and students in her Vanderbilt seminar, History of Global Health: Omar Amir, Maggie Cox, Bryce Bailey, Donald Fitzgerald, Ashley Hunter, Jillian Jackson, Rohit Kamath, Zoe Mulraine, Liu Lanxi, Madison Noall, Catie O’Reilly, Isabella Schaffer, Katie Swift, Charlotte Whitfield, and Allie Yan.

For ideas and resources to use NBN interviews in your classes, please email Laura Stark at [email protected] or see Stark’s essay “Can New Media Save the Book?” in Contexts (2015).

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Alberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019)

3 december 2019 | 58 min

Nir Eyal, "Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life" (Bloomsbury, 2019)

25 november 2019 | 57 min

Ruha Benjamin, "Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code" (Polity, 2019)

19 november 2019 | 55 min

J. Yates and C. N. Murphy, "Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting since 1880" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019)

14 november 2019 | 53 min

Jonathan Rees, "Before the Refrigerator: How We Used to Get Ice" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018)

14 november 2019 | 55 min

Margaret E. Schotte, "Sailing School: Navigating Science and Skill, 1550-1800" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019)

14 november 2019 | 57 min

Throughout the Age of Exploration, European maritime communities bent on colonial and commercial expansion embraced the complex mechanics of celestial navigation. They developed schools, textbooks, and instruments to teach the new mathematical techniques to sailors. As these experts debated the value of theory and practice, memory and mathematics, they created hybrid models that would have a lasting impact on applied science.

In Sailing School: Navigating Science and Skill, 1550-1800 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), a richly illustrated comparative study of this transformative period, Margaret E. Schotte charts more than two hundred years of navigational history as she investigates how mariners solved the challenges of navigating beyond sight of land. She begins by outlining the influential sixteenth-century Iberian model for training and certifying nautical practitioners. She takes us into a Dutch bookshop stocked with maritime manuals and a French trigonometry lesson devoted to the idea that "navigation is nothing more than a right triangle." The story culminates at the close of the eighteenth century with a young British naval officer who managed to keep his damaged vessel afloat for two long months, thanks largely to lessons he learned as a keen student.

This is the first study to trace the importance, for the navigator's art, of the world of print. Schotte interrogates a wide variety of archival records from six countries, including hundreds of published textbooks and never-before-studied manuscripts crafted by practitioners themselves. Ultimately, Sailing School helps us to rethink the relationship among maritime history, the Scientific Revolution, and the rise of print culture during a period of unparalleled innovation and global expansion.

Lukas Rieppel teaches at Brown University. You can find more about him here, or find him on twitter here.

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Kathryn Conrad on University Press Publishing

3 november 2019 | 39 min

Elisabeth Köll, "Railroads and the Transformation of China" (Harvard UP, 2019)

28 oktober 2019 | 67 min

J. Neuhaus, "Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers" (West Virginia UP, 2019)

24 oktober 2019 | 31 min

Donna Dickenson, "Me Medicine vs. We Medicine: Reclaiming Biotechnology for the Common Good" (Columbia UP, 2016)

26 juli 2019 | 21 min

Personalized healthcare―or what the award-winning author Donna Dickenson calls "Me Medicine"―is radically transforming our longstanding "one-size-fits-all" model. Technologies such as direct-to-consumer genetic testing, pharmacogenetically developed therapies in cancer care, private umbilical cord blood banking, and neurocognitive enhancement claim to cater to an individual's specific biological character, and, in some cases, these technologies have shown powerful potential. Yet in others they have produced negligible or even negative results. Whatever is behind the rise of Me Medicine, it isn't just science. So why is Me Medicine rapidly edging out We Medicine, and how has our commitment to our collective health suffered as a result?

In her cogent, provocative book Me Medicine vs. We Medicine: Reclaiming Biotechnology for the Common Good(Columbia University Press, 2016), Dickenson examines the economic and political factors fueling the Me Medicine phenomenon and explores how, over time, this paradigm shift in how we approach our health might damage our individual and collective well-being. Historically, the measures of "We Medicine," such as vaccination and investment in public-health infrastructure, have radically extended our life spans, and Dickenson argues we've lost sight of that truth in our enthusiasm for "Me Medicine."

Dickenson explores how personalized medicine illustrates capitalism's protean capacity for creating new products and markets where none existed before―and how this, rather than scientific plausibility, goes a long way toward explaining private umbilical cord blood banks and retail genetics. Drawing on the latest findings from leading scientists, social scientists, and political analysts, she critically examines four possible hypotheses driving our Me Medicine moment: a growing sense of threat; a wave of patient narcissism; corporate interests driving new niche markets; and the dominance of personal choice as a cultural value. She concludes with insights from political theory that emphasize a conception of the commons and the steps we can take to restore its value to modern biotechnology.

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David Beer, “The Data Gaze: Capitalism, Power and Perception“ (Sage, 2019)

2 juli 2019 | 37 min

Kerim Yasar, "Electrified Voices: How the Telephone, Phonograph, and Radio Shaped Modern Japan, 1868-1945" (Columbia UP, 2018)

28 maj 2019 | 90 min

Gökçe Günel, "Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi" (Duke UP, 2019)

24 maj 2019 | 43 min

Whether in space colonies or through geo-engineering, the looming disaster of climate change inspires no shortage of techno-utopian visions of human survival. Most of such hypotheses remain science fiction, but in Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi (Duke University Press, 2019), Gökçe Günel explores the United Arab Emirates’s planned Masdar City, an experimental attempt at designing an emissions-free society. The first parts of Masdar City opened beside the Abu Dhabi airport in 2010 as an oil-wealth funded initiative to establish the UAE as a leader in the renewable energy sector and to begin to prepare the emirates for a low or post-oil economy. Masdar attracted students and researchers from around the world to test, and be test subjects, for innovations including personal rapid transit, energy currencies, carbon capture and storage, and closed-loop resource circuits. Quickly, however, the master plan was abandoned as unworkable; but Masdar City has also not been a failure. Rather, Günel explores the interconnected social, technical, and political ramifications and adaptations involved in this attempt to design a potential fossil fuel-free future. She shrewdly criticizes the limitations of climate change strategies intended to protect the political economic status quo. Yet also, through deep ethnographic fieldwork with participants, Günel demonstrates the valuable role of anthropological insight in social and technological adaptations to a changing climate.

Gökçe Günel is Assistant Professor in the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona.

Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene.

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Martin Collins, "A Telephone for the World: Motorola, Iridium, and the Making of a Global Age" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018)

23 maj 2019 | 53 min

Eric Topol, "Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again" (Basic Books, 2019)

7 maj 2019 | 40 min

Chris Bernhardt, "Quantum Computing for Everyone" (MIT Press, 2019)

2 maj 2019 | 55 min

Crystal Abidin, "Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online" (Emerald Publishing, 2018)

29 april 2019 | 50 min

Christopher Preston, "The Synthetic Age: Outdesigning Evolution, Resurrecting Species, and Reengineering Our World" (MIT Press, 2018)

18 april 2019 | 51 min

Tom Wheeler, "From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future" (Brookings, 2019)

27 mars 2019 | 59 min

Discussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Open Access Publishing

19 mars 2019 | 32 min

Kartik Hosanagar, "A Human’s Guide to Machine Intelligence: How Algorithms Are Shaping Our Lives" (Viking, 2019)

12 mars 2019 | 56 min

James Schwoch, "Wired into Nature: The Telegraph and the North American Frontier" (U Illinois Press, 2018)

6 mars 2019 | 51 min

Joy Lisi Rankin, "A People’s History of Computing in the United States" (Harvard UP, 2018).

19 februari 2019 | 40 min

Adrienne Mayor, "Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology" (Princeton UP, 2018)

6 februari 2019 | 42 min

The first robot to walk the earth was a bronze giant called Talos. This wondrous machine was created not by the MIT Robotics Lab, but by Hephaestus, the Greek god of invention. More than 2,500 years ago, long before medieval automata, and centuries before technology made self-moving devices possible, Greek mythology was exploring ideas about creating artificial life―and grappling with still-unresolved ethical concerns about biotechne, “life through craft.” Mythic automata appear in tales about Jason and the Argonauts, Medea, Daedalus, Prometheus, and Pandora, and many of these machines are described as being built with the same materials and methods that human artisans used to make tools and statues. And, indeed, many sophisticated animated devices were actually built in antiquity, reaching a climax with the creation of a host of automata in the ancient city of learning, Alexandria, the original Silicon Valley.

In Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, Dr. Adrienne Mayor tells the fascinating story of the earliest expressions of the timeless impulse to create artificial life and reveals how some of today’s most advanced innovations in robotics and AI were foreshadowed in ancient myth.

Adrienne Mayor is a Research Scholar in Classics and History and Philosophy of Science and Berggruen Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. She is a folklorist and historian of ancient science who investigates natural knowledge contained in pre-scientific myths and oral traditions. Her research looks at ancient "folk science" precursors, alternatives, and parallels to modern scientific methods. Her work has been featured on NPR, the BBC, the History Channel, the New York Times, Smithsonian, and National Geographic.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City.

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Matthew Longo, "The Politics of Borders: Sovereignty, Security, and the Citizen after 9/11" (Cambridge UP, 2017)

4 februari 2019 | 54 min

In his new book, Matthew Longo takes the reader on an unusual journey, at least within political theory, since his work combines a normative political theory approach with an ethnographic approach to understand both the conceptual and actual issue of borders as spaces that separate and distinguish states and nations, and individuals and citizens. The Politics of Borders: Sovereignty, Security, and the Citizen after 9/11 (Cambridge University Press, 2017) is not simply about the border because, as the book makes clear, borders are in no way simple, and what Longo has pursued in his work is the complexity that encompasses the theoretical idea of the border but also how and why borders are more diverse in understanding than we often ascribe to them. Longo interrogates what a border actually is, noting that the space itself is not quite the thin line between states that we often assume it to be, but a physical area that is co-administered by bordering nations, often collaboratively, thus blurring the line or space of sovereignty. Threaded throughout the book is the ongoing question of what constitutes citizenship, since borders and citizenship are braided together though the structures of the state, and the considerations of who is and is not permitted membership within a state. Longo has also included a substantial exploration of the role of technology and data in the actual understanding of how border security works in practice. This section of the analysis is particularly important to consider because, according to Longo, the focus on the individual and their data profile, shifts the understanding of state sovereignty and the responsibility for definitions of citizenship. This book is incredibly topical in a variety of areas, not least in the way that it contributes to our thinking about the border itself as a space and as a concept, the role of the state, and the growing domain of data and technology and how they are shaping ideas of citizenship.

This podcast was hosted by Lilly Goren, Professor of Political Science and Global Studies at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. You can follow her on Twitter @gorenlj.

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Jan English-Lueck, "Cultures@SiliconValley: Second Edition" (Stanford UP, 2017)

28 januari 2019 | 67 min

Is Social Media Killing Democracy? with Regina Rini

22 januari 2019 | 35 min

Megan Finn, "Documenting Aftermath: Information Infrastructures in the Wake of Disasters" (MIT Press, 2018)

8 januari 2019 | 57 min

Pamela E. Klassen, "The Story of Radio Mind: A Missionary's Journey on Indigenous Land" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

24 december 2018 | 53 min

A. G. Holloway and J. W. White, "Our Little Monitor: The Greatest Invention of the Civil War" (Kent State UP, 2018)

19 december 2018 | 48 min

Paola Bertucci, "Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France" (Yale UP, 2018)

6 december 2018 | 56 min

McKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century" (Verso, 2017)

6 december 2018 | 64 min

Chris Horrocks, “The Joy of Sets: A Short History of the Television” (Reaktion Press, 2017)

8 november 2018 | 39 min

Raymond Boyle, “The Talent Industry: Television, Cultural Intermediaries and New Digital Pathways” (Palgrave, 2018)

6 november 2018 | 40 min

J. Obert, A. Poe, A. Sarat, eds., “The Lives of Guns” (Oxford UP, 2018)

1 november 2018 | 34 min

N. M. Sambaluk, “The Other Space Race: Eisenhower and the Quest for Aerospace Security” (Naval Institute Press, 2015)

29 oktober 2018 | 87 min

Lee Humphreys, “The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life” (MIT Press, 2018)

19 oktober 2018 | 3 min

Wade Roush, ed., “Twelve Tomorrows” (MIT Press, 2018)

18 oktober 2018 | 41 min

Science fiction is, at its core, about tomorrow—exploring through stories what the universe may look like one or 10 or a million years in the future.

Twelve Tomorrows (MIT Press, 2018) uses short stories to fit nearly a dozen possible “tomorrows” into a single book. Edited by journalist Wade Roush, the collection features stories by Elizabeth Bear, SL Huang, Clifford V. Johnson, J. M. Ledgard, Liu Cixin, Ken Liu, Paul McAuley, Nnedi Okorafor, Malka Older, Sarah Pinsker, and Alastair Reynolds.

The book is the latest in a series of identically titled books launched in 2011 by MIT Technology Review. The series explores the future implications of emerging technologies through the lens of fiction.

It’s the first time Roush, who hosts the podcast Soonish and specializes in writing about science and technology, has edited fiction. “The mission of Twelve Tomorrows is to highlight stories that are totally plausible from an engineering point of view,” Roush says.

In “The Heart of the Matter,” Nnedi Okorafur explores how suspicion of new technology can have real life consequences. In this case, plotters against the reformist president of Nigeria try to muster support for a coup by manipulating fears about the president’s new artificial heart, claiming that the organ—which was grown in a Chinese laboratory from plant cells—is powered by witchcraft.

In “The Woman Who Destroyed Us,” SL Huang describes the plight of a mother who wants to exact revenge on a doctor who used deep brain stimulation to treat her son’s behavioral and mental health issues. The changes in her son are so dramatic that the mother feels she’s lost her child, and yet the son is happy with the result, feeling that the treatment has revealed his true self.

If there’s one message Roush hopes readers take from the collection, it’s that people are in the driver’s seat when it comes to building and using new technologies. He hopes the book reminds people “that we do have the power to adopt or shun technology, that we can decide how to bring it into our lives, to what extent we want to use it or not use it. We can even influence the way innovation happens. We can tell scientists and engineers, ‘You know what? This isn’t good enough’ or ‘We’re worried about this. We want you to build in more safeguards.’… We have that power.”

Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe.

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Rachel Z. Arndt, “Beyond Measure” (Sarabande Books, 2018)

12 oktober 2018 | 31 min

Byron Reese, “The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity” (Simon & Schuster, 2018)

4 oktober 2018 | 73 min

In his new book, The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity (Simon & Schuster, 2018), futurist, technologist, and CEO of Gigaom, Byron Reese makes the case that technology has reshaped humanity just three times in history: 100,000 years ago, we harnessed fire, which led to language; 10,000 years ago, we developed agriculture, which led to cities and warfare; and 5,000 years ago, we invented the wheel and writing, which lead to the nation state. He tells us that we are now on the doorstep of a fourth change brought about by two technologies: AI and robotics. His book provides an essential background on how we got to this point, and how—rather than what—we should think about the topics we’ll soon all be facing, such as machine consciousness, automation, changes in employment, creative computers, radical life extension, artificial life, AI ethics, the future of warfare, superintelligence, and the implications of extreme prosperity.

By asking questions like “Are you a machine?” and “Could a computer feel anything?”, Reese cultivates discussion at the cutting edge in robotics and AI, and provides a framework by which we can all understand, discuss, and act on the issues of the Fourth Age and how they’ll transform humanity.

Byron Reese is the CEO and publisher of the industry-leading technology research company Gigaom, and the founder of several high-tech companies. He has spent the better part of his life exploring the interplay of technology with human history. Reese has patents, obtained and pending, in disciplines as varied as crowdsourcing, content creation, and psychographics. The websites he has launched, which cover the intersection of technology, business, science, and history, have together received over a billion visitors and he is author of the acclaimed book, Infinite Progress: How Technology and the Internet Will End Ignorance, Disease, Hunger, Poverty, and War. He joins me today to talk about his new book, The Fourth Age.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City.

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P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking, “LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018)

2 oktober 2018 | 50 min

Ben Epstein, “The Only Constant is Change: Technology, Political Communication, and Innovation Over Time” (Oxford UP, 2018)

22 augusti 2018 | 47 min

Julie A. Cohn, “The Grid: Biography of an American Technology” (MIT Press, 2017)

15 augusti 2018 | 23 min

Laura Kalba, “Color in the Age of Impressionism: Commerce, Technology, and Art” (Penn State UP, 2018)

14 juni 2018 | 61 min

When you imagine the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, what colors do you see? Whatever comes to mind, Laura Kalba’s, Color in the Age of Impressionism: Commerce, Technology, and Art (Penn State University Press, 2018) will change the way you think about the contents, forms, and significance of the palette of this critical moment in the history of modernity. Examining the impact of emergent color technologies on French visual culture and landscapes, Color in the Age of Impressionism includes, but moves beyond, a discussion of the works and colors of Impressionist artists to consider color theory, dye manufacture, flower cultivation and gardening culture, fireworks, chromolithographic reproduction and collecting, autochromes and neo-Impressionism. Along the way, this is a history of aesthetics, art, fashion, technical innovation, and the modern markets of hue, tone, contrast, harmony, and shade during the “color revolution” of the decades Kalba explores.

Approaching the history of color in the period with the archival passion and conceptual tools of the historian of visual culture, the book pushes past the discussion and prescription of taste to delve deeper into the social, economic, technological, political, and cultural history of color in a France in the throes of the emergence of a consumer and capitalist society divided by class and other differences. A “bottom-up” history of color, Color in the Age of Impressionism takes seriously the question: How did ordinary French men and women understand realism, abstraction, and fantasy during the decades of the emergence of a modernity that included a spectrum of visuality, imagination, and techniques of representation? A winner of The College Art Association’s 2018 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, the study will be of great interest to anyone fascinated by the histories of art, looking, spectacle, culture, and everyday life in France in the decades before and after the fin-de-siècle.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: [email protected].

*The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of “Creatures,” a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as “hazy”). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/.

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Jacob N. Shapiro, “Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict” (Princeton UP, 2018)

7 juni 2018 | 55 min

Larry Cuban, “The Flight of a Butterfly or the Path of a Bullet? Using Technology to Transform Teaching and Learning” (Harvard Education Press, 2018)

6 juni 2018 | 34 min

Hala Auji, “Printing Arab Modernity: Book Culture and the American Press in Nineteenth-Century Beirut” (Brill, 2016)

5 juni 2018 | 51 min

In Middle Eastern history, the printing press has been both over- and under-assigned significance as an agent of social change. Hala Auji’s Printing Arab Modernity: Book Culture and the American Press in Nineteenth-Century Beirut (Brill, 2016) is not only a history of the American Protestant mission’s Arabic press in Beirut, which printed books for Ottoman readers during the 19th century, but a window into the world of Arabic printing at large. Auji uses art history to chart the transition between manuscripts and printed books, using a deep appreciation for Islamic art and book-production to highlight rupture and continuity. Text and non-textual elements are used to tell a story that was not local simply to Beirut, but had connections to the entire region and the development of printing in Arabic-language script at large. Part book-history, part art history, part intellectual history, Printing Arab Modernity ebbs between lithography and typography to tell an essential narrative of modern Middle Eastern history.

Hala Auji is an assistant professor of art history in the Department of Fine Arts and Art History at the American University of Beirut (AUB). She holds a PhD in art history from Binghamton University, State University of New York, an MA in Art Criticism & Theory from Art Center College of Design, and a BFA in graphic design from the American University of Beirut. Her research interests include: Arabic book and print culture, 19th-century Islamic art and architecture and the| history of modern science in the Islamic world, amongst many more. She can also be found at https://www.halaauji.net/

Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing.

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B.J. Mendelson, “Privacy: And How to Get It Back” (Curious Reads, 2017)

3 maj 2018 | 47 min

Yutao Sun and Seamus Grimes, “China and Global Value Chains” (Routledge, 2018)

30 april 2018 | 45 min

Today I was joined by Seamus Grimes from Ireland where he is Emeritus Professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway. With Yutao Sun (Dalian University of Technology), he just published a very interesting and timely book China and Global Value Chains: Globalization and the Information and Communications Technology Sector (Routledge, 2018).

President Trump has raised the intriguing question of bringing the manufacturing of companies like Apple back from China to the U.S. This book, however, argues that in this age of the knowledge-based economy and increased globalization, that value creation and distribution based on knowledge and innovation activities are at the core of economic development. The double-edged sword of globalization has transformed China’s economic development in the past few decades. Although China has benefitted from globalization and is now the second largest economy in the world, having become a global manufacturing power and the biggest exporter of high-tech products, it continues to be highly dependent on foreign sources of capital and technology.

The book explores the core of the Chinese economy from the perspective of the global value chain, combining analysis of inward investment, international trade, science and technology and innovation and economic development. Specifically, it investigates China’s evolving role with some innovative Chinese companies emerging in the global market and China’s ongoing efforts to become an innovation-driven economy.

This is a very interesting book on the complexity of the global industrial systems that are behind the production of the electronic goods that we use daily. Beside China and this specific sector, it is a timely warning for those that argue in favour of raising barriers or regulating otherwise the current flow of goods and components worldwide.

Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Critical Management Studies.

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George Perkovich and Ariel E. Levite, “Understanding Cyber Conflict: 14 Analogies” (Georgetown UP, 2017)

18 april 2018 | 54 min

Stephen Monteiro, “The Fabric of Interface: Mobile Media, Design, and Gender” (MIT Press, 2017)

6 april 2018 | 28 min

Alex Wade, “Playback: A Genealogy of 1980s British Videogames” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018)

23 mars 2018 | 50 min

Christopher J. Lee, “Jet Lag” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017)

27 februari 2018 | 50 min

Molly Wright Steenson, “Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape” (MIT Press, 2017)

27 februari 2018 | 25 min

Jennifer Hart, “Ghana on the Go: African Mobility in the Age of Motor Transportation” (Indiana UP, 2016)

23 februari 2018 | 60 min

Michael Shermer, “Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia” (Henry Holt, 2018)

20 februari 2018 | 55 min

Dmitry Novikov, “Cybernetics: Past to Future” (Springer Verlag, 2016)

15 februari 2018 | 61 min

Andrew Keen, “How To Fix The Future” (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2018)

6 februari 2018 | 61 min

Nick Montfort, “The Future” (MIT, 2017)

29 januari 2018 | 33 min

Leo Coleman, “A Moral Technology: Electrification as Political Ritual in New Delhi” (Cornell UP, 2017)

19 januari 2018 | 53 min

Thomas Mullaney, “The Chinese Typewriter: A History” (MIT Press, 2017)

9 januari 2018 | 137 min

Liss C. Werner, “Cybernetics: State of the Art” (Tech Uni of Berlin Press, 2017)

9 januari 2018 | 77 min

Chelsea Schelly, “Dwelling in Resistance: Living with Alternative Technologies in America” (Rutgers UP, 2017)

28 december 2017 | 34 min

Julien Mailland and Kevin Driscoll, “Minitel: Welcome to the Internet” (MIT Press, 2017)

21 december 2017 | 58 min

Alfie Bown, “The Playstation Dreamworld” (Polity, 2017)

20 december 2017 | 44 min

Zek Valkyrie, “Game Worlds Get Real: How Who We Are Online Became Who We Are Offline” (Praeger, 2017)

15 december 2017 | 57 min

Brian Clegg, “Big Data: How the Information Revolution Is Transforming Our Lives” (Icon Books, 2017)

19 september 2017 | 55 min

Eileen Le Han, “Micro-Blogging Memories: Weibo and Collective Remembering in Contemporary China” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)

12 juli 2017 | 54 min

Simone Muller, “Wiring the World: The Social and Cultural Creation of Global Telegraph Networks” (Columbia UP, 2016)

10 juli 2017 | 55 min

Thomas Hazlett, “The Political Spectrum: The Tumultuous Liberation of Wireless Technology” (Yale UP, 2017)

30 juni 2017 | 46 min

Andre Sirois, “Hip-Hop DJs and the Evolution of Technology: Cultural Exchange, Innovation, and Democratization” (Peter Lang, 2016)

13 juni 2017 | 60 min

What is the role of the deejay in shaping hip-hop? Did deejays shape the technology that is used to create the music or were they simply consumers of mixers, faders, and microphones? What is the relationship between deejays and the manufacturers that produced the technology that made hip-hop possible?

Andre Sirois explores these questions in his book, Hip-Hop DJs and the Evolution of Technology: Cultural Exchange, Innovation, and Democratization (which can be downloaded for free here). Sirois is both a scholar and a deejay, and his book brings academic discourse into dialogue with working deejays. Hip-Hop DJs and the Evolution of Technology (Peter Lang, 2016) draws on extensive interviews with the deejays that have shaped hip-hop and the technology manufacturers who made the products behind the deejays.

The podcast covers the history of deejays, examining the three legends that are considered the founders of hip-hop: DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash. He looks at how they transformed the role of the deejay through their digging in the crates, the development of deejaying techniques, and how they developed a collaborative ethos among deejays even as they sought to develop their own reputations. Then, Sirois explores other deejays, such as DJ Trix, DJ Craze, the Scratch Hamsters, and the Invisibl Skratch Piklz, who worked with manufacturers, including Vestax and Rane, to produce signature mixers and other equipment. (You can view Sirois’s collection of vintage mixers at djpedia). The podcast also examines the complicated ways that deejays and manufacturers worked together even though few deejays received significant economic benefit from these collaborations.

Dr. Andre Sirois, also known as DJ food stamp, is an instructor at the University of Oregon, where he teaches courses on filmmaking and popular culture in the media. He has over 17 years experience as a hip-hop, scratch, club, and radio DJ. His scratches have been featured on numerous artists songs, including the gold-selling single by Spose, “I’m Awesome.” He is one of the founders of DJistory/DJpedia, a non-profit organization and archive dedicated to preserving and telling histories of DJ technology and culture.

Richard Schur, Drury University professor of English and Director of the Honors Program, is the host for this podcast.

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Marilyn Palmer and Ian West, “Technology and the Country House” (Historic England Publishing/U.Chicago, 2016)

26 maj 2017 | 62 min

Sharrona Pearl, “Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other” (U. Chicago Press, 2017)

18 maj 2017 | 68 min

James Poyner, “Trump Tweets: His Social Media Phenomenon” (Wilkinson Publishing, 2017)

18 maj 2017 | 80 min

Willliam Rankin, “After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century” (U. Chicago Press, 2016)

17 maj 2017 | 43 min

Sophia Roosth, “Synthetic: How Life Got Made” (U Chicago Press, 2017)

13 maj 2017 | 72 min

Helen Anne Curry, “Evolution Made to Order: Plant Breeding and Technological Innovation in Twentieth-Century America” (U. Chicago Press, 2016)

8 maj 2017 | 35 min

Matt Pearl, “The Solo Video Journalist: Doing It All and Doing it Well in TV Multimedia Journalism” (Focal Press, 2016)

4 maj 2017 | 61 min

Democracy and Dialogue Online with Joshua Cohen

20 april 2017 | 37 min

Donna Freitas, “The Happiness Effect: How Social Media is Driving a Generation to Appear Perfect at Any Cost” (Oxford UP, 2017)

18 april 2017 | 24 min

In The Happiness Effect: How Social Media is Driving a Generation to Appear Perfect at Any Cost (Oxford University Press, 2017), Donna Freitas investigates the darker side of social media use and explains how pressure to appear happy and successful online can actually make people less happy in the real world. Using the stories of college students she interviewed as a framework, Freitas builds a dynamic argument and offers concrete tools for how teachers, parents, and society as a whole can help young people take control of their smartphones and of their own happiness. Donna Freitas is a Nonresident Research Associate at the University of Notre Dames Center for the Study of Religion and Society, and when she is not traveling for research she teaches in the Honors Colleges at Hofstra University. She is the author of Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America’s College Campuses (Oxford University Press, 2008), as well as several novels for young adults. A regular contributor to Publisher’s Weekly, she has also written for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.

Susan Raab is president of Raab Associates, an internationally recognized agency that specializes in marketing literature, products and initiatives that help improve the lives of young people. Clients have included National Geographic, Scholastic, the International Board on Books for Young People, and bestselling authors and illustrators. Susan is marketing advisor for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). She’s also a journalist reporting on publishing, education and human rights. Her work as a broadcast correspondent has been hosted by the University of Connecticut, and by the University of Florida’s Recess Radio, a program syndicated to 500 public radio stations. Her many interviews, including with Art Spiegelman, Jon Scieszka, Norton Juster, Laurie Halse Anderson and many others talking about art and literature can be heard here. Follow Susan at: https://twitter.com/sraab18

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Amit Prasad, “Imperial Technoscience: Transnational Histories of MRI in the United States, Britain, and India” (MIT, 2014)

18 april 2017 | 59 min

Democracy and Social Media with Michael Lynch

5 april 2017 | 27 min

Danielle Knafo and Rocco Lo Bosco, “The Age of Perversion: Desire and Technology in Psychoanalysis and Culture” (Routledge, 2016)

27 mars 2017 | 51 min

Jessie Daniels, Karen Gregory, and Tressie McMillan Cottom, eds “Digital Sociologies” (Policy Press, 2016)

9 februari 2017 | 31 min

Matthew L. Jones, “Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage” (U. Chicago Press, 2016)

23 januari 2017 | 65 min

Dave Karpf, “Analytic Activism: Digital Listening and the New Political Strategy” (Oxford UP, 2016)

9 januari 2017 | 32 min

Nicholas A. John, “The Age of Sharing” (Polity Press, 2016)

6 januari 2017 | 47 min

Heather Dowd, “Classroom Management in the Digital Age: Effective Practices for Technology-Rich Learning Spaces” (EdTechTeam, 2016)

5 januari 2017 | 33 min

Carroll Pursell, “From Playgrounds to PlayStation: The Interaction of Technology and Play” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015)

29 december 2016 | 50 min

Carroll Pursell‘s From Playgrounds to PlayStation: The Interaction of Technology and Play (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015) explores how play reflects and drives the evolution of American culture. Pursell engagingly examines the ways in which technology affects play and play shapes people. The objects that children (and adults) play with and play on, along with their games and the hobbies they pursue, can reinforce but also challenge gender roles and cultural norms. Inventors who often talk about “playing” at their work, as if motivated by the pure fun of invention have used new materials and technologies to reshape sports and gameplay, sometimes even crafting new, extreme forms of recreation, but always responding to popular demand. Drawing from a range of sources, including scholarly monographs, patent records, newspapers, and popular and technical journals, the book covers numerous modes and sites of play.

Susan Raab is president of Raab Associates, an internationally recognized agency that specializes in marketing literature, products and initiatives that help improve the lives of young people. Clients have included National Geographic, Scholastic, the International Board on Books for Young People, and bestselling authors and illustrators. Susan is marketing advisor for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). She’s also a journalist reporting on publishing, education and human rights. Her work as a broadcast correspondent has been hosted by the University of Connecticut, and by the University of Florida’s Recess Radio, a program syndicated to 500 public radio stations. Her many interviews, including with Art Spiegelman, Jon Scieszka, Norton Juster, Laurie Halse Anderson and many others talking about art and literature can be heard here. Follow Susan at: https://twitter.com/sraab18

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Alecia Swasy, “How Journalists Use Twitter: The Changing Landscape of U.S. Newsrooms” (Lexington Books, 2016)

12 november 2016 | 28 min

Asif A. Siddiqi, “The Red Rockets’ Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857-1957” (Cambridge UP, 2013)

30 september 2016 | 47 min

Milton Chen, “Education Nation: Six Leading Edges of Innovation in Our Schools” (Jossey Bass, 2012)

26 september 2016 | 50 min

Marc Raboy, “Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World” (Oxford UP, 2016)

21 september 2016 | 67 min

E.R. Truitt, “Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art” (U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2015)

21 september 2016 | 55 min

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Clarke’s third law, coined in 1973, expresses the difficulty that people of any era have in reconciling the bounds of current knowledge with our experiences in a world full of marvels. In a fascinating investigation of role of automata in the culture of the medieval Latin west, E.R. Truitt’s Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) traces the story of automata from their early appearance in the Latin west as gifts of foreign courts, to the literary manifestations of these objects, to the eventual creation of elaborate mechanical automata in the middle of the thirteenth century. Along the way, this history examines the nature of marvels, the constitution of natural knowledge, the text-based transformation of Latin intellectual culture, definitions of life and death, the spectacle of court, and the mechanics of the universe (8, 9). The cast of characters, both fictional and factual, embraces writers, travelers, and natural philosophers ranging from Liudprand of Cremona (c. 920 972), Pope Sylvester II (c. 946 1003) and Fr. William of Rubruck (c. 1220 1293), to Sir John Mandeville, witness of marvels mechanical and divine, and a Charlemagne whose stay in Constantinople brings him face to face with a pagan rulers powers of astral science that test the potentials of Charlemagne’s piety.

Our conversation about Truitt’s comprehensively researched and highly readable book ranges over C-3PO’s medieval forebears in the alabaster chamber, the religious rehabilitation of disembodied talking heads, the role of clocks and clockwork in the discourse shift from natural philosophy to mechanical engineering, and the political significance of lewd mechanical monkeys covered in rotting badger pelts.

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Mary Chayko, “Superconnected: The Internet, Digital Media, and Techno-Social Life” (SAGE, 2016)

13 september 2016 | 37 min

George Couros, “The Innovator’s Mindset: Empower Learning, Unleash Talent, and Lead a Culture of Creativity” (Dave Burgess Consulting, 2015)

13 september 2016 | 55 min

Jean Chalaby, “The Format Age: Television’s Entertainment Revolution” (Polity, 2015)

29 augusti 2016 | 42 min

Daniel Kreiss, “Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy” (Oxford UP, 2016)

29 augusti 2016 | 34 min

James Rodger Fleming, “Inventing Atmospheric Science: Bjerknes, Rossby, Wexler, and the Foundations of Modern Meteorology” (MIT Press, 2016)

26 augusti 2016 | 64 min

Benjamin Peters, “How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet” (MIT Press, 2016)

16 juli 2016 | 64 min

Ronald R. Kline, “The Cybernetics Moment: Or, Why We Call Our Age the Information Age” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015)

8 juli 2016 | 60 min

Greg Jenner, “A Million Years in a Day: A Curious History of Everyday Life from Stone Age to Phone Age” (St. Martin’s Press, 2016)

26 juni 2016 | 70 min

Mark Carrigan, “Social Media for Academics” (Sage, 2016)

27 april 2016 | 42 min

Alfie Bown, “Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism” (Zero Books, 2015)

18 april 2016 | 31 min

Benjamin Castleman, “The 160-Character Solution: How Text Messaging and Other Behavioral Strategies Can Improve Education” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015)

3 april 2016 | 59 min

Phillip Penix-Tadsen, “Cultural Code: Video Games and Latin America” (MIT Press, 2016)

14 mars 2016 | 46 min

David R. Brake, “Sharing our Lives Online: Risks and Exposure in Social Media” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)

29 februari 2016 | 47 min

Jeffery Pomerantz, “Metadata” (MIT, 2015)

22 februari 2016 | 43 min

Finn Brunton, “Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet” (MIT Press, 2013)

16 februari 2016 | 60 min

Paul R. Josephson, “Fish Sticks, Sports Bras, and Aluminum Cans: The Politics of Everyday Technologies” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015)

29 januari 2016 | 62 min

Barry Brown and Oskar Juhlin, “Enjoying Machines” (MIT 2015)

6 januari 2016 | 35 min

Nathan Altice, “I Am Error: The Nintendo Family Computer-Entertainment System Platform” (MIT Press, 2015)

23 december 2015 | 39 min

The genre of “platform studies” offers both researchers and readers more than an examination of the technical machinations of a computing system. Instead, the family of methodologies presents a humanist exploration of digital media from the perspective of the platform itself. That is, this approach contemplates the social, economic and cultural influence and significance of the technology. Although more formally identified by Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort in 2007 at the Digital Arts and Cultures Conference, the decades old platform studies discipline affords an understanding of the material manifestations of culture and creative work produced by computing systems.

In his new book, I Am Error: The Nintendo Family Computer Entertainment System Platform (MIT Press, 2015), Nathan Altice, a digital media creator and scholar, studies the NES system and the Family Computer, it’s precursor. More than considering the NES as a single entity, the author investigates the platform as a “network of objects and texts,” that go beyond a “stable configuration of hardware and software.” In this way, Altice dives deep to unearth the code and design decisions that shape the creative affordances of the NES, how users choose to play using the platform, and how the system was received outside of Japan.

The NES’s cultural reception is foundational for grasping a key theme throughout the book, that of “translation.” For Altice, translation produces errors – “new meanings, new expressions, new bodies, and new objects.” That is, the flaws in hardware and software, including the translation of language from Japanese to English, are not necessarily negative objects to be overcome. Instead, these bugs in the machine add to the performance of the games and the platform, and have very real social, economic, and cultural consequences.

I Am Error is one book in the Platform Studies series from MIT Press.

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Megan Prelinger, “Inside the Machine: Art and Invention in the Electronic Age” (Norton, 2015)

19 november 2015 | 69 min

John Durham Peters, “The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)

17 november 2015 | 65 min

Eric T. Meyer and Ralph Schroeder, “Knowledge Machines: Digital Transformations of the Sciences and Humanities” (MIT Press, 2015)

15 november 2015 | 38 min

Gillian Isaacs Russell, “Screen Relations: The Limits of Computer-Mediated Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy” (Karnac, 2015)

13 oktober 2015 | 56 min

At New Books in Psychoanalysis, interviews are conducted using Skype. As the program is audio rather than video based, it never occurred to me to use the camera on my computer to see on the screen the person I was speaking to. Rather, I kept my ear turned acutely towards the authors, hanging on their every word while privately perusing my list of questions. I have joked with many interviewees that for all I know they are in their pajamas or naked. Truth be told, I have had no interest in seeing the authors during the interview. There was and is something about having the experience that the listener has on hearing, rather than seeing, the interview that may play a role in creating a certain kind of intensity and intimacy. So it was not lost on me that for this particular interview with Gillian Isaacs Russell about a book that looks straightforwardly at the impact of technology on the therapeutic relationship, that we would not be making eye contact. Though we could, I requested that we not do so. And anyway, of course, if you have used it, eye contact is actually impossible on Skype. We can see each other but we cannot lock orbs.

Our interview, as you will hear, is full of the same kinds of problems that one might have when working with a patient over the ether. At one point there is a bizarre reverb and everything Isaacs Russell says comes out in triplicate. We did not lose the connection though this has happened to me on several occasions while playing my interlocutory part. And of course we both had our anxieties about the capacity of the technology to connect us and to keep us connected but do bear in mind that we are not analyst and patient. Our relationship is layered with much less meaning or significance than that of the analytic couple. If the technology disconnected us, we would not wonder if it was something that one of us said. No one would have hurt feelings. We could keep it impersonal.

In Screen Relations: The Limits of Computer-Mediated Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (Karnac, 2015), Isaacs Russell asks a key question of psychoanalysts: what might be lost in working this way? The interview explores reasons why analysts have jumped in to use Skype and explores what the implications might be of the loss of two bodies in a room together. Her thinking is clear and the ideas she pits forth I found haunting. The age old question of what makes a treatment psychoanalysis came to mind when reading this book as I wondered if you can’t smell the patient, if there is not the risk of touch that is not acted upon, if there is not the walk out the door when the session is over, is essential grist for the mill irreparably lost?

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Joseph M. Reagle, “Reading the Comments: Likers, Haters and Manipulators at the Bottom of the Web” (MIT Press, 2015)

2 oktober 2015 | 32 min

Jessica Baldwin-Philippi, “Using Technology, Building Democracy: Digital Campaigning and the Construction of Citizenship” (Oxford UP, 2015)

28 september 2015 | 24 min

Tom Jackson, “Chilled: How Refrigeration Changed the World and Might Do So Again” (Bloomsbury, 2015)

19 augusti 2015 | 56 min

Alexandra Minna Stern, “Telling Genes: The Story of Genetic Counseling in America” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012)

10 augusti 2015 | 70 min

Due in part to lobbying efforts on behalf of the human genome project, human genes tend to be thought of in light of the present–genetic components of human disease and differential risks associated with genetic individuals–before the future, what gets passed on to later generations. However, public understanding of genetics did not merely radiate from laboratories, as Alexandra Minna Stern‘s book, Telling Genes: The Story of Genetic Counseling in America (Johns Hopkins University, 2012) shows. Before the age of genetic sequencing and mass-produced tests, physicians from various specialties provided genetic counseling on an ad-hoc basis, most of which took the form of reproductive advice. Medical genetics had only been established in the 1960s, with the shadow of eugenics still looming large over a field that was now more inclined toward description of heritable conditions than prescription of reproductive sanctions and sterilization. The founding of the first master’s program in genetic counseling in 1969 established the institutional and intellectual basis for a new kind of health care professional, one that would further the reorientation of medical genetics toward patient-centered care.

Stern’s book connects this emergent professional identity to the broader history of genetic and eugenic programs in the United States. So, while this is a history focused on how the distinct profession of genetic counseling emerged as an alternative to traditional medical authority, it is firmly situated within the conflicts that have persistently plagued the development and application of human genetic knowledge. This orientation toward fundamental tensions is reflected by the book’s structure. While she begins with a historical overview of genetic counseling as a profession, the rest of the book is organized around issues; genetic risk and the questionable efficacy of disease apprehension; the politics of race inherent in population knowledge; the fundamental role played by disability in the understanding of inherited disorders; the gender politics of genetic counseling as a challenge to the medical establishment; therapeutic ethics; and the emergence of prenatal testing.

This highly readable whirlwind tour through the complex ethical and historical landscape of genetic counseling rewards those new to the history of genetics by virtue of its accessibility, along with those more familiar through the vast amounts of new source material it blends in seamlessly with broader frames. If you enjoy this book, look out for a new edition of Eugenic Nation, Stern’s first book on the politics of eugenics.

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Janet Vertesi, “Seeing like a Rover: How Robots, Teams, and Images Craft Knowledge of Mars” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)

10 augusti 2015 | 67 min

Jonathan Coopersmith, “Faxed: The Rise and Fall of the Fax Machine” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015)

17 juli 2015 | 63 min

Christian Fuchs, “Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media” (Routledge, 2015)

28 juni 2015 | 57 min

Jenifer Van Vleck, “Empire of the Air: Aviation and the American Ascendancy” (Harvard UP, 2013)

14 juni 2015 | 37 min

Charis Thompson, “Good Science: The Ethical Choreography of Stem Cell Research” (MIT Press, 2013)

8 juni 2015 | 74 min

Charis Thompson‘s Good Science: The Ethical Choreography of Stem Cell Research (MIT Press, 2013) is an important book. Good Science explores the “ethical choreography” of the consolidation of human embryonic stem cell research in the first decade of the twenty-first century, drawing important implications for the possible futures of stem cell research by looking carefully at its past and developing an approach to what Thompson calls “good science.” The book compellingly argues that “a high level of political attention to the ethics of the life sciences and biomedicine…is a good thing for science and democracy,” especially as we have now reached “the end of the beginning of human pluripotent stem cell research.”

Part I of the book (Stem Cell Biopolitics) explores early attention to the embryo debate. Ch. 2 looks at stem cell research as it’s widely understood to engage ethical concerns, describing the “pro-curial frame” of stem cell research in the period under scrutiny, when promoting stem cell innovation involved aspirations to be pro-cure and there was an ethical focus on the procurement of stem cells and cell lines for research. Pt. II of the book (Stem Cell Geopolitics) looks at what happened domestically as the debate over stem cells moved from the federal to the state levels and back in the US, and then turns to consider transnational circuits that were crucial to those practices and conversations. Ch. 3 looks at three phases that made up the beginning of human pluripotent stem cell research in the US: the time around President Bush’s 2001 policy, the period when states “seceded” from that policy (exemplified by California’s Proposition 71), and the period around Obama’s 2009 policy. Ch. 4 looks at the transnational geopolitics of stem cell research in an era when stem cell research became increasingly international and research advocates were deeply concerned with international competition and “brain drain.” Thompson takes readers into laboratory environments in South Korea and Singapore in order to undermine a popular rhetorical binary of East/West that contrasted an “East” that had a pro-science spirit and lack of concern with the moral status of the embryo, and a “West” that had been taken over by anti-science religious fanatics and technophobes.

Pt. III of the book (Thinking of Other Lives) looks carefully at questions of research subjecthood. Ch. 7 focuses on human-human relationships and practices of donation at a time when a number of norms came under renewed scrutiny – including altruism, anonymity, and the alienation of tissue from donors – and this led to the conclusion that the old model for donation wasn’t working. In this context, there were increasing demands for reciprocity in various forms, and Thompson considers various models in California that rethought the relationships between donor/recipient and biomaterial/bioinformation. Ch. 6 focuses on the logic of using animals as substitutive research subjects for human-focused research, and calling for a move away from using animals as research subjects and toward using in vitro systems instead.

To do all of this, Thompson develops a methodology she calls “triage” which we talk about early in the interview. Good Science is a wonderful and critical book, and well worth reading and teaching widely!

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John Sharp, “Works of Game: On the Aesthetics of Games and Art” (MIT Press, 2015)

1 juni 2015 | 39 min

Greg Siegel, “Forensic Media: Reconstructing Accidents in Accelerated Modernity” (Duke UP, 2014)

26 maj 2015 | 67 min

Jon L. Mills, “Privacy in the New Media Age” (University Press of Florida, 2015)

25 maj 2015 | 33 min

Myles W. Jackson, “The Genealogy of a Gene: Patents, HIV/AIDS, and Race” (MIT Press, 2015)

18 maj 2015 | 39 min

Naomi S. Baron, “Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World” (Oxford UP, 2015)

1 maj 2015 | 39 min

Christine L. Borgman, “Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World” (MIT Press, 2015)

20 april 2015 | 37 min

Robert W. Gehl, “Reverse Engineering Social Media” (Temple UP, 2014)

13 april 2015 | 43 min

Casey O’Donnell, “Developer’s Dilemma: The Secret World of Videogame Creators” (MIT Press, 2014)

6 april 2015 | 41 min

Yasmin B. Kafai and Quinn Burke, “Connected Code: Why Children Need to Learn Programming” (MIT, 2014)

7 mars 2015 | 41 min

Thomas Leitch, “Wikipedia U: Knowledge, Authority, and Liberal Education in the Digital Age” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014)

4 mars 2015 | 11 min

Stephen Goldsmith and Susan Crawford, “The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance” (Jossey-Bass, 2014)

1 januari 2015 | 26 min

Frank Pasquale, “The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information” (Harvard UP, 2015)

24 december 2014 | 53 min

Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, “Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe” (MIT Press, 2014)

14 december 2014 | 39 min

Johanna Drucker, “Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production” (Harvard University Press, 2014)

11 december 2014 | 66 min

James Giordano, “Neurotechnology in National Security and Defense” (CRC Press, 2014)

4 december 2014 | 74 min

Carolyn L. Kane, “Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code” (U of Chicago Press, 2014)

3 december 2014 | 65 min

Carolyn L. Kane’s new book traces the modern history of digital color, focusing on the role of electronic color in computer art and media aesthetics since 1960. Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code (University of Chicago Press, 2014) places color at the center of media studies, exploring some amazing works of art and technology to understand the changing history of the relationship between color as embodied in machine code and screen interface. Using a methodology called “media archaeology” that is informed by the work of Foucault, Nietzsche, Kittler, Heidegger, Stiegler, and others, Chromatic Algorithms traces a transformation of color from optics to algorithms. The chapters trace a history of synthetic color in Western aesthetics and philosophy, the rise of Day-Glo, the aesthetics of color in video art from the 1960s and 1970s, the technology of color TVs, the connection between color and notions of transcendence and utopia, “democratic color” and Salvador DalÃ’s urinated-upon pen, the early history of art/engineering at Bell Labs, the technology of digital infrared visualization, the aesthetics of “Photoshop cinema,” bioart and its glow-in-the-dark bunnies, and the work of some amazing artists including Lillian Schwartz, Jeremy Blake, and many many others. It is a gorgeous and fascinating study of color, technology, visualization, the digital, and beyond.

As you work through the book, I highly recommend searching the Web for some of the amazing work described in its chapters. I’m based in Canada and so some of the following links may not work for you: in that case, just try searching on your own for the title:

The rock opera Battle for Milkquarious! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zDMhwq3pcA

Jeremy Blake, Winchester Redux http://vimeo.com/16485005

Zbigniew RybczyÅ„ski, Tango http://vimeo.com/9033947

Paper Rad: http://www.paperrad.org/

This site has some clips from Lillian Schwartz’z Proxima Centauri: http://lillian.com/kinetic/

You can browse video clips from WGBH’s New Television Workshop here: http://main.wgbh.org/wgbh/NTW/

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Victor Pickard, “America’s Battle for Media Democracy” (Cambridge UP, 2014)

25 november 2014 | 30 min

Alon Peled, “Traversing Digital Babel: Information, E-Government, and Exchange” (MIT Press, 2014)

7 november 2014 | 45 min

Ethan Zuckerman, “Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection” (Norton, 2013)

6 november 2014 | 48 min

In the early days of the Internet, optimists saw the future as highly connected, where voices from across the globe would mingle and learn from one another as never before. However, as Ethan Zuckerman argues in Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (Norton, 2013), just because a connection is possible does not mean disparate voices are being heard. Instead, things and not ideas have become more connected; we now live in a world where is easier to get a bottle of water from a tropical island halfway around the world than it is to get (let alone comprehend) news from that island.

Zuckerman, a media scholar and activist based at MIT, suggests despite our perceived “connectedness,” the wired world is actually becoming more provincial and narrow, as we shift from professionally curated news and information, to search engines and algorithmically selected information based on previous “likes” and those of our homogeneous social circles. In other words, we are getting more and more of what we already know we want with ever-greater efficiency, but not what we need to be informed participants in a global world.

In an expansive analysis that takes on everything from the global response to modern pandemics, to Greek philosophy, to the “Arab Spring,” to musical hybridization across cultures, Zuckerman calls for a world of “digital cosmopolitans,” where those who can bridge between communities are called upon to foster deeper, more nuanced conversations around the globe in ways that fulfill the promise of expanding technological opportunities.

At once a thoughtful analysis, an engaging history, and a bold call to arms, Rewire offers readers a deep understanding of how media is evolving to shape and be shaped by global voices. As such, it has vast implications at both personal and geopolitical levels for the future of information, technology.

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John Tresch, “The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon” (U Chicago Press, 2014)

30 oktober 2014 | 73 min

Don Lincoln, “The Large Hadron Collider” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014)

9 oktober 2014 | 62 min

Hugh F. Cline, “Information Communication Technology and Social Transformation” (Routledge, 2014)

9 oktober 2014 | 42 min

Jeremy Lipschultz, “Social Media Communication: Concepts, Practices, Data, Law, and Ethics” (Routledge, 2014)

7 september 2014 | 46 min

John Tresch, “The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

5 september 2014 | 73 min

John Tresch‘s beautiful new book charts a series of transformations that collectively ushered in a new cosmology in the Paris of the early-mid nineteenth century. The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon (University of Chicago Press, 2012) narrates the emergence of a new image of the machine, a new concept of nature, a new theory of knowledge, and a new political orientation through a series of chapters that each use the work of a single figure to open up a world of romantic machines.

Part 1 of the book looks at the work of physical scientists whose model of precision experiment and math was transformed by an encounter with romantic philosophy and aesthetics, and introduces the electro-magnetic work of physicist AndreMarie Ampre, the instrumental practices of Prussian geophysical researcher Alexander von Humboldt, and the labor theory of knowledge in relation to the instruments of astronomer and politician Francois Arago. Part 2 looks at the impact of technology on theories of the self and the human, focusing on the fantastic arts and public spectacles featuring new discoveries in optics, mechanics, and natural history. (Readers will find lively discussions of dioramas, hallucinatory opera, symphonies, museums, magic shows, and expositions, here.) Part 3 treats the utopian thinkers and engineer-scientists of the late Restoration and the July Monarchy, looking at religiously-inflected social technologies of conversion, communication, and temporal coordination in the work and thought of Saint-Simon and his followers, printer and literary critic Pierre Leroux’s work and theories, and Auguste Comte’s instruments of thought and paper. It is a rich, elegantly argued work that offers not just a history of science and technology, but also a tracing of the roots of some contemporary continental philosophy, as well.

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Tim Anderson, “Popular Music in a Digital Music Economy” (Routledge, 2014)

23 augusti 2014 | 60 min

Daryn Lehoux, “What Did the Romans Know?: An Inquiry into Science and Worldmaking” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

16 augusti 2014 | 71 min

Josh Lerner, “Making Democracy Fun: How Game Design Can Empower Citizens and Transform Politics” (MIT Press, 2014)

28 juli 2014 | 21 min

Ronen Shamir, “Current Flow: The Electrification of Palestine” (Stanford UP, 2013)

23 juli 2014 | 72 min

Judith Donath, “The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online” (MIT Press, 2014)

19 juli 2014 | 31 min

Amit Prasad, “Imperial Technoscience: Transnational Histories of MRI in the United States, Britain, and India” (MIT Press, 2014)

9 juli 2014 | 39 min

Lisa Gitelman, “Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents” (Duke UP, 2014)

9 juli 2014 | 67 min

“One doesn’t so much read a death certificate, it would seem, as perform calisthenics on one…”

From the first, prefatory page of Lisa Gitelman‘s new book, the reader is introduced to a way of thinking about documents as tools for creating bodily experience, and as material objects situated within hierarchies and relationships of labor. Working beautifully at the intersection of media studies and history, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Duke University Press, 2014) curates a thoughtful and inspiring collection of moments from the expansion of a modern “scriptural economy.” The case studies explore fill-in-the-blank forms in the context of late nineteenth century job printing, typescript books and scholarly communication in the 1930s, photocopies and photocopying in the 1960s and 1970s, and PDF files in the 1990s and beyond. The final chapter is a fascinating exploration of what it might look like to write a situated history of amateurdom and the figure of the “amateur,” a theme that recurs throughout the preceding chapters. Though all of these cases are carefully rooted within a US context, the insights gleaned from them potentially apply to a much wider and trans-local conversation about the documentary media of writers and readers. It is a history of documenting as an epistemic practice and documents as instruments, and that history is consistently and productively entangled with concerns about reproduction, access, labor, and the emergence of a bureaucratic self. Along the way, Paper Knowledge helpfully opens up some persistent historiographical notions that benefit from such opening, such as “print culture,” “digital humanities,” “authorship,” and other categories that have defined the history of and with communication, and that animate contemporary debates within academia and beyond.

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Payal Arora, “The Leisure Commons: A Spatial History of Web 2.0” (Routledge, 2014)

2 juli 2014 | 33 min

Vili Lehdonvirta and Edward Castronova, “Virtual Economies: Design and Analysis” (MIT, 2014)

19 juni 2014 | 40 min

Lori Emerson, “Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound” (University of Minnesota, 2014)

12 juni 2014 | 31 min

David Nemer, “Favela Digital: The Other Side of Technology” (GSA Editora e Grafica, 2013)

5 juni 2014 | 39 min

Vincent Mosco, “To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World” (Paradigm Publishers, 2014)

29 maj 2014 | 38 min

Lawrence Goldstone, “Birdmen: The Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss, and the Battle to Control the Skies” (Ballentine, 2014)

18 maj 2014 | 49 min

danah boyd, “It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens” (Yale UP, 2014)

12 maj 2014 | 45 min

Michael Saler, “As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality” (Oxford UP, 2012)

12 maj 2014 | 55 min

In As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (Oxford, 2012), historian Michael Saler explores the precursors of the current proliferation of digital virtual worlds. Saler challenges Max Weber’s analysis of modernity as the disenchanting of the world, and demonstrates that modernity is deeply “enchanted by reason.”

Saler demonstrates this argument by examining a new phenomenon: adult engagement with and immersion in fictional worlds. He argues that from the 1880s, a growing number of individuals both in Britain and in the US were enticed by fictional characters such as Sherlock Holmes to “communally and persistently” inhabit worlds of the imagination. Readers were drawn in particular to a new literary genre “The New Romanticism” that rose in Britain in the 1880s. The genre combined the objective style of realism with the fantastic content of romance. Novels such as “Drakula” and “Treasure Island” made the fantastic seem plausible through the use of scientific detail and the inclusion of maps, photographs and footnotes. Victorian readers had acquired a sophistication that enabled them to immerse themselves in the fiction while keeping an ironic distance from it. Their delight was derived from their awareness to the fabrication rather than from being deluded by it.

In addition to a theoretical framework, Saler provides an in-depth and enjoyable exploration of the work of authors that dominated the genre, and of the communities they inspired. Three chapters explain contemporary fascination with the novels of Arthur Conan Doyle, H.P. Lovecraft and J.R.R Tolkien. The chapters also elaborate the important role of readers in sustaining their success. As such they provide an important contribution to the history of fan culture. Finally, Saler offers a defense against labeling the engagement with imaginary and virtual worlds as escapism. He argues that imagined worlds should be valued as safe havens to reflect on the ‘real’ world and consider social and cultural change. A space to practice empathy and tolerance that teaches us to think of the world not in “just so” terms but through the more forgiving “as if” perspective. Imagined and virtual worlds are a reminder that the ‘real world’ too is a social construct that can and should be questioned.

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Jennifer Stromer-Galley, “Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age” (Oxford UP, 2014)

5 maj 2014 | 27 min

Jennifer Stromer-Galley, “Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age” (Oxford UP, 2014)

18 april 2014 | 34 min

Paul-Brian McInerney, “From Social Movement to Moral Market: How the Circuit Riders Sparked an IT Revolution and Created a Technology Market” (Stanford UP, 2014)

14 april 2014 | 34 min

Nick Yee, “The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us-and How They Don’t” (Yale UP, 2014)

11 april 2014 | 51 min

Adam Thierer, “Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom” (Mercatus Center, 2014)

4 april 2014 | 50 min

Andrew L. Russell, “Open Standards in the Digital Age” (Cambridge UP, 2014)

27 mars 2014 | 52 min

Robert Neer, “Napalm: An American Biography” (Harvard UP, 2013)

13 februari 2014 | 47 min

Thomas Bey William Bailey, “Unofficial Release: Self-Released and Handmade Audio in Post-Industrial Society” (Belsona Books, 2012)

22 november 2013 | 56 min

Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell, “How to Watch Television” (NYU Press, 2013)

16 november 2013 | 47 min

William J. Clancey, “Working on Mars: Voyages of Scientific Discovery with the Mars Exploration Rovers” (MIT Press, 2012)

3 november 2013 | 68 min

Aaron S. Moore, “Constructing East Asia: Technology, Ideology, and Empire in Japan’s Wartime Era, 1931-1945” (Stanford UP, 2013)

26 oktober 2013 | 71 min

Jonathan Sterne, “MP3: The Meaning of a Format” (Duke UP, 2012)

10 oktober 2013 | 77 min

Ian Samson, “Paper: An Elegy” (Harper Collins, 2012)

24 september 2013 | 35 min

David Munns, “A Single Sky: How an International Community Forged the Science of Radio Astronomy” (MIT Press, 2012)

29 juli 2013 | 69 min

John O. McGinnis, “Accelerating Democracy: Transforming Governance Through Technology” (Princeton UP, 2013)

10 juli 2013 | 61 min

Nicco Mele, “The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath” (St. Martin’s Press, 2013)

24 juni 2013 | 37 min

Clive Hamilton, “Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering” (Yale UP, 2013)

20 juni 2013 | 34 min

Dominic Pettman, “Human Error” (UMinnesota, 2011)/”Look at the Bunny” (Zero Books, 2013)

31 maj 2013 | 76 min

Douglas Rushkoff, “Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now” (Current, 2013)

21 maj 2013 | 35 min

Joseph November, “Biomedical Computing: Digitizing Life in the United States” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2012)

14 maj 2013 | 63 min

There are pigeons, cats, and Martians here. There are CT scanners, dentures, computers large enough to fill rooms, war games, and neural networks. In Biomedical Computing: Digitizing Life in the United States (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), Joe November mobilizes this ecology of instruments and objects, people and programs, in a story that maps out the early years of the introduction of computers to biology and medicine from 1955 to 1965. As computing technology was gradually integrated into different spaces of biomedicine that were characterized by agents with very different agendas (a set of processes not without significant contestation), biomedicine and computing transformed one another. Life itself was changed as a result, as the objects of biomedical computing were translated into the kinds of system-entities that computers could describe. The historian of technology who reads November’s book will find fascinating stories of machines like LINC, ENIAC, and UNIVAC. The historian of science will find accounts of the ways that military funding shaped the computerization of biomedicine, windows into the mid-century work supported by the NIH, stories of the transformation of diagnostic medicine in the US, and chapters from the history of crystallography and molecular biology. The historian of networks and computing will find analyses of the importance of operations research, expert systems, and transdisciplinary research practices to the work of some of the central figures in the history of the computational sciences. In addition to all of this, November’s book can also be read as a history of the modern personal computer. (There are also men in RNA-themed neckties sprinkled throughout the early part of the story.) Enjoy the interview, and imagine as you listen that you’re here with me at the National Humanities Center, Skyping with Joe as a thunderstorm booms overhead, rain falls loudly outside the window, and brilliant humanities scholars share excited conversation about their work outside the door. It was a special afternoon.

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Paul Barrett, “Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun” (Broadway, 2013)

2 maj 2013 | 54 min

David Hochfelder, “The Telegraph in America, 1832-1920” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2012)

23 april 2013 | 44 min

Robert W. McChesney, “Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy” (The New Press, 2013)

4 april 2013 | 47 min

C.W. Anderson, “Rebuilding the News: Metropolitan Journalism in the Digital Age” (Temple UP, 2013)

3 mars 2013 | 52 min

Alec Foege, “The Tinkerers: The Amateurs, DIYers, and Inventors Who Make America Great” (Basic Books, 2013)

17 januari 2013 | 52 min

Alec Foege, "The Tinkerers: The Amateurs, DIYers, and Inventors Who Make America Great" (Basic Books, 2013)

17 januari 2013 | 52 min

From its earliest years, the United States was a nation of tinkerers: men and women who looked at the world around them and were able to create something genuinely new from what they saw. Guided by their innate curiosity, a desire to know how things work, and a belief that anything can be improved, amateurs and professionals from Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Edison came up with the inventions that laid the foundations for America's economic dominance. Recently, Americans have come to question whether our tinkering spirit has survived the pressures of ruthless corporate organization and bottom-line driven caution. But as Alec Foege shows in The Tinkerers, reports of tinkering's death have been greatly exaggerated.

Through the stories of great tinkerers and inventions past and present, Foege documents how Franklin and Edison's modern-day heirs do not allow our cultural obsessions with efficiency and conformity to interfere with their passion and creativity. Tinkering has been the guiding force behind both major corporate-sponsored innovations such as the personal computer and Ethernet, and smaller scale inventions with great potential, such as a machine that can make low-cost eyeglass lenses for people in impoverished countries and a device that uses lasers to shoot malarial mosquitoes out of the sky. Some tinkerers attended the finest engineering schools in the world; some had no formal training in their chosen fields. Some see themselves as solo artists; others emphasize the importance of working in teams. What binds them together is an ability to subvert the old order, to see fresh potential in existing technologies, and to apply technical know-how to the problems of their day.

As anyone who has feared voiding a warranty knows, the complexity of modern systems can be needlessly intimidating. Despite this, tinkerers can – and do – come from anywhere, whether it's the R&D lab of a major corporation, a hobbyist's garage, or a summer camp for budding engineers. Through a lively retelling of recent history and captivating interviews with today's most creative innovators, Foege reveals how the tinkering tradition remains, in new and unexpected forms, at the heart of American society and culture.

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Ines Mergel, “Social Media in the Public Sector: A Guide to Participation, Collaboration and Transparency in the Networked World” (Jossey-Bass 2012)

16 december 2012 | 30 min

David Wolman, “The End Of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers, and the Coming Cashless Society” (Da Capo Press, 2012)

8 juni 2012 | 58 min

Many of us in the western world don’t rely on bills and coins as much as we used to, yet the idea of cash money is still an ever-present constant in our minds. How often have you stopped to consider the idea of what “money” actually is on a larger scale, or where our changing habits could lead us? In his book The End of Money – Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers, and the Coming Cashless Society (Da Capo Press, 2012), David Wolman examines our commitment to cash, its advantages and drawbacks, how it facilitates crime and poverty, even its health and environmental issues. With an engaging and accessible style he prompts us to rethink the notion of money, how it works, and what forms it could take in the future.

Wolman starts with a short history of cash, beginning with the official introduction of paper money to the Chinese monetary system in the 13th century and Marco Polo’s reaction to it 100 years later. Next we follow him around the globe to get a cross-cultural picture of cash today – including explorations of the cultural heritage and emotional value of cash, of an increasing trend in developing countries of people using their cellphones to transfer money to both businesses and family, and of counterfeiting and anti-counterfeiting technology. Along the way he enlists a wide variety of people to help illustrate these concepts: a Georgia pastor who views the end of cash as a sign of the End Times, a convicted counterfeiter (or “Monetary Architect”, depending on who you’re talking to), a coin collector with an ambivalent attitude toward coins, and a British “digital money guru” who views money as a menace.

David Wolman is a contributing editor at Wired magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @DavidWolman. He is, in his own words, a “…guy who’s interested in seemingly small, simple, straightforward topics that in fact, when you put them under the microscope, are anything but simple.” This book is an excellent example of that, and an engrossing read. In our interview he spoke of his year-long experiment to go without using coins or bills at all, the meaning of privacy and security as it relates to money in a digital world, and what he sees as the future of “money”.

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Barry Kernfeld, “Pop Song Piracy: Disobedient Music Distribution Since 1929” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

17 maj 2012 | 69 min

Allen Buchanan, “Better than Human: The Promise and Perils of Enhancing Ourselves” (Oxford UP, 2011)

1 mars 2012 | 78 min

Peter-Paul Verbeek, “Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

15 februari 2012 | 64 min

Daqing Yang, “Technology of Empire: Telecommunications and Japanese Expansion in Asia, 1883-1945” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2010)

15 november 2011 | 75 min

Kimbrew McLeod and Peter DiCola, “Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling” (Duke University Press, 2011)

4 augusti 2011 | 71 min

Siva Vaidhyanathan, “The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry)” (U. California Press, 2011)

4 augusti 2011 | 64 min

Louis Siegelbaum, “Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile” (Cornell UP, 2008)

22 juli 2011 | 62 min

Mark Stephen Meadows, “We Robot: Skywalker’s Hand, Blade Runners, Iron Man, Slutbots, and How Fiction Became Fact” (Lyons Press, 2011)

6 juli 2011 | 56 min

Scott Cleland with Ira Brodsky, “Search and Destroy: Why You Can’t Trust Google” (Telescope Books, 2011)

20 juni 2011 | 48 min

Dagmar Schaefer, “The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

31 maj 2011 | 59 min

Brian Christian, “The Most Human Human: A Defense of Humanity in the Age of the Computer” (Penguin, 2011)

23 maj 2011 | 49 min

Robert Goldberg, “Tabloid Medicine: How the Internet is Being Used to Hijack Medical Science for Fear and Profit” (Simon & Schuster, 2010)

18 mars 2011 | 41 min

Joel Wolfe, “Autos and Progress: The Brazilian Search for Modernity” (Oxford UP, 2010)

19 mars 2010 | 67 min

Here’s something I learned by reading Joel Wolfe’s terrific Autos and Progress: The Brazilian Search for Modernity (Oxford, 2010): the United States and Brazil have a lot in common. Both hived off European empires; both struggled with slavery and its legacy; both are profoundly multiethnic and multiracial; both have spent much of their respective histories settling a vast “wild” frontier (though, to be fair, it was already “settled” by indigenous people); and, most importantly for our purposes, both are car-crazy, and indeed for almost the same reason. In the United States, the automobile meant modernity. It was the implement with which we, Americans of every stripe, would “tame” a continent and thereby realize our national potential. The Brazilians, according to Wolfe, feel the same way. Joel does a masterful job of explaining how the promise of this crucial technology entered the Brazilian psyche and became not only the vehicle of modernity (pardon the pun) but also the symbol of everything modern. Along the way Joel explodes one of the foundational myths of modern anti-globalism (and what used to be called “anti-imperialism”), namely, that powerful “multinational corporations” muscled their way into undeveloped countries and fostered a crippling “dependency.” Not in Brazil. The Brazilians invited Ford, GM, and VW into the country with a full understanding of what they were getting; they embraced the values these corporations fostered, all of which were seen as “modern”; and when things weren’t working out, they essentially forced them to act according to Brazilian interests. The Brazilians were, so to speak, in the driver’s seat of automobilismo; the supposedly all-powerful multinationals were along for the ride. In the end, both enjoyed the journey, despite some rough patches. I’m happy to say, however, that this book has no rough spots at all. You will drive carefree from the first to the last page. Have a good trip.

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New Books in Technology

Interviews with Scholars of Technology about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.

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Victor P. Petrov, "Balkan Cyberia: Cold War Computing, Bulgarian Modernization, and the Information Age Behind the Iron Curtain" (MIT Press, 2023)

Lizhi Liu, "From Click to Boom: The Political Economy of E-Commerce in China" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Tim Harris, "In Pursuit of Unicorns: A Journey Through 50 Years of Biotechnology" (Cold Springs Harbor, 2024)

Libuse Hannah Veprek, "At the Edge of AI: Human Computation Systems and Their Intraverting Relations" (Transcript, 2024)

Jerry Brotton, "Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction" (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2024)

Salem Elzway and Jason Resnikoff on Automation

Thinking Machines: The First AI Takeover Story

Jamie Hakim, "Digital Intimacies: Queer Men and Smartphones in Times of Crisis" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

When We Prioritize Data and Metrics, What Happens to Human Connections?

Greg Epstein, "Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World's Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation" (MIT Press, 2024)

Ian Milligan, "Averting the Digital Dark Age: How Archivists, Librarians, and Technologists Built the Web a Memory" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024)

Thinking Machines: The Turing Test at 75

Thinking Machines: The Turing Test at 75

Bob Frishman, "Edward Duffield: Philadelphia Clockmaker, Citizen, Gentleman, 1730-1803" (APS Press, 2024)

Anto Mohsin, "Electrifying Indonesia: Technology and Social Justice in National Development" (U Wisconsin Press, 2023)

Emotional Rescue

Kids Across the Spectrums: Growing Up Autistic in the Digital Age

Marietje Schaake, "The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley" (Princeton UP, 2024)

John Withington, "A History of Fireworks from: Their Origins to the Present Day" (Reaktion, 2024)

Pamela O. Long on the Long, Long, Long History of Technology

Marco Bastos, "Brexit, Tweeted: Polarization and Social Media Manipulation" (Bristol UP, 2024)

Jeffrey Ding, "Technology and the Rise of Great Powers: How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Gerald Sim, "Screening Big Data: Films That Shape Our Algorithmic Literacy" (Routledge, 2024)

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World

Jordan Minor, "Video Game of the Year: A Year-By-Year Guide to the Best, Boldest, and Most Bizarre Games from Every Year Since 1977" (Abrams, 2023)

Ethical Machines: A Conversation with Reid Blackman

Emily M. Bender on AI Hype

Gergely Gosztonyi, "Censorship from Plato to Social Media: The Complexity of Social Media’s Content Regulation and Moderation Practices" (Springer, 2023)

Hey, Robot!

Trevor Boffone, "TikTok Broadway: Musical Theatre Fandom in the Digital Age" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Sarah Malanowski and Nicholas R. Baima, "Why It's Ok to Be a Gamer" (Routledge, 2024)

Andy Clarno et al., "Imperial Policing: Weaponized Data in Carceral Chicago" (U Minnesota Press, 2024)

Henry H. Work, "Wood, Whiskey and Wine: A History of Barrels"(Reaktion Books, 2024)

John V. Pavlik, "Journalism and the Metaverse" (Anthem Press, 2024)

Tarryn Li-Min Chun, "Revolutionary Stagecraft: Theater, Technology, and Politics in Modern China" (U Michigan Press, 2024), "Revolutionary Stagecraft: Theater, Technology, and Politics in Modern China" (U Michigan Press, 2024)

The Human Advantage: A Conversation with Jay Richards

Directions of Peer Review in Software Engineering

Cyrus Mody on the Importance of Square (as in NOT COOL) Scientists and Engineers

Phil Haun, "Tactical Air Power and the Vietnam War: Explaining Effectiveness in Modern Air Warfare" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Craig Gent, "Cyberboss: The Rise of Algorithmic Management and the New Struggle for Control at Work" (Verso, 2024)

Andrew Denning, "Automotive Empire: How Cars and Roads Fueled European Colonialism in Africa" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Mark Walker, "Hitler's Atomic Bomb: History, Legend, and the Twin Legacies of Auschwitz and Hiroshima" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Tim Sweijs and Jeffrey H. Michaels, "Beyond Ukraine: Debating the Future of War" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Thomas Zeller, "Consuming Landscapes: What We See When We Drive and Why It Matters" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022)

Paula Bialski on Middletech, Software Work, and the Culture of Good Enough

Carl Öhman, "The Afterlife of Data: What Happens to Your Information When You Die and Why You Should Care" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

AI and Music: The Future is Here (featuring "There I Ruined It")

Shannon Vallor, "The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Aram Sinnreich and Jesse Gilbert, "The Secret Life of Data: Navigating Hype and Uncertainty in the Age of Algorithmic Surveillance" (MIT Press, 2024)

Jeremy Black, "A World History of Rail: From the Steam Regime to Today" (Amberley Publishing, 2023)

Tara Ward, "Appreciation Post: Towards an Art History of Instagram" (U California Press, 2024)

Eve Herold, "Robots and the People Who Love Them: Holding on to Our Humanity in an Age of Social Robots" (St. Martin's Press, 2024)

Jason Hannan, "Trolling Ourselves to Death: Democracy in the Age of Social Media" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Ann Johnson and Johannes Lenhard, "Cultures of Prediction: How Engineering and Science Evolve with Mathematical Tools" (MIT Press, 2024)

Living with Digital Surveillance in China

Siobhan Angus, "Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography" (Duke UP, 2024)

Paulina Rowinska, "Mapmatics: How We Navigate the World Through Numbers" (Pan Macmillan, 2024)

danah boyd on Digital Technology and Everyday Life

Allison J. Pugh, "The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World" (Princeton UP, 2024)

More Than A Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech

Cameron J. Buckner, "From Deep Learning to Rational Machines" (Oxford UP, 2023)

AI and the Humanities: Nina Beguš DIscusses "Artificial Humanities"

Gretchen McCulloch, "Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language" (Riverhead Books, 2020)

Joanna Guldi, "The Dangerous Art of Text Mining: A Methodology for Digital History" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Daniel P. Ott, "Harvesting History: McCormick's Reaper, Heritage Branding, and Historical Forgery" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)

Rob Drew, "Unspooled: How the Cassette Made Music Shareable" (Duke UP, 2023)

Constantin Ardeleanu, "Steamboat Modernity: Travel, Transport, and Social Transformation on the Lower Danube, 1830–1860" (CEU Press, 2024)

Priya Satia, "Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution" (Bloomsbury, 2019)

Catherine D'Ignazio, "Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action" (MIT Press, 2024)

Douglas L. Reside, "Fixing the Musical: How Technologies Shaped the Broadway Repertory" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Per Högselius and Achim Klüppelberg, "The Soviet Nuclear Archipelago: A Historical Geography of Atomic-Powered Communism" (CEU Press, 2023)

Gina Sipley, "Just Here for the Comments: Lurking as Digital Literacy Practice" (Bristol UP, 2024)

"Did You Miss My Comment or What?": Understanding Toxicity in Open Source Discussions

Tiziano Bonini and Emiliano Trere, "Algorithms of Resistance: The Everyday Fight against Platform Power" (MIT Press, 2024)

MC Forelle on Cars, Chipification, and Repair

John Powers, "Technology and the Making of Experimental Film Culture" (Oxford UP, 2023)