Language

What spam is, how it works, and how it has shaped online communities and the Internet itself. The vast majority of all email sent every day is spam, a variety of idiosyncratically spelled requests to provide account information, invitations to spend money on dubious products, and pleas to send cash overseas. Most of it is caught by filters before ever reaching an in-box. Where does it come from? As Finn Brunton explains in Spam, it is produced and shaped by many different populations around the world: programmers, con artists, bots and their botmasters, pharmaceutical merchants, marketers, identity thieves, crooked bankers and their victims, cops, lawyers, network security professionals, vigilantes, and hackers. Every time we go online, we participate in the system of spam, with choices, refusals, and purchases the consequences of which we may not understand. This is a book about what spam is, how it works, and what it means. Brunton provides a cultural history that stretches from pranks on early computer networks to the construction of a global criminal infrastructure. The history of spam, Brunton shows us, is a shadow history of the Internet itself, with spam emerging as the mirror image of the online communities it targets. Brunton traces spam through three epochs: the 1970s to 1995, and the early, noncommercial computer networks that became the Internet; 1995 to 2003, with the dot-com boom, the rise of spam's entrepreneurs, and the first efforts at regulating spam; and 2003 to the present, with the war of algorithms—spam versus anti-spam. Spam shows us how technologies, from email to search engines, are transformed by unintended consequences and adaptations, and how online communities develop and invent governance for themselves.

A new vision of money as a communication technology that creates and sustains invisible—often exclusive—communities One of the basic structures of everyday life, money is at its core a communication media. Payment systems—cash, card, app, or Bitcoin—are informational and symbolic tools that integrate us into, or exclude us from, the society that surrounds us. Examining the social politics of financial technologies, Lana Swartz reveals what’s at stake when we pay. This accessible and insightful analysis comes at a moment of disruption: from “fin-tech” startups to cryptocurrency schemes, a variety of technologies are poised to unseat traditional financial infrastructures. Swartz explains these changes, traces their longer histories, and demonstrates their consequences. Getting paid and paying determines whether or not you can put food on the table. She shows just how important these invisible systems are. The data that payment produces is uniquely revelatory—and newly valuable. New forms of money create new forms of identity, new forms of community, and new forms of power.

Yale University Press

In our "wireless" world it is easy to take the importance of the undersea cable systems for granted, but the stakes of their successful operation are huge, as they are responsible for carrying almost all transoceanic Internet traffic. In The Undersea Network Nicole Starosielski follows these cables from the ocean depths to their landing zones on the sandy beaches of the South Pacific, bringing them to the surface of media scholarship and making visible the materiality of the wired network. In doing so, she charts the cable network's cultural, historical, geographic and environmental dimensions. Starosielski argues that the environments the cables occupy are historical and political realms, where the network and the connections it enables are made possible by the deliberate negotiation and manipulation of technology, culture, politics and geography. Accompanying the book is an interactive digital mapping project, where readers can trace cable routes, view photographs and archival materials, and read stories about the island cable hubs.

Duke University Press Books

An explanation of the digital practices of the black Internet From BlackPlanet to #BlackGirlMagic, Distributed Blackness places blackness at the very center of internet culture. André Brock Jr. claims issues of race and ethnicity as inextricable from and formative of contemporary digital culture in the United States. Distributed Blackness analyzes a host of platforms and practices (from Black Twitter to Instagram, YouTube, and app development) to trace how digital media have reconfigured the meanings and performances of African American identity. Brock moves beyond widely circulated deficit models of respectability, bringing together discourse analysis with a close reading of technological interfaces to develop nuanced arguments about how “blackness” gets worked out in various technological domains. As Brock demonstrates, there’s nothing niche or subcultural about expressions of blackness on social media: internet use and practice now set the terms for what constitutes normative participation. Drawing on critical race theory, linguistics, rhetoric, information studies, and science and technology studies, Brock tabs between black-dominated technologies, websites, and social media to build a set of black beliefs about technology. In explaining black relationships with and alongside technology, Brock centers the unique joy and sense of community in being black online now.

Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media

An eye-opening look at the invisible workers who protect us from seeing humanity’s worst on today’s commercial internet Social media on the internet can be a nightmarish place. A primary shield against hateful language, violent videos, and online cruelty uploaded by users is not an algorithm. It is people. Mostly invisible by design, more than 100,000 commercial content moderators evaluate posts on mainstream social media platforms: enforcing internal policies, training artificial intelligence systems, and actively screening and removing offensive material—sometimes thousands of items per day. Sarah T. Roberts, an award-winning social media scholar, offers the first extensive ethnographic study of the commercial content moderation industry. Based on interviews with workers from Silicon Valley to the Philippines, at boutique firms and at major social media companies, she contextualizes this hidden industry and examines the emotional toll it takes on its workers. This revealing investigation of the people “behind the screen” offers insights into not only the reality of our commercial internet but the future of globalized labor in the digital age.

Yale University Press

This is the first book to explore the broad influence of computers and television on the evolution of the US legal process.

Oxford University Press on Demand

Winner of the 2009 Ruth Benedict Prize for Outstanding Monograph from the Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists Winner of the 2010 Distinguished Book Award from the American Sociological Association, Sociology of Sexualities Section Winner of the 2010 Congress Inaugural Qualitative Inquiry Book Award Honorable Mention From Wal-Mart drag parties to renegade Homemaker’s Clubs, Out in the Country offers an unprecedented contemporary account of the lives of today’s rural queer youth. Mary L. Gray maps out the experiences of young people living in small towns across rural Kentucky and along its desolate Appalachian borders, providing a fascinating and often surprising look at the contours of gay life beyond the big city. Gray illustrates that, against a backdrop of an increasingly impoverished and privatized rural America, LGBT youth and their allies visibly—and often vibrantly—work the boundaries of the public spaces available to them, whether in their high schools, public libraries, town hall meetings, churches, or through websites. This important book shows that, in addition to the spaces of Main Street, rural LGBT youth explore and carve out online spaces to fashion their emerging queer identities. Their triumphs and travails defy clear distinctions often drawn between online and offline experiences of identity, fundamentally redefining our understanding of the term ‘queer visibility’ and its political stakes. Gray combines ethnographic insight with incisive cultural critique, engaging with some of the biggest issues facing both queer studies and media scholarship. Out in the Country is a timely and groundbreaking study of sexuality and gender, new media, youth culture, and the meaning of identity and social movements in a digital age.

Surveys the online social habits of American teens and analyzes the role technology and social media plays in their lives, examining common misconceptions about such topics as identity, privacy, danger, and bullying.

Yale University Press

Digital Research Confidential: The Secrets of Studying Behavior Online

Behind-the-scenes stories of how Internet research projects actually get done. The realm of the digital offers both new methods of research and new objects of study. Because the digital environment for scholarship is constantly evolving, researchers must sometimes improvise, change their plans, and adapt. These details are often left out of research write-ups, leaving newcomers to the field frustrated when their approaches do not work as expected. Digital Research Confidential offers scholars a chance to learn from their fellow researchers' mistakes—and their successes. The book—a follow-up to Eszter Hargittai's widely read Research Confidential—presents behind-the-scenes, nuts-and-bolts stories of digital research projects, written by established and rising scholars. They discuss such challenges as archiving, Web crawling, crowdsourcing, and confidentiality. They do not shrink from specifics, describing such research hiccups as an ethnographic interview so emotionally draining that afterward the researcher retreated to a bathroom to cry, and the seemingly simple research question about Wikipedia that mushroomed into years of work on millions of data points. Digital Research Confidential will be an essential resource for scholars in every field. Contributors Megan Sapnar Ankerson, danah boyd, Amy Bruckman, Casey Fiesler, Brooke Foucault Welles, Darren Gergle, Eric Gilbert, Eszter Hargittai, Brent Hecht, Aron Hsiao, Karrie Karahalios, Paul Leonardi, Kurt Luther, Virág Molnár, Christian Sandvig, Aaron Shaw, Michelle Shumate, Matthew Weber

Every porn scene is a record of people at work. But on-camera labor is only the beginning of the story. Porn Work takes readers behind the scenes to explore what porn performers think of their work and how they intervene to hack it. Blending extensive fieldwork with feminist and antiwork theorizing, Porn Work details entrepreneurial labor on the boundaries between pleasure and tedium. Rejecting any notion that sex work is an aberration from straight work, it reveals porn workers' creative strategies as prophetic of a working landscape in crisis. In the end, it looks to what porn has to tell us about what's wrong with work, and what it might look like to build something better.

Why employees of pioneering Internet companies chose to invest their time, energy, hopes, and human capital in start-up ventures. In the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, employees of Internet startups took risks—left well-paying jobs for the chance of striking it rich through stock options (only to end up unemployed a year later), relocated to areas that were epicenters of a booming industry (that shortly went bust), chose the opportunity to be creative over the stability of a set schedule. In Venture Labor, Gina Neff investigates choices like these made by high-tech workers in New York City's “Silicon Alley” in the 1990s. Why did these workers exhibit entrepreneurial behavior in their jobs—investing time, energy, and other personal resources that Neff terms “venture labor”—when they themselves were employees and not entrepreneurs? Neff argues that this behavior was part of a broader shift in society in which economic risk shifted away from collective responsibility toward individual responsibility. In the new economy, risk and reward took the place of job loyalty, and the dot-com boom helped glorify risks. Company flexibility was gained at the expense of employee security. Through extensive interviews, Neff finds not the triumph of the entrepreneurial spirit but a mixture of motivations and strategies, informed variously by bravado, naïveté, and cold calculation. She connects these individual choices with larger social and economic structures, making it clear that understanding venture labor is of paramount importance for encouraging innovation and, even more important, for creating sustainable work environments that support workers.

Language Arts & Disciplines

(Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work

An illuminating investigation into a class of enterprising women aspiring to “make it” in the social media economy but often finding only unpaid work Profound transformations in our digital society have brought many enterprising women to social media platforms—from blogs to YouTube to Instagram—in hopes of channeling their talents into fulfilling careers. In this eye-opening book, Brooke Erin Duffy draws much-needed attention to the gap between the handful who find lucrative careers and the rest, whose “passion projects” amount to free work for corporate brands. Drawing on interviews and fieldwork, Duffy offers fascinating insights into the work and lives of fashion bloggers, beauty vloggers, and designers. She connects the activities of these women to larger shifts in unpaid and gendered labor, offering a lens through which to understand, anticipate, and critique broader transformations in the creative economy. At a moment when social media offer the rousing assurance that anyone can “make it”—and stand out among freelancers, temps, and gig workers—Duffy asks us all to consider the stakes of not getting paid to do what you love.

Yale University Press

Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy

“The best book yet on the complex lives and choices of for-profit students.” —The New York Times Book Review As featured on The Daily Show, NPR’s Marketplace, and Fresh Air, the “powerful, chilling tale” (Carol Anderson, author of White Rage) of higher education becoming an engine of social inequality “p>Lower Ed is quickly becoming the definitive book on the fastest-growing sector of higher education at the turn of the twenty-first century: for-profit colleges. With sharp insight and deliberate acumen, Tressie McMillan Cottom—a sociologist who was once a recruiter at two for-profit colleges—expertly parses the fraught dynamics of this big-money industry. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews with students, employees, executives, and activists, Lower Ed details the benefits, pitfalls, and real costs of the expansion of for-profit colleges. Now with a new foreword by Stephanie Kelton, economic advisor to Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, this smart and essential book cuts to the very core of our nation’s broken social contracts and the challenges we face in our divided, unequal society.

Examines the author's idea of object-oriented philosophy, wherein things, and how they interact with one another, are the center of philosophical interest.

U of Minnesota Press

A new way of thinking about data science and data ethics that is informed by the ideas of intersectional feminism. Today, data science is a form of power. It has been used to expose injustice, improve health outcomes, and topple governments. But it has also been used to discriminate, police, and surveil. This potential for good, on the one hand, and harm, on the other, makes it essential to ask: Data science by whom? Data science for whom? Data science with whose interests in mind? The narratives around big data and data science are overwhelmingly white, male, and techno-heroic. In Data Feminism, Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein present a new way of thinking about data science and data ethics—one that is informed by intersectional feminist thought. Illustrating data feminism in action, D'Ignazio and Klein show how challenges to the male/female binary can help challenge other hierarchical (and empirically wrong) classification systems. They explain how, for example, an understanding of emotion can expand our ideas about effective data visualization, and how the concept of invisible labor can expose the significant human efforts required by our automated systems. And they show why the data never, ever “speak for themselves.” Data Feminism offers strategies for data scientists seeking to learn how feminism can help them work toward justice, and for feminists who want to focus their efforts on the growing field of data science. But Data Feminism is about much more than gender. It is about power, about who has it and who doesn't, and about how those differentials of power can be challenged and changed.

A vivid look at how India has developed the idea of entrepreneurial citizens as leaders mobilizing society and how people try to live that promise Can entrepreneurs develop a nation, serve the poor, and pursue creative freedom, all while generating economic value? In Chasing Innovation, Lilly Irani shows the contradictions that arise as designers, engineers, and businesspeople frame development and governance as opportunities to innovate. Irani documents the rise of "entrepreneurial citizenship" in India over the past seventy years, demonstrating how a global ethos of development through design has come to shape state policy, economic investment, and the middle class in one of the world’s fastest-growing nations. Drawing on her own professional experience as a Silicon Valley designer and nearly a decade of fieldwork following a Delhi design studio, Irani vividly chronicles the practices and mindsets that hold up professional design as the answer to the challenges of a country of more than one billion people, most of whom are poor. While discussions of entrepreneurial citizenship promise that Indian children can grow up to lead a nation aspiring to uplift the poor, in reality, social, economic, and political structures constrain whose enterprise, which hopes, and which needs can be seen as worthy of investment. In the process, Irani warns, powerful investors, philanthropies, and companies exploit citizens' social relations, empathy, and political hope in the quest to generate economic value. Irani argues that the move to recast social change as innovation, with innovators as heroes, frames others—craftspeople, workers, and activists—as of lower value, or even dangers to entrepreneurial forms of development. With meticulous historical context and compelling stories, Chasing Innovation lays bare how long-standing power hierarchies such as class, caste, language, and colonialism continue to shape opportunity in a world where good ideas supposedly rule all.

Princeton University Press

How communication technologies meant to empower people with speech disorders -- to give voice to the voiceless -- are still subject to disempowering structural inequalities.

Language Arts & Disciplines

The internet and the mobile phone have disrupted many of our conventional understandings of ourselves and our relationships, raising anxieties and hopes about their effects on our lives. In this second edition of her timely and vibrant book, Nancy Baym provides frameworks for thinking critically about the roles of digital media in personal relationships. Rather than providing exuberant accounts or cautionary tales, it offers a data-grounded primer on how to make sense of these important changes in relational life Fully updated to reflect new developments in technology and digital scholarship, the book identifies the core relational issues these media disturb and shows how our talk about them echoes historical discussions about earlier communication technologies. Chapters explore how we use mediated language and nonverbal behavior to develop and maintain communities, social networks, and new relationships, and to maintain existing relationships in our everyday lives. The book combines research findings with lively examples to address questions such as: Can mediated interaction be warm and personal? Are people honest about themselves online? Can relationships that start online work? Do digital media damage the other relationships in our lives? Throughout, the book argues that these questions must be answered with firm understandings of media qualities and the social and personal contexts in which they are developed and used. This new edition of Personal Connections in the Digital Age will be required reading for all students and scholars of media, communication studies, and sociology, as well as all those who want a richer understanding of digital media and everyday life.

Tune In, Log Out is an ethnographic study of an Internet soap opera fan group. Bridging the fields of computer-mediated communication and audience studies, the book shows how verbal and non verbal communicative practices create collaborative interpretations and criticism, group humor, interpersonal relationships, group norms and individual identity. While much has been written about problems and inequities women have encountered online, Nancy K Baym's analysis of a female-dominated group in which female communication styles prevail demonstrates that women can build successful online communities while still welcoming male participation. In addition, a longitudinal look at the development of fan group allows an examination of the endurance of the group's social structure in the face of the Internet's tremendous growth. Lively and engaging, Tune In, Log Out provides an entertaining introduction to issues of online and audience community.

Language Arts & Disciplines

Playing to the Crowd: Musicians, Audiences, and the Intimate Work of Connection

"Playing to the Crowd explores and explains how the rise of digital communication platforms has transformed artist-fan relationships into something more intimate. Through in-depth interviews with musicians such as the Cure, UB40, and Throwing Muses, Nancy K. Baym reveals how new media has facilitated connections through the active participation of both the artists and their devoted digital fan base. Before the rise of online sharing and user-generated content, audiences were mostly seen as undifferentiated masses, often mediated through record labels and the press. Today, musicians and fans have built more active relationships through social media, fan sites, and artist sites, giving them a new sense of intimacy, while offering artists unparalleled access to and information about their audiences. But this comes at a price. For audiences, meeting their heroes can kill the mystique. And for artists, maintaining active relationships with so many people can be labor intensive and emotionally draining. Drawing on her own rich history as a deeply connected music fan, Baym offers an entirely new approach to media culture, arguing that the work musicians put into maintaining these intimate relationships reflects the demands of the gig economy, one which requires resources and strategies that we all music come to recognize"--Publisher's description.

Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy

If you wanted to build a machine that would distribute propaganda to millions of people, distract them from important issues, energize hatred and bigotry, erode social trust, undermine respectable journalism, foster doubts about science, and engage in massive surveillance all at once, you would make something a lot like Facebook. Of course, none of that was part of the plan. In this fully updated paperback edition of Antisocial Media, Siva Vaidhyanathan explains how Facebook devolved from an innocent social site hacked together by Harvard students into a force that, while it may make personal life just a little more pleasurable, makes democracy a lot more challenging. It's an account of the hubris of good intentions, a missionary spirit, and an ideology that sees computer code as the universal solvent for all human problems. And it's an indictment of how "social media" has fostered the deterioration of democratic culture around the world, from facilitating Russian meddling in support of Trump's election to the exploitation of the platform by murderous authoritarians in Burma and the Philippines. Both authoritative and trenchant, Antisocial Media shows how Facebook's mission went so wrong.

Oxford University Press, USA

http://books.google.com/books?id=pUlFwgEACAAJ&dq=isbn:9780190056544&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

We all create intellectual property. We all use intellectual property. Intellectual property is the most pervasive yet least understood way we regulate expression. Despite its importance to so many aspects of the global economy and daily life, intellectual property policy remains a confusing and arcane subject. This engaging book clarifies both the basic terms and the major conflicts surrounding these fascinating areas of law, offering a layman's introduction to copyright, patents, trademarks, and other forms of knowledge falling under the purview of intellectual property rights. Using vivid examples, noted media expert Siva Vaidhyanathan illustrates the powers and limits of intellectual property, distilling with grace and wit the complex tangle of laws, policies, and values governing the dissemination of ideas, expressions, inventions, creativity, and data collection in the modern world. Vaidhyanathan explains that intellectual property exists as it does because powerful interests want it to exist. The strongest economies in the world have a keen interest in embedding rigid methods of control and enforcement over emerging economies to preserve the huge economic interests linked to their copyright industries-film, music, software, and publishing. For this reason, the fight over the global standardization of intellectual property has become one of the most important sites of tension in North-South global relations. Through compelling case studies, including those of Starbucks, Coca-Cola, Sony, Amazon, and Google Books, Vaidhyanathan shows that the modern intellectual property systems reflect three centuries of changes in politics, economics, technologies, and social values. Although it emerged from a desire to foster creativity while simultaneously protecting it, intellectual property today has fundamentally shifted to a political dimension.

Oxford University Press

http://books.google.com/books?id=knjXDQAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:9780195372779&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Looks at the dark side of Google and its search engine, raising issues about intellectual property rights and the impact that Google has on thinking and decision making, and discussing ways to deal with a Google-dominated Internet.

Univ of California Press

http://books.google.com/books?id=tG0E1e8389UC&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:9780520272897&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and how it Threatens Creativity

Argues that strict legal guidelines prove insensitive to the diverse forms of cultural expression prevalent in the United States

http://books.google.com/books?id=sGjSY0rRC_wC&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:9780814788073&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control Is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System

The Anarchist in the Library is the first guide to one of the most important cultural and economic battlegrounds of our increasingly plugged-in world. Siva Vaidhyanathan draws the struggle for information that will determine much of the culture and politics of the twenty-first century: anarchy or oligarchy, total freedom vs. complete control. His acclaimed book explores topics from unauthorized fan edits of Star Wars to terrorist organizations' reliance on “leaderless resistance,” from Napster to Total Information Awareness to flash mobs.

Technology & Engineering

http://books.google.com/books?id=AF6-tAEACAAJ&dq=isbn:9780465089857&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

Describes how patterns of information, knowledge, and cultural production are changing. The author shows that the way information and knowledge are made available can either limit or enlarge the ways people create and express themselves. He describes the range of legal and policy choices that confront.

Yale University Press

http://books.google.com/books?id=VUpUhgBnovwC&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:9780300125771&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

The Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence

The hidden costs of artificial intelligence, from natural resources and labor to privacy and freedom What happens when artificial intelligence saturates political life and depletes the planet? How is AI shaping our understanding of ourselves and our societies? In this book Kate Crawford reveals how this planetary network is fueling a shift toward undemocratic governance and increased inequality. Drawing on more than a decade of research, award-winning science, and technology, Crawford reveals how AI is a technology of extraction: from the energy and minerals needed to build and sustain its infrastructure, to the exploited workers behind "automated" services, to the data AI collects from us. Rather than taking a narrow focus on code and algorithms, Crawford offers us a political and a material perspective on what it takes to make artificial intelligence and where it goes wrong. While technical systems present a veneer of objectivity, they are always systems of power. This is an urgent account of what is at stake as technology companies use artificial intelligence to reshape the world.

Yale University Press

http://books.google.com/books?id=KfodEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:9780300209570&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

This book uses data collected from in-depth interviews with young people over the course of a year to explore the complex role of social media in their lives, and the part it plays in shaping how they understand and present their identity to a broad public on a wide array of platforms. Using this data, the book proposes and develops a new theoretical framework for understanding identity performances. Comic Theory, detailed in this book, centres on a consideration of the role of social media design in shaping identity, and explores the ways in which socio-culturally grounded users engage in acts of compromise, novelty, and negotiation with social media designs and digital technologies to produce unique identity performances. Positioned within the field of educational research, this book overtly challenges assumptions and myths about the internet as a neutral source of knowledge, instead exploring the way in which designs and technologies shape who we interact with and how we understand what it is to be social. Moving beyond the over-used ‘digital natives’ paradigm, this book makes a clear case that educators and education researchers need to move beyond a focus on coding and digital skills alone, highlighting the pressing need to take explicit account of the overlaps between digital technology, culture, and education.

http://books.google.com/books?id=7i3rDwAAQBAJ&dq=isbn:9789811557163&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things: UK Policy Opportunities and Challenges

Through algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI), objects and digital services now demonstrate new skills they did not have before, right up to replacing human activity through pre-programming or by making their own decisions. As part of the internet of things, AI applications are already widely used today, for example in language processing, image recognition and the tracking and processing of data. This policy brief illustrates the potential negative and positive impacts of AI and reviews related policy strategies adopted by the UK, US, EU, as well as Canada and China. Based on an ethical approach that considers the role of AI from a democratic perspective and considering the public interest, the authors make policy recommendations that help to strengthen the positive impact of AI and to mitigate its negative consequences.

University of Westminster Press

http://books.google.com/books?id=9QXfvQEACAAJ&dq=isbn:9781911534815&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Peters defines media expansively as elements that compose the human world. Drawing from ideas implicit in media philosophy, Peters argues that media are more than carriers of messages: they are the very infrastructures combining nature and culture that allow human life to thrive. Through an encyclopedic array of examples from the oceans to the skies,The Marvelous Clouds reveals the long prehistory of so-called new media. Digital media, Peters argues, are an extension of early practices tied to the establishment of civilization such as mastering fire, building calendars, reading the stars, creating language, and establishing religions. New media do not take us into uncharted waters, but rather confront us with the deepest and oldest questions of society and ecology: how to manage the relations people have with themselves, others, and the natural world.

University of Chicago Press

Language Arts & Disciplines

http://books.google.com/books?id=nr0lEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:9780226421353&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human

"Tom Boellstorff conducted more than two years of fieldwork in Second Life, living among and observing its residents in the same way anthropologists traditionally have done to learn about cultures and social groups in the so-called real world. He applied the methods of anthropology to study many facets of this new frontier of human life, including issues of gender, race, sex, money, conflict and antisocial behavior, the construction of place and time, and the interplay of self and group."--BOOK JACKET.

Princeton University Press

http://books.google.com/books?id=Y2rcwAEACAAJ&dq=isbn:9780691135281&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions that Shape Social Media

"Most users want their Twitter feed, Facebook page, and YouTube comments to be free of harassment and porn. Whether faced with 'fake news' or livestreamed violence, 'content moderators'--who censor or promote user-posted content--have never been more important. This is especially true when the tools that social media platforms use to curb trolling, ban hate speech, and censor pornography can also silence the speech you need to hear. [The author] provides an overview of current social media practices and explains the underlying rationales for how, when, and why these policies are enforced. In doing so, [the author] highlights that content moderation receives too little public scrutiny even as it is shapes social norms and creates consequences for public discourse, cultural production, and the fabric of society. Based on interviews with content moderators, creators, and consumers, this ... book is ... for anyone who's ever clicked 'like' or 'retweet.'"--

Yale University Press

http://books.google.com/books?id=-RteDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:9780300173130&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

A look at the revolution in game live streaming and esports broadcasting Every day thousands of people broadcast their gaming live to audiences over the internet using popular sites such as Twitch, which reaches more than one hundred million viewers a month. In these new platforms for interactive entertainment, big esports events featuring digital game competitors live stream globally, and audiences can interact with broadcasters—and each other—through chat in real time. What are the ramifications of this exploding online industry? Taking readers inside home studios and backstage at large esports events, Watch Me Play investigates the rise of game live streaming and how it is poised to alter how we understand media and audiences. Through extensive interviews and immersion in this gaming scene, T. L. Taylor delves into the inner workings of the live streaming platform Twitch. From branding to business practices, she shows the pleasures and work involved in this broadcasting activity, as well as the management and governance of game live streaming and its hosting communities. At a time when gaming is being reinvented through social media, the potential of an ever-growing audience is transforming user-generated content and alternative distribution methods. These changes will challenge the meaning of ownership and intellectual property and open the way to new forms of creativity. The first book to explore the online phenomenon Twitch and live streaming games, Watch Me Play offers a vibrant look at the melding of private play and public entertainment.

Princeton University Press

http://books.google.com/books?id=YXSYDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:9780691183558&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Culture Warlords: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Battle for America's Soul

From journalist and self-described "mouthy Jewish broad from New York," an in-depth and personal look of the byzantine and harrowing online world of white supremacists, from a woman who has studied the movement up close, and been targeted by it. Incels. White nationalists. QAnon. Proud Boys. Patriot Front. There are so many extremist groups nowadays it's hard to keep track. Talia Lavin, however, was no stranger to the modern American white supremacist movement, even before it re-gained prominence in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. Culture Warlords is a field guide to the racist right online, from a narrator who has herself become the frequent target of extremist trolls (including those at Fox News). Lavin is every skinhead's worst nightmare: a loud and unapologetic Jewish woman, funny, smart, and profoundly anti-racist, with the journalistic chops to expose the tactics and landscape of online hatemongers. In the book, she turns the lens of anti-Semitism, racism, and white power back on itself in an attempt to understand the online hate movement's schisms, recruiting tactics, and the threat it represents to the 2020 election and beyond. She reports on specific strategies utilized by neo-Nazis, Proud Boys, and QAnon to disseminate conspiracy theories, exposing their tactics and fighting fire with fire. A journalist who is proudly antifascist, Talia Lavin is a trailblazing voice of a new generation who is standing up to online hate.

http://books.google.com/books?id=MqJCzQEACAAJ&dq=isbn:9780306846434&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Kill All Normies: The Online Culture Wars from Tumblr and 4chan to the Alt-right and Trump

How internet subcultures are conquering the mainstream, from from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the alt-right.

http://books.google.com/books?id=oLfwswEACAAJ&dq=isbn:9781785355431&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

A sophisticated argument about how the internet and communication networks impact on politics, democracy, and identity.

http://books.google.com/books?id=f6fZAAAAMAAJ&dq=isbn:9780745317489&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

This book highlights that the capacity for gathering, analysing, and utilising vast amounts of digital (user) data raises significant ethical issues. Annika Richterich provides a systematic contemporary overview of the field of critical data studies that reflects on practices of digital data collection and analysis. The book assesses in detail one big data research area: biomedical studies, focused on epidemiological surveillance. Specific case studies explore how big data have been used in academic work. The Big Data Agenda concludes that the use of big data in research urgently needs to be considered from the vantage point of ethics and social justice. Drawing upon discourse ethics and critical data studies, Richterich argues that entanglements between big data research and technology/ internet corporations have emerged. In consequence, more opportunities for discussing and negotiating emerging research practices and their implications for societal values are needed.

University of Westminster Press

http://books.google.com/books?id=kykNEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:9781911534730&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

The untold story about how the internet became social, and why this matters for its future "Whether you're reading this for a nostalgic romp or to understand the dawn of the internet, The Modem World will delight you with tales of BBS culture and shed light on how the decisions of the past shape our current networked world."--danah boyd, author of It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens Fifteen years before the commercialization of the internet, millions of amateurs across North America created more than 100,000 small-scale computer networks. The people who built and maintained these dial-up bulletin board systems (BBSs) in the 1980s laid the groundwork for millions of others who would bring their lives online in the 1990s and beyond. From ham radio operators to HIV/AIDS activists, these modem enthusiasts developed novel forms of community moderation, governance, and commercialization. The Modem World tells an alternative origin story for social media, centered not in the office parks of Silicon Valley or the meeting rooms of military contractors, but rather on the online communities of hobbyists, activists, and entrepreneurs. Over time, countless social media platforms have appropriated the social and technical innovations of the BBS community. How can these untold stories from the internet's past inspire more inclusive visions of its future?

Yale University Press

http://books.google.com/books?id=bYxhEAAAQBAJ&dq=isbn:9780300248142&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Misbehavior in Cyber Places: The Regulation of Online Conduct in Virtual Communities on the Internet

This book studies computer-mediated, interpersonal Internet activity up to the turn of the century, examining virtual misbehavior across a wide range of online environments. It also lays out the theoretical framework and fundamental ideas of media ecology, a branch of communication scholarship, highly relevant for understanding digital technology.

Rowman & Littlefield

http://books.google.com/books?id=3yQv1T4_Y7gC&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:9780761860112&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Vaike Fors, Sarah Pink, Martin Berg, and Tom O’Dell

Digital self-tracking devices and data have become normal elements of everyday life. Imagining Personal Data examines the implications of the rise of body monitoring and digital self-tracking for how we inhabit, experience and imagine our everyday worlds and futures. Through a focus on how it feels to live in environments where data is emergent, present and characterized by a sense of uncertainty, the authors argue for a new interdisciplinary approach to understanding the implications of self-tracking, which attends to its past, present and possible future. Building on social science approaches, the book accounts for the concerns of scholars working in design, philosophy and human-computer interaction. It problematizes the body and senses in relation to data and tracking devices, presents an accessible analytical account of the sensory and affective experiences of self-tracking, and questions the status of big data. In doing so it proposes an agenda for future research and design that puts people at its centre.

http://books.google.com/books?id=0LllzgEACAAJ&dq=isbn:9781032082073&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Open access available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-mono/10.4324/9781003085676/imagining-personal-data-vaike-fors-sarah-pink-martin-berg-tom-dell

This book adopts a critical youth studies approach and theorizes the digital as a key feature of the everyday to analyse how ideas about youth and cyber-safety, digital inclusion and citizenship are mobilized. Despite a growing interest in the benefits and opportunities for young people online, both ‘young people’ and ‘the digital’ continue to be constructed primarily as sites of social and cultural anxiety requiring containment and control. Juxtaposing public policy, popular educational and parental framings of young people’s digital practices with the insights from fieldwork conducted with young Australians aged 12–25, the book highlights the generative possibilities of attending to intergenerational tensions. In doing so, the authors show how a shift beyond the paradigm of control opens up towards a deeper understanding of the capacities that are generated in and through digital life for young and old alike. Young People in Digital Society will be of interest to scholars and students in youth studies, cultural studies, sociology, education, and media and communications.

http://books.google.com/books?id=sResxgEACAAJ&dq=isbn:1137573686&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

A.third@westernsydney.edu.au

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet

How, despite thirty years of effort, Soviet attempts to build a national computer network were undone by socialists who seemed to behave like capitalists.

http://books.google.com/books?id=hrFIDAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:9780262034180&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

From dial-up to wi-fi, an engaging cultural history of the commercial web industry In the 1990s, the World Wide Web helped transform the Internet from the domain of computer scientists to a playground for mass audiences. As URLs leapt off computer screens and onto cereal boxes, billboards, and film trailers, the web changed the way many Americans experienced media, socialized, and interacted with brands. Businesses rushed online to set up corporate “home pages” and as a result, a new cultural industry was born: web design. For today’s internet users who are more familiar sharing social media posts than collecting hotlists of cool sites, the early web may seem primitive, clunky, and graphically inferior. After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, this pre-crash era was dubbed “Web 1.0,” a retronym meant to distinguish the early web from the social, user-centered, and participatory values that were embodied in the internet industry’s resurgence as “Web 2.0” in the 21st century. Tracking shifts in the rules of “good web design,” Ankerson reimagines speculation and design as a series of contests and collaborations to conceive the boundaries of a new digitally networked future. What was it like to go online and “surf the Web” in the 1990s? How and why did the look and feel of the web change over time? How do new design paradigms like user-experience design (UX) gain traction? Bringing together media studies, internet studies, and design theory, Dot-com Design traces the shifts in, and struggles over, the web’s production, aesthetics, and design to provide a comprehensive look at the evolution of the web industry and into the vast internet we browse today.

http://books.google.com/books?id=NcU4DwAAQBAJ&dq=isbn:9781479882182&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

From race, sex, class, and culture, the multidisciplinary field of Internet studies needs theoretical and methodological approaches that allow us to question the organization of social relations that are embedded in digital technologies, and that foster a clearer understanding of how power relations are organized through technologies. Representing a scholarly dialogue among established and emerging critical media and information studies scholars, this volume provides a means of foregrounding new questions, methods, and theories which can be applied to digital media, platforms, and infrastructures. These inquiries include, among others, how representation to hardware, software, computer code, and infrastructures might be implicated in global economic, political, and social systems of control. Contributors argue that more research needs to explicitly trace the types of uneven power relations that exist in technological spaces. By looking at both the broader political and economic context and the many digital technology acculturation processes as they are differentiated intersectionally, a clearer picture emerges of how under-acknowledging culturally situated and gendered information technologies are impacting the possibility of participation with (or purposeful abstinence from) the Internet. This book is ideal for undergraduate and graduate courses in Internet studies, library and information studies, communication, sociology, and psychology. It is also ideal for researchers with varying expertise and will help to advance theoretical and methodological approaches to Internet research.

Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften

http://books.google.com/books?id=OjwzjgEACAAJ&dq=isbn:9781433130014&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

An analysis of the failure of U.S. broadband policy to solve the rural–urban digital divide, with a proposal for a new national rural broadband plan. 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, 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 multistakeholder system, guided by thoughtful public policy and funded by public and private support.

Technology & Engineering

http://books.google.com/books?id=FAg_EAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:9780262543064&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

US internet infrastructure and policy

This book takes an extensive look at the many different types of users and cultures that comprise the popular social media platform Tumblr. Though it does not receive nearly as much attention as other social media such as Twitter or Facebook, Tumblr and its users have been hugely influential in creating and shifting popular culture, especially progressive youth culture, with the New York Times referring to 2014 as the dawning of the “age of Tumblr activism.” Perfect for those unfamiliar with the platform as well as those who grew up on it, this volume contains essays and artwork that span many different topics: fandom; platform structure and design; race, gender and sexuality, including queer and trans identities; aesthetics; disability and mental health; and social media privacy and ethics. An entire generation of young people that is now beginning to influence mass culture and politics came of age on Tumblr, and this volume is an indispensable guide to the many ways this platform works.

University of Michigan Press

Technology & Engineering

http://books.google.com/books?id=e-4EEAAAQBAJ&dq=isbn:9780472901296&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

The contributors to Signal Traffic investigate how the material artifacts of media infrastructure--transoceanic cables, mobile telephone towers, Internet data centers, and the like--intersect with everyday life. Essayists confront the multiple and hybrid forms networks take, the different ways networks are imagined and engaged with by publics around the world, their local effects, and what human beings experience when a network fails. Some contributors explore the physical objects and industrial relations that make up an infrastructure. Others venture into the marginalized communities orphaned from the knowledge economies, technological literacies, and epistemological questions linked to infrastructural formation and use. The wide-ranging insights delineate the oft-ignored contrasts between industrialized and developing regions, rich and poor areas, and urban and rural settings, bringing technological differences into focus. Contributors include Charles R. Acland, Paul Dourish, Sarah Harris, Jennifer Holt and Patrick Vonderau, Shannon Mattern, Toby Miller, Lisa Parks, Christian Sandvig, Nicole Starosielski, Jonathan Sterne, and Helga Tawil-Souri.

University of Illinois Press

Language Arts & Disciplines

http://books.google.com/books?id=t__CoQEACAAJ&dq=isbn:9780252039362&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

The first scholarly book in English on Minitel, the pioneering French computer network, offers a history of a technical system and a cultural phenomenon. A decade before the Internet became a medium for the masses in the United States, tens of millions of users in France had access to a network for e-mail, e-commerce, chat, research, game playing, blogging, and even an early form of online porn. In 1983, the French government rolled out Minitel, a computer network that achieved widespread adoption in just a few years as the government distributed free terminals to every French telephone subscriber. With this volume, Julien Mailland and Kevin Driscoll offer the first scholarly book in English on Minitel, examining it as both a technical system and a cultural phenomenon. Mailland and Driscoll argue that Minitel was a technical marvel, a commercial success, and an ambitious social experiment. Other early networks may have introduced protocols and software standards that continue to be used today, but Minitel foretold the social effects of widespread telecomputing. They examine the unique balance of forces that enabled the growth of Minitel: public and private, open and closed, centralized and decentralized. Mailland and Driscoll describe Minitel's key technological components, novel online services, and thriving virtual communities. Despite the seemingly tight grip of the state, however, a lively Minitel culture emerged, characterized by spontaneity, imagination, and creativity. After three decades of continuous service, Minitel was shut down in 2012, but the history of Minitel should continue to inform our thinking about Internet policy, today and into the future.

http://books.google.com/books?id=vZ4LEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:9780262537759&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

An exploration of the Dark Web—websites accessible only with special routing software—that examines the history of three anonymizing networks, Freenet, Tor, and I2P. The term “Dark Web” conjures up drug markets, unregulated gun sales, stolen credit cards. But, as Robert Gehl points out in Weaving the Dark Web, for each of these illegitimate uses, there are other, legitimate ones: the New York Times's anonymous whistleblowing system, for example, and the use of encryption by political dissidents. Defining the Dark Web straightforwardly as websites that can be accessed only with special routing software, and noting the frequent use of “legitimate” and its variations by users, journalists, and law enforcement to describe Dark Web practices (judging them “legit” or “sh!t”), Gehl uses the concept of legitimacy as a window into the Dark Web. He does so by examining the history of three Dark Web systems: Freenet, Tor, and I2P. Gehl presents three distinct meanings of legitimate: legitimate force, or the state's claim to a monopoly on violence; organizational propriety; and authenticity. He explores how Freenet, Tor, and I2P grappled with these different meanings, and then discusses each form of legitimacy in detail by examining Dark Web markets, search engines, and social networking sites. Finally, taking a broader view of the Dark Web, Gehl argues for the value of anonymous political speech in a time of ubiquitous surveillance. If we shut down the Dark Web, he argues, we lose a valuable channel for dissent.

http://books.google.com/books?id=QzdmDwAAQBAJ&pg=PR4&dq=isbn:+978-0-262-03826-3&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

A digital ethnography of the "dark web"

Social Engineering: How Crowdmasters, Phreaks, Hackers, and Trolls Created a New Form of Manipulativ e Communication

Manipulative communication—from early twentieth-century propaganda to today’s online con artistry—examined through the lens of social engineering. The United States is awash in manipulated information about everything from election results to the effectiveness of medical treatments. Corporate social media is an especially good channel for manipulative communication, with Facebook a particularly willing vehicle for it. In Social Engineering, Robert Gehl and Sean Lawson show that online misinformation has its roots in earlier techniques: mass social engineering of the early twentieth century and interpersonal hacker social engineering of the 1970s, converging today into what they call “masspersonal social engineering.” As Gehl and Lawson trace contemporary manipulative communication back to earlier forms of social engineering, possibilities for amelioration become clearer. The authors show how specific manipulative communication practices are a mixture of information gathering, deception, and truth-indifferent statements, all with the instrumental goal of getting people to take actions the social engineer wants them to. Yet the term “fake news,” they claim, reduces everything to a true/false binary that fails to encompass the complexity of manipulative communication or to map onto many of its practices. They pay special attention to concepts and terms used by hacker social engineers, including the hacker concept of “bullshitting,” which the authors describe as a truth-indifferent mix of deception, accuracy, and sociability. They conclude with recommendations for how society can undermine masspersonal social engineering and move toward healthier democratic deliberation.

http://books.google.com/books?id=DLxNEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:9780262543453&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Reverse Engineering Social Media: Software, Culture, and Political Economy in New Media Capitalism

Robert Gehl's timely critique, Reverse Engineering Social Media, rigorously analyzes the ideas of social media and software engineers, using these ideas to find contradictions and fissures beneath the surfaces of glossy sites such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Gehl adeptly uses a mix of software studies, science and technology studies, and political economy to reveal the histories and contexts of these social media sites. Looking backward at divisions of labor and the process of user labor, he provides case studies that illustrate how binary "Like" consumer choices hide surveillance systems that rely on users to build content for site owners who make money selling user data, and that promote a culture of anxiety and immediacy over depth. Reverse Engineering Social Media also presents ways out of this paradox, illustrating how activists, academics, and users change social media for the better by building alternatives to the dominant social media sites.

Temple University Press

http://books.google.com/books?id=UwjxAwAAQBAJ&dq=isbn:9781439910351&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

An exploration of the modalities, affective intensities, and disturbing qualities of online pornography. Digital production tools and online networks have dramatically increased the general visibility, accessibility, and diversity of pornography. Porn can be accessed for free, anonymously, and in a seemingly endless range of niches, styles, and formats. In Carnal Resonance, Susanna Paasonen moves beyond the usual debates over the legal, political, and moral aspects of pornography to address online porn in a media historical framework, investigating its modalities, its affect, and its visceral and disturbing qualities. Countering theorizations of pornography as emotionless, affectless, detached, and cold, Paasonen addresses experiences of porn largely through the notion of affect as gut reactions, intensities of experience, bodily sensations, resonances, and ambiguous feelings. She links these investigations to considerations of methodology (ways of theorizing and analyzing online porn and affect), questions of materiality (bodies, technologies, and inscriptions), and the evolution of online pornography. Paasonen dicusses the development of online porn, focusing on the figure of the porn consumer, and considers user-generated content and amateur porn. She maps out the modality of online porn as hyperbolic, excessive, stylized, and repetitive, arguing that literal readings of the genre misunderstand its dynamics and appeal. And she analyzes viral videos and extreme and shock pornogaphy, arguing for the centrality of disgust and shame in the affective dynamics of porn. Paasonen's analysis makes clear the crucial role of media technologies—digital production tools and networked communications in particular—in the forms that porn takes, the resonances it stirs, and the experiences it makes possible.

http://books.google.com/books?id=2wqbC17l5iUC&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:9780262016315&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Web Social Science: Concepts, Data and Tools for Social Scientists in the Digital Age

Although written simply enough to be accessible to undergraduates, accomplished scholars are likely to appreciate it too. Reading it taught me quite a lot about a subject I thought I knew rather well. ' - Paul Vogt, Emeritus Professor, Illinois State University 'This book brings the art and science of building and applying innovative online research tools to students and faculty across the social sciences.' - Professor William H. Dutton, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford A comprehensive guide to the theory and practice of web Social Science. This book demonstrates how the web is being used to collect social research data, such as online surveys and interviews, as well as digital trace data from social media environments, such as Facebook and Twitter. It also illuminates how the advent of the web has led to traditional social science concepts and approaches being combined with those from other scientific disciplines, leading to new insights into social, political and economic behaviour. Situating social sciences in the digital age, this book aids: understanding of the fundamental changes to society, politics and the economy that have resulted from the advent of the web choice of appropriate data, tools and research methods for conducting research using web data learning how web data are providing new insights into long-standing social science research questions appreciation of how social science can facilitate an understanding of life in the digital age It is ideal for students and researchers across the social sciences, as well as those from information science, computer science and engineering who want to learn about how social scientists are thinking about and researching the web.

SAGE Publications Limited

http://books.google.com/books?id=4Ck8lgEACAAJ&dq=isbn:978-1-84920-481-1&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

‘Digital Sociology is definitive for anyone interested in social research with digital data. Lucidly and generatively, it analyses how digital data increasingly render knowledge a core contemporary social problem. Drawing on great experience with digital methods, and excellent sociological and philosophical scholarship, Marres generously and incisively explores the predicaments of knowing the digital and digital knowing. The remarkable re-configurative potential of the book ranges from practical and technical considerations through to ethical and ontological questions associated with social life.’ Adrian MacKenzie, Lancaster University ‘Arguing that the advent of digital sociology affords an opportunity for wider critical reflection on social research, Noortje Marres is the perfect guide to developments and debates in computationally mediated methods and sociality. The scope and acuity of her review illustrate cogently how social worlds and their analyses are perpetually conjoined.’ Lucy Suchman, President of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) ‘Digital Sociology presents an intelligent and empathetic account of social enquiry with and against digital infrastructures. Among its many strengths is the licence it offers to problematize and conjure up objects for research in interaction with actors – digital and otherwise – who are busy redefining knowledge, sociality and politics.’ Brit Ross Winthereik, IT University of Copenhagen This provocative new introduction to the field of digital sociology offers a critical overview of interdisciplinary debates about new ways of knowing society that are emerging today at the interface of computing, media, social research and social life. Digital Sociology introduces key concepts, methods and understandings that currently inform the development of specifically digital forms of social enquiry. Marres assesses the relevance and usefulness of digital methods, data and techniques for the study of sociological phenomena and evaluates the major claim that computation makes possible a new ‘science of society’. As Marres argues, the digital does much more than inspire innovation in social research: it forces us to engage anew with fundamental sociological questions. We must learn to appreciate that the digital has the capacity to throw into crisis existing knowledge frameworks and is likely to reconfigure wider relations. This timely engagement with a key transformation of our age will be indispensable reading for undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in digital sociology, digital media, computing and society. Noortje Marres is Associate Professor in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methods at the University of Warwick.

http://books.google.com/books?id=pvwfvgAACAAJ&dq=isbn:978-0-7456-8478-9&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Sharing is central to how we live today: it is what we do online; it is a model of economic behaviour; and it is also a type of therapeutic talk. Sharing embodies positive values such as empathy, communication, fairness, openness and equality. The Age of Sharing shows how and when sharing became caring, and explains how its meanings have changed in the digital age. But the word 'sharing' also camouflages commercial or even exploitative relations. Websites say they share data with advertisers, although in reality they sell it, while parts of the sharing economy look a great deal like rental services. Ultimately, it is argued, practices described as sharing and critiques of those practices have common roots. Consequently, the metaphor of sharing now constructs significant swathes of our social practices and provides the grounds for critiquing them; it is a mode of participation in the capitalist order as well as a way of resisting it. Drawing on nineteenth-century literature, Alcoholics Anonymous, the American counterculture, reality TV, hackers, Airbnb, Facebook and more, The Age of Sharing offers a rich account of a complex contemporary keyword. It will appeal to students and scholars of the internet, digital culture and linguistics.

Language Arts & Disciplines

http://books.google.com/books?id=F6u4DQAAQBAJ&dq=isbn:1509512292&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Instagram is at the heart of global digital culture, having made selfies, filters and square frames an inescapable part of everyday life since it was launched in 2010. In the first book-length examination of Instagram, Tama Leaver, Tim Highfield and Crystal Abidin trace how this quintessential mobile photography app has developed as a platform and a culture. They consider aspects such as the new visual social media aesthetics, the rise of Influencers and new visual economies, and the complex politics of the platform as well as examining how Instagram's users change their use of the platform over time and respond to evolving features. The book highlights the different ways Instagram is used by subcultural groups around the world, and how museums, restaurants and public spaces are striving to be 'Insta-worthy'. Far from just capturing milestones and moments, the authors argue that Instagram has altered the ways people communicate and share, while also creating new approaches to marketing, advertising, politics and the design of spaces and venues. Rich with grounded examples from across the world, from birth pictures to selfies at funerals, Instagram is essential reading for students and scholars of media and communication.

http://books.google.com/books?id=p2TrxQEACAAJ&dq=isbn:9781509534388&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Cutting-edge student exploration of what it means to live in a digital society. Introduces key concepts and research essential for digital media, social media and media/data and society modules.

Language Arts & Disciplines

http://books.google.com/books?id=eEBOEAAAQBAJ&dq=isbn:9781529785098&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

The ability to gather data that can be crunched by machines is valuable for studying society. The new methods needed to work it require new skills and new ways of thinking about best research practices. This book reflects on the role and usefulness of big data, challenging overly optimistic expectations about what it can reveal, introducing practices and methods for its analysis and visualization, and raising important political and ethical questions regarding its collection, handling, and presentation.

http://books.google.com/books?id=AmgxvgAACAAJ&dq=isbn:9789462981362&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Digital Media and Society: Transforming Economics, Politics and Social Practices

Referencing key contemporary debates on issues such as surveillance, identity, the global financial crisis, the digital divide and Internet politics, this book is a critical intervention in discussions on the impact of the proliferation of digital media technologies on politics, the economy and social practices. Divided into three parts, the first highlights the way in which digital media challenges normative conceptions of the public sphere and discusses this in relation to the creation of new forms of knowledge through the digitization of scholarly resources and the impact of digital media on traditional conceptions of identity. The second part focuses on the digital economy, emphasizing the opportunities it affords through the creative industries, as well as the threat posed by the computerization of the financial industry, and the third part focuses on uses of digital media through a number of case studies relating to online reading, the new social movements, surveillance and the developing world.

http://books.google.com/books?id=TVPGoAEACAAJ&dq=isbn:9781137393623&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

andrew.white1970@gmail.com

Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves

This book is open access under a CC BY license. Selfies, blogs and lifelogging devices help us understand ourselves, building on long histories of written, visual and quantitative modes of self-representations. This book uses examples to explore the balance between using technology to see ourselves and allowing our machines to tell us who we are.

http://books.google.com/books?id=YoaRCwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:9781137476661&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

jill.walker.rettberg@uib.no

Provides an accessible study of blogging and places it in a historical, theoretical and contemporary context. Jill Walker Rettberg discusses the ways blogs are integrated into the mainstream social media ecology, where comments and links from Twitter and Facebook may be more important than the network between blogs that was significant five years ago, and questions the shift towards increased commercialization and corporate control of blogs. The book also analyses how smartphones with cameras and social media have led a shift towards more visual emphasis in blogs. The book is packed with examples that show how blogging and related genres are changing media and communication.--

Language Arts & Disciplines

http://books.google.com/books?id=KjqHN_Ur_y4C&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:9780745663654&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

jill.walker.rettberg@uib.no

We live in a world in which Google's search algorithms determine how we access information, Facebook's News Feed algorithms shape how we socialize, and Netflix collaborative filtering algorithms choose the media products we consume. As such, we live algorithmic lives. Life, however, is not blindly controlled or determined by algorithms. Nor are we simply victims of an ever-expanding artificial intelligence. Rather than looking at how technologies shape or are shaped by political institutions, this book is concerned with the ways in which informational infrastructure may be considered political in its capacity to shape social and cultural life. It looks specifically at the conditions of algorithmic life -- how algorithms work, both materially and discursively, to create the conditions for sociality and connectivity. The book argues that the most important aspect of algorithms is not what they are in terms of their specific technical details but rather how they become part of social practices and how different people enlist them as powerful brokers of information, communication and society. If we truly want to engage with the promises of automation and predictive analytics entailed by the promises of "big data", we also need to understand the contours of algorithmic life that condition such practices. Setting out to explore both the specific uses of algorithms and the cultural forms they generate, this book offers a novel understanding of the power and politics of algorithmic life as grounded in case studies that explore the material-discursive dimensions of software.

Oxford University Press

Language Arts & Disciplines

http://books.google.com/books?id=2GdaDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:9780190493028&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition

How big data and machine learning encode discrimination and create agitated clusters of comforting rage. In Discriminating Data, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun reveals how polarization is a goal—not an error—within big data and machine learning. These methods, she argues, encode segregation, eugenics, and identity politics through their default assumptions and conditions. Correlation, which grounds big data’s predictive potential, stems from twentieth-century eugenic attempts to “breed” a better future. Recommender systems foster angry clusters of sameness through homophily. Users are “trained” to become authentically predictable via a politics and technology of recognition. Machine learning and data analytics thus seek to disrupt the future by making disruption impossible. Chun, who has a background in systems design engineering as well as media studies and cultural theory, explains that although machine learning algorithms may not officially include race as a category, they embed whiteness as a default. Facial recognition technology, for example, relies on the faces of Hollywood celebrities and university undergraduates—groups not famous for their diversity. Homophily emerged as a concept to describe white U.S. resident attitudes to living in biracial yet segregated public housing. Predictive policing technology deploys models trained on studies of predominantly underserved neighborhoods. Trained on selected and often discriminatory or dirty data, these algorithms are only validated if they mirror this data. How can we release ourselves from the vice-like grip of discriminatory data? Chun calls for alternative algorithms, defaults, and interdisciplinary coalitions in order to desegregate networks and foster a more democratic big data.

http://books.google.com/books?id=Oy9GEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:9780262046220&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Louise Amoore examines how machine learning algorithms are transforming the ethics and politics of contemporary society, proposing what she calls cloud ethics as a way to hold algorithms accountable by engaging with the social and technical conditions under which they emerge and operate.

http://books.google.com/books?id=1Ta7xwEACAAJ&dq=isbn:9781478008316&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Anthropology has two main tasks: to understand what it is to be human and to examine how humanity is manifested differently in the diversity of culture. These tasks have gained new impetus from the extraordinary rise of the digital. This book brings together several key anthropologists working with digital culture to demonstrate just how productive an anthropological approach to the digital has already become. Through a range of case studies from Facebook to Second Life to Google Earth, Digital Anthropology explores how human and digital can be defined in relation to one another, from avatars and disability; cultural differences in how we use social networking sites or practise religion; the practical consequences of the digital for politics, museums, design, space and development to new online world and gaming communities. The book also explores the moral universe of the digital, from new anxieties to open-source ideals. Digital Anthropology reveals how only the intense scrutiny of ethnography can overturn assumptions about the impact of digital culture and reveal its profound consequences for everyday life. Combining the clarity of a textbook with an engaging style which conveys a passion for these new frontiers of enquiry, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of anthropology, media studies, communication studies, cultural studies and sociology.

Bloomsbury Academic

http://books.google.com/books?id=198MywAACAAJ&dq=isbn:978-0-85785-290-8&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Anthropology and Sociology in digital spaces

This third volume in Christian Fuchs's Media, Communication and Society book series illuminates what it means to live in an age of digital capitalism, analysing its various aspects, and engaging with a variety of critical thinkers whose theories and approaches enable a critical understanding of digital capitalism for media and communication. Each chapter focuses on a particular dimension of digital capitalism or a critical theorist whose work helps us to illuminate how digital capitalism works. Subjects covered include: digital positivism, administrative big data analytics, the role and relations of patriarchy, slavery, and racism in the context of digital labour; digital alienation, the role of social media in the capitalist crisis, the relationship of imperialism and digital labour, alternatives such as trade unions and class struggles in the digital age, platform co-operatives, digital commons, and public service Internet platforms. It also considers specific examples, including the digital labour of Foxconn and Pegatron workers, software engineers at Google and online freelancers, and considers the political economy of targeted-advertising based Internet platforms such as Facebook, Google, YouTube and Instagram. Digital Capitalism illuminates how digital capitalist society's economy, politics, and culture work and interact, making it essential reading for both students and researchers in media, culture and communication studies and related disciplines.

http://books.google.com/books?id=uxt2zgEACAAJ&dq=isbn:9781032119205&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

To analyse social and behavioural phenomena in our digitalized world, it is necessary to understand the main research opportunities and challenges specific to online and digital data. This book presents an overview of the many techniques that are part of the fundamental toolbox of the digital social scientist. Placing online methods within the wider tradition of social research, Giuseppe Veltri discusses the principles and frameworks that underlie each technique of digital research. This practical guide covers methodological issues such as dealing with different types of digital data, construct validity, representativeness and big data sampling. It looks at different forms of unobtrusive data collection methods (such as web scraping and social media mining) as well as obtrusive methods (including qualitative methods, web surveys and experiments). Special extended attention is given to computational approaches to statistical analysis, text mining and network analysis. Digital Social Research will be a welcome resource for students and researchers across the social sciences and humanities carrying out digital research (or interested in the future of social research).

http://books.google.com/books?id=ZD25DwAAQBAJ&dq=isbn:9781509529339&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

This is the first book to connect digital media technologies in digital sociology to traditional sociological and offers a much needed overview of it. It includes problems of the digital age in relation to inequality and identity, making it suitable for use for a global audience on a variety of courses.

http://books.google.com/books?id=7zBSDQAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:9781447329015&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Society and the Internet: How Networks of Information and Communication are Changing Our Lives

How is society being reshaped by the continued diffusion and increasing centrality of the Internet in everyday life and work? Society and the Internet provides key readings for students, scholars, and those interested in understanding the interactions of the Internet and society. This multidisciplinary collection of theoretically and empirically anchored chapters addresses the big questions about one of the most significant technological transformations of this century, through a diversity of data, methods, theories, and approaches. Drawing from a range of disciplinary perspectives, Internet research can address core questions about equality, voice, knowledge, participation, and power. By learning from the past and continuing to look toward the future, it can provide a better understanding of what the ever-changing configurations of technology and society mean, both for the everyday life of individuals and for the continued development of society at large. This second edition presents new and original contributions examining the escalating concerns around social media, disinformation, big data, and privacy. Following a foreword by Manual Castells, the editors introduce some of the key issues in Internet Studies. The chapters then offer the latest research in five focused sections: The Internet in Everyday Life; Digital Rights and Human Rights; Networked Ideas, Politics, and Governance; Networked Businesses, Industries, and Economics; and Technological and Regulatory Histories and Futures. This book will be a valuable resource not only for students and researchers, but for anyone seeking a critical examination of the economic, social, and political factors shaping the Internet and its impact on society.

Oxford University Press, USA

http://books.google.com/books?id=ULbwvwEACAAJ&dq=isbn:9780198843504&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

How culture evolves through algorithms rather than knowledge inherited from ancestors. From our hunter-gatherer days, we humans evolved to be excellent throwers, chewers, and long-distance runners. We are highly social, crave Paleolithic snacks, and display some gendered difference resulting from mate selection. But we now find ourselves binge-viewing, texting while driving, and playing Minecraft. Only the collective acceleration of cultural and technological evolution explains this development. The evolutionary psychology of individuals—the drive for “food and sex”—explains some of our current habits, but our evolutionary success, Alex Bentley and Mike O'Brien explain, lies in our ability to learn cultural know-how and to teach it to the next generation. Today, we are following social media bots as much as we are learning from our ancestors. We are radically changing the way culture evolves. Bentley and O'Brien describe how the transmission of culture has become vast and instantaneous across an Internet of people and devices, after millennia of local ancestral knowledge that evolved slowly. Long-evolved cultural knowledge is aggressively discounted by online algorithms, which prioritize popularity and recency. If children are learning more from Minecraft than from tradition, this is a profound shift in cultural evolution. Bentley and O'Brien examine the broad and shallow model of cultural evolution seen today in the science of networks, prediction markets, and the explosion of digital information. They suggest that in the future, artificial intelligence could be put to work to solve the problem of information overload, learning to integrate concepts over the vast idea space of digitally stored information.

http://books.google.com/books?id=mmYyDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:9780262036955&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Anthropology and Algorithms

Using the tools of rhetorical criticism, the authors detail how memetic persuasion operates, with a particular focus on the 2016 election of Donald J. Trump. Make America Meme Again reveals the rhetorical principles used to design Alt-right memes, outlining the myriad ways memes lure mainstream audiences to a number of extremist claims.

Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers

http://books.google.com/books?id=0ut6zQEACAAJ&dq=isbn:9781433182051&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

How sharing the mundane details of daily life did not start with Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube but with pocket diaries, photo albums, and baby books. Social critiques argue that social media have made us narcissistic, that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube are all vehicles for me-promotion. In The Qualified Self, Lee Humphreys offers a different view. She shows that sharing the mundane details of our lives—what we ate for lunch, where we went on vacation, who dropped in for a visit—didn't begin with mobile devices and social media. People have used media to catalog and share their lives for several centuries. Pocket diaries, photo albums, and baby books are the predigital precursors of today's digital and mobile platforms for posting text and images. The ability to take selfies has not turned us into needy narcissists; it's part of a longer story about how people account for everyday life. Humphreys refers to diaries in which eighteenth-century daily life is documented with the brevity and precision of a tweet, and cites a nineteenth-century travel diary in which a young woman complains that her breakfast didn't agree with her. Diaries, Humphreys explains, were often written to be shared with family and friends. Pocket diaries were as mobile as smartphones, allowing the diarist to record life in real time. Humphreys calls this chronicling, in both digital and nondigital forms, media accounting. The sense of self that emerges from media accounting is not the purely statistics-driven “quantified self,” but the more well-rounded qualified self. We come to understand ourselves in a new way through the representations of ourselves that we create to be consumed.

http://books.google.com/books?id=3-RVDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:9780262037853&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Citizens at the Gates: Twitter, Networked Publics, and the Transformation of American Journalism

Drawing insights from nearly a decade of mixed-method research, Stephen R. Barnard analyzes Twitter’s role in the transformation of American journalism. As the work of media professionals grows increasingly hybrid, Twitter has become an essential space where information is shared, reporting methods tested, and power contested. In addition to spelling opportunity for citizen media activism, the normalization of digital communication adds new channels of influence for traditional thought leaders, posing notable challenges for the future of journalism and democracy. In his analyses of Twitter practices around newsworthy events—including the Boston Marathon bombing, protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and the election of Donald Trump—Barnard brings together conceptual and theoretical lenses from multiple academic disciplines, bridging sociology, journalism, communication, media studies, science and technology studies, and political science.

http://books.google.com/books?id=PNESwAEACAAJ&dq=isbn:9783030080174&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Designing for Democracy: How to Build Community in Digital Environments

How should we "fix" digital technologies to support democracy instead of undermining it? In Designing for Democracy, Jennifer Forestal argues that accurately evaluating the democratic potential of digital spaces means studying how the built environment--a primary component of our "modern public square"--structures our activity, shapes our attitudes, and supports the kinds of relationships and behaviors democracy requires. Drawing from a wide range ofdisciplines, she argues that "democratic spaces" must be designed with three environmental characteristics that, taken together, afford users the ability to engage in fundamental civic practices. In connecting the built environment, digital technologies, and democratic theory, Designing for Democracy providesblueprints for democracy in a digital age.

Oxford Studies Digital Politic

Language Arts & Disciplines

http://books.google.com/books?id=P8qDzgEACAAJ&dq=isbn:9780197568767&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Adolescence, Girlhood, and Media Migration: US Teens' Use of Social Media to Negotiate Offline Struggles

This book considers teens' social media use as a lens through which to more clearly see American adolescence, girlhood, and marginality in the twenty-first century. It investigates how young women use social media to address, mediate, and negotiate the struggles they face in their daily lives as minors, females, and racial minorities.

Language Arts & Disciplines

http://books.google.com/books?id=JywnzQEACAAJ&dq=isbn:9781498553940&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets!: Transmedia Organizing and the Immigrant Rights Movement

An exploration of social movement media practices in an increasingly complex media ecology, through richly detailed cases of immigrant rights activism. For decades, social movements have vied for attention from the mainstream mass media—newspapers, radio, and television. Today, many argue that social media power social movements, from the Egyptian revolution to Occupy Wall Street. Yet, as Sasha Costanza-Chock reports, community organizers know that social media enhance, rather than replace, face-to-face organizing. The revolution will be tweeted, but tweets alone do not the revolution make. In Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets! Costanza-Chock traces a much broader social movement media ecology. Through a richly detailed account of daily media practices in the immigrant rights movement, the book argues that there is a new paradigm of social movement media making: transmedia organizing. Despite the current spotlight on digital media, Costanza-Chock finds, social movement media practices tend to be cross-platform, participatory, and linked to action. Immigrant rights organizers leverage social media creatively, even as they create media ranging from posters and street theater to Spanish-language radio, print, and television. Drawing on extensive interviews, workshops, and media organizing projects, Costanza-Chock presents case studies of transmedia organizing in the immigrant rights movement over the last decade. Chapters focus on the historic mass protests against the anti-immigrant Sensenbrenner Bill; coverage of police brutality against peaceful activists; efforts to widen access to digital media tools and skills for low-wage immigrant workers; paths to participation in DREAM activism; and the implications of professionalism for transmedia organizing. These cases show us how savvy transmedia organizers work to strengthen movement identity, win political and economic victories, and transform public consciousness forever.

http://books.google.com/books?id=PTgbBQAAQBAJ&dq=isbn:9780262322812&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Janet Abbate recounts the key players and technologies that allowed the Internet to develop; but her main focus is always on the social and cultural factors that influenced the Internet's design and use. Since the late 1960s the Internet has grown from a single experimental network serving a dozen sites in the United States to a network of networks linking millions of computers worldwide. In Inventing the Internet, Janet Abbate recounts the key players and technologies that allowed the Internet to develop; but her main focus is always on the social and cultural factors that influenced the Internets design and use. The story she unfolds is an often twisting tale of collaboration and conflict among a remarkable variety of players, including government and military agencies, computer scientists in academia and industry, graduate students, telecommunications companies, standards organizations, and network users. The story starts with the early networking breakthroughs formulated in Cold War think tanks and realized in the Defense Department's creation of the ARPANET. It ends with the emergence of the Internet and its rapid and seemingly chaotic growth. Abbate looks at how academic and military influences and attitudes shaped both networks; how the usual lines between producer and user of a technology were crossed with interesting and unique results; and how later users invented their own very successful applications, such as electronic mail and the World Wide Web. She concludes that such applications continue the trend of decentralized, user-driven development that has characterized the Internet's entire history and that the key to the Internet's success has been a commitment to flexibility and diversity, both in technical design and in organizational culture.

http://books.google.com/books?id=E2BdY6WQo4AC&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:9780262511155&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing

How Britain lost its early dominance in computing by systematically discriminating against its most qualified workers: women. In 1944, Britain led the world in electronic computing. By 1974, the British computer industry was all but extinct. What happened in the intervening thirty years holds lessons for all postindustrial superpowers. As Britain struggled to use technology to retain its global power, the nation's inability to manage its technical labor force hobbled its transition into the information age. In Programmed Inequality, Mar Hicks explores the story of labor feminization and gendered technocracy that undercut British efforts to computerize. That failure sprang from the government's systematic neglect of its largest trained technical workforce simply because they were women. Women were a hidden engine of growth in high technology from World War II to the 1960s. As computing experienced a gender flip, becoming male-identified in the 1960s and 1970s, labor problems grew into structural ones and gender discrimination caused the nation's largest computer user—the civil service and sprawling public sector—to make decisions that were disastrous for the British computer industry and the nation as a whole. Drawing on recently opened government files, personal interviews, and the archives of major British computer companies, Programmed Inequality takes aim at the fiction of technological meritocracy. Hicks explains why, even today, possessing technical skill is not enough to ensure that women will rise to the top in science and technology fields. Programmed Inequality shows how the disappearance of women from the field had grave macroeconomic consequences for Britain, and why the United States risks repeating those errors in the twenty-first century.

http://books.google.com/books?id=ZA38DwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:9780262535182&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Is the Internet erasing national borders? Will the future of the Net be set by Internet engineers, rogue programmers, the United Nations, or powerful countries? Who's really in control of what's happening on the Net? In this provocative new book, Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu tell the fascinating story of the Internet's challenge to governmental rule in the 1990s, and the ensuing battles with governments around the world. It's a book about the fate of one idea--that the Internet might liberate us forever from government, borders, and even our physical selves. We learn of Google's struggles with the French government and Yahoo's capitulation to the Chinese regime; of how the European Union sets privacy standards on the Net for the entire world; and of eBay's struggles with fraud and how it slowly learned to trust the FBI. In a decade of events the original vision is uprooted, as governments time and time again assert their power to direct the future of the Internet. The destiny of the Internet over the next decades, argue Goldsmith and Wu, will reflect the interests of powerful nations and the conflicts within and between them. While acknowledging the many attractions of the earliest visions of the Internet, the authors describe the new order, and speaking to both its surprising virtues and unavoidable vices. Far from destroying the Internet, the experience of the last decade has lead to a quiet rediscovery of some of the oldest functions and justifications for territorial government. While territorial governments have unavoidable problems, it has proven hard to replace what legitimacy governments have, and harder yet to replace the system of rule of law that controls the unchecked evils of anarchy. While the Net will change some of the ways that territorial states govern, it will not diminish the oldest and most fundamental roles of government and challenges of governance. Well written and filled with fascinating examples, including colorful portraits of many key players in Internet history, this is a work that is bound to stir heated debate in the cyberspace community.

Oxford University Press

http://books.google.com/books?id=GsylX8a_npcC&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:9780198034803&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media

An examination of young people's everyday new media practices—including video-game playing, text-messaging, digital media production, and social media use. Conventional wisdom about young people's use of digital technology often equates generational identity with technology identity: today's teens seem constantly plugged in to video games, social networking sites, and text messaging. Yet there is little actual research that investigates the intricate dynamics of youths' social and recreational use of digital media. Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out fills this gap, reporting on an ambitious three-year ethnographic investigation into how young people are living and learning with new media in varied settings—at home, in after-school programs, and in online spaces. Integrating twenty-three case studies—which include Harry Potter podcasting, video-game playing, music sharing, and online romantic breakups—in a unique collaborative authorship style, Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out is distinctive for its combination of in-depth description of specific group dynamics with conceptual analysis.

Technology & Engineering

http://books.google.com/books?id=CRe01HDPY7gC&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:9780262258265&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

An exploration of how and why social media content is tagged as “not safe for work” and an argument against conflating sexual content with risk. The hashtag #NSFW (not safe for work) acts as both a warning and an invitation. NSFW tells users, “We dare you to click on this link! And by the way, don't do it until after work!” Unlike the specificity of movie and television advisories (“suggestive dialogue,” “sexual content”), NSFW signals, nonspecifically, sexually explicit content that ranges from nude selfies to pornography. NSFW looks at how and why social media content is tagged “not safe” and shows how this serves to conflate sexual content and risk. The authors argue that the notion of “unsafety” extends beyond the risk of losing one's job or being embarrassed at work to an unspecified sense of risk attached to sexually explicit media content and sexual communication in general. The authors examine NSFW practices of tagging and flagging on a range of social media platforms; online pornography and its dependence on technology; user-generated NSFW content—in particular, the dick pic and associated issues of consent, desire, agency, and social power; the deployment of risqué humor in the workplace; and sexist and misogynist online harassment that functions as an enforcer of inequalities. They argue against the categorical effacement of sexual content by means of an all-purpose hashtag and urge us to shift considerations of safety from pictorial properties to issues of context and consent.

http://books.google.com/books?id=3CWzDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:026204305X&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

The Digital Street: Adolescence, Technology, and Community in the Inner City

Introduction to the digital street -- Girls and boys -- Code switching -- Pastor -- Going to jail because of the internet -- Conclusion -- Appendix in digital urban ethnography -- References -- Index

Oxford University Press, USA

http://books.google.com/books?id=aEfKtwEACAAJ&dq=isbn:9780199381272&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

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

Why the troll problem is actually a culture problem: how online trolling fits comfortably within today's media landscape.

http://books.google.com/books?id=pjYhBwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:9780262028943&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Here is the ultimate book on the worldwide movement of hackers, pranksters, and activists that operates under the non-name Anonymous, by the writer the Huffington Post says “knows all of Anonymous’ deepest, darkest secrets.” Half a dozen years ago, anthropologist Gabriella Coleman set out to study the rise of this global phenomenon just as some of its members were turning to political protest and dangerous disruption (before Anonymous shot to fame as a key player in the battles over WikiLeaks, the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street). She ended up becoming so closely connected to Anonymous that the tricky story of her inside–outside status as Anon confidante, interpreter, and erstwhile mouthpiece forms one of the themes of this witty and entirely engrossing book. The narrative brims with details unearthed from within a notoriously mysterious subculture, whose semi-legendary tricksters—such as Topiary, tflow, Anachaos, and Sabu—emerge as complex, diverse, politically and culturally sophisticated people. Propelled by years of chats and encounters with a multitude of hackers, including imprisoned activist Jeremy Hammond and the double agent who helped put him away, Hector Monsegur, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy is filled with insights into the meaning of digital activism and little understood facets of culture in the Internet age, including the history of “trolling,” the ethics and metaphysics of hacking, and the origins and manifold meanings of “the lulz.”

http://books.google.com/books?id=khVPEAAAQBAJ&dq=isbn:9781781689837&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

This book explores the weird and mean and in-between that characterize everyday expression online, from absurdist photoshops to antagonistic Twitter hashtags to deceptive identity play. Whitney Phillips and Ryan M. Milner focus especially on the ambivalence of this expression: the fact that it is too unwieldy, too variable across cases, to be essentialized as old or new, vernacular or institutional, generative or destructive. Online expression is, instead, all of the above. This ambivalence, the authors argue, hinges on available digital tools. That said, there is nothing unexpected or surprising about even the strangest online behavior. Ours is a brave new world, and there is nothing new under the sun – a point necessary to understanding not just that online spaces are rife with oddity, mischief, and antagonism, but why these behaviors matter. The Ambivalent Internet is essential reading for students and scholars of digital media and related fields across the humanities, as well as anyone interested in mediated culture and expression.

http://books.google.com/books?id=UF1YvgAACAAJ&dq=isbn:9781509501274&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Infoglut: How Too Much Information is Changing the Way We Think and Know

In this cutting edge book,cultural theorist Mark Andrejevic approaches the question of how the era of "big data" -- characterized by information overload and data glut --influences the way we think about and use information. In particular, Andrejevic traces connections between the different strategies various groupsare usingto navigate a mediated information landscape that has transformed quite rapidly from one characterized by perceived scarcity (and barriers to access) to one of data glut.These strategies--likeneuromarketing, data mining,...

http://books.google.com/books?id=G9NrLwEACAAJ&dq=isbn:9780415659086&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code, and the Play of Everyday Practice

The legal and technical rules governing flows of information are out of balance, argues Julie E. Cohen in this original analysis of information law and policy. Flows of cultural and technical information are overly restricted, while flows of personal information often are not restricted at all. The author investigates the institutional forces shaping the emerging information society and the contradictions between those forces and the ways that people use information and information technologies in their everyday lives. She then proposes legal principles to ensure that people have ample room for cultural and material participation as well as greater control over the boundary conditions that govern flows of information to, from, and about them.

Yale University Press

http://books.google.com/books?id=_FnQDjthDpsC&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:9780300125436&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Mobile media – from mobile phones to smartphones to netbooks – are transforming our daily lives. We communicate, we locate, we network, we play, and much more using our mobile devices. In Mobile Interface Theory, Jason Farman demonstrates how the worldwide adoption of mobile technologies is causing a reexamination of the core ideas about what it means to live our everyday lives. He argues that mobile media's pervasive computing model, which allows users to connect and interact with the internet while moving across a wide variety of locations, has produced a new sense of self among users – a new embodied identity that stems from virtual space and material space regularly enhancing, cooperating or disrupting each other. Exploring a range of mobile media practices – including mobile maps and GPS technologies, location-aware social networks, urban and alternate reality games that use mobile devices, performance art, and storytelling projects – Farman illustrates how mobile technologies are changing the ways we produce lived, embodied spaces.

http://books.google.com/books?id=HmmSRAAACAAJ&dq=isbn:9780415878913&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Taking “Gangnam Style” seriously: what Internet memes can tell us about digital culture. In December 2012, the exuberant video “Gangnam Style” became the first YouTube clip to be viewed more than one billion times. Thousands of its viewers responded by creating and posting their own variations of the video—“Mitt Romney Style,” “NASA Johnson Style,” “Egyptian Style,” and many others. “Gangnam Style” (and its attendant parodies, imitations, and derivations) is one of the most famous examples of an Internet meme: a piece of digital content that spreads quickly around the web in various iterations and becomes a shared cultural experience. In this book, Limor Shifman investigates Internet memes and what they tell us about digital culture. Shifman discusses a series of well-known Internet memes—including “Leave Britney Alone,” the pepper-spraying cop, LOLCats, Scumbag Steve, and Occupy Wall Street's “We Are the 99 Percent.” She offers a novel definition of Internet memes: digital content units with common characteristics, created with awareness of each other, and circulated, imitated, and transformed via the Internet by many users. She differentiates memes from virals; analyzes what makes memes and virals successful; describes popular meme genres; discusses memes as new modes of political participation in democratic and nondemocratic regimes; and examines memes as agents of globalization. Memes, Shifman argues, encapsulate some of the most fundamental aspects of the Internet in general and of the participatory Web 2.0 culture in particular. Internet memes may be entertaining, but in this book Limor Shifman makes a compelling argument for taking them seriously.

http://books.google.com/books?id=cZI9AQAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:9780262525435&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory Media

How memetic media—aggregate texts that are collectively created, circulated, and transformed—become a part of public conversations that shape broader cultural debates. Internet memes—digital snippets that can make a joke, make a point, or make a connection—are now a lingua franca of online life. They are collectively created, circulated, and transformed by countless users across vast networks. Most of us have seen the cat playing the piano, Kanye interrupting, Kanye interrupting the cat playing the piano. In The World Made Meme, Ryan Milner argues that memes, and the memetic process, are shaping public conversation. It's hard to imagine a major pop cultural or political moment that doesn't generate a constellation of memetic texts. Memetic media, Milner writes, offer participation by reappropriation, balancing the familiar and the foreign as new iterations intertwine with established ideas. New commentary is crafted by the mediated circulation and transformation of old ideas. Through memetic media, small strands weave together big conversations. Milner considers the formal and social dimensions of memetic media, and outlines five basic logics that structure them: multimodality, reappropriation, resonance, collectivism, and spread. He examines how memetic media both empower and exclude during public conversations, exploring the potential for public voice despite everyday antagonisms. Milner argues that memetic media enable the participation of many voices even in the midst of persistent inequality. This new kind of participatory conversation, he contends, complicates the traditional culture industries. When age-old gatekeepers intertwine with new ways of sharing information, the relationship between collective participation and individual expression becomes ambivalent. For better or worse—and Milner offers examples of both—memetic media have changed the nature of public conversations.

http://books.google.com/books?id=xL34DwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:9780262535229&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Media are poetic forces. They produce and reveal worlds, representing them to our senses and connecting them to our lives. While the poetic powers of media are perceptual, symbolic, social and technical, they are also profoundly moral and existential. They matter for how we reflect upon and act in a shared, everyday world of finite human existence. The Poetics of Digital Media explores the poetic work of media in digital culture. Developing an argument through close readings of overlooked or denigrated media objects and practices – screenshots, tagging on social media, selfies, and more – the book reveals how media act as poetic infrastructures, continually populating the world with beings and scenarios to be encountered, while also creating poetic performances, making the world available for apprehension, recognition and reflection. Paul Frosh analyses how media shape the experiential structures of our lives, and enable their revelation through (sometimes shocking) moments of visibility and tangibility. Bringing us face to face with the conditions of our existence, he investigates how the 'given' world we inhabit is given through media. The Poetics of Digital Media is important reading for students and scholars of media theory, philosophy of media, visual culture and media aesthetics.

http://books.google.com/books?id=awgcogEACAAJ&dq=isbn:9780745651323&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age

Presents an analysis of social media, discussing how a technology which was once heralded as democratic, has evolved into one which promotes elitism and inequality and provides companies with the means of invading privacy in search of profits.

Yale University Press

http://books.google.com/books?id=xcrYAQAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:9780300176728&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Since launching as a website for everyday video-sharing in 2005, YouTube has become one of the world’s most powerful digital media platforms. Originally published in 2009 when YouTube was only four years old, this book was the first to systematically investigate its cultural impacts and politics, highlighting the productive tensions between its amateur community rhetoric and its commercial media logics. Since then, YouTube has grown as a platform and matured as a company. Its business model is built on coordinating the interests of and extracting value from its content creators, audiences, advertisers and media partners, in a commercial setting where YouTube now competes with other powerful social media and streaming television platforms. Meanwhile, YouTube’s diverse communities of content creators, who developed the platform’s most distinctive cultural forms and genres, have strong ideas and interests of their own. While preserving the original edition’s forensic analysis of YouTube’s early popular culture and uses, this fully revised and updated edition weaves fresh examples, updated theoretical perspectives and comparative historical insights throughout each of its six chapters. Burgess and Green show how, over its more than a decade of existence, YouTube’s dual logics of commerciality and community have persisted, generating new genres of popular culture, new professional identities and business models for the media industries, and giving rise to ongoing platform governance challenges. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in the contemporary and future implications of digital media platforms and will be particularly valuable for students and scholars in media, communication and cultural studies.

http://books.google.com/books?id=NTCkBgAAQBAJ&dq=isbn:9780745660189&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

The world is in the midst of a social media paradigm. Once viewed as trivial and peripheral, social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and WeChat have become an important part of the information and communication infrastructure of society. They are bound up with business and politics as well as everyday life, work, and personal relationships. This international Handbook addresses the most significant research themes, methodological approaches and debates in the study of social media. It contains substantial chapters written especially for this book by leading scholars from a range of disciplinary perspectives, covering everything from computational social science to sexual self-expression. Part 1: Histories And Pre-Histories Part 2: Approaches And Methods Part 3: Platforms, Technologies And Business Models Part 4: Cultures And Practices Part 5: Social And Economic Domains

SAGE Publications Limited

http://books.google.com/books?id=xpdPwAEACAAJ&dq=isbn:9781526486875&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

The sometimes surprising, often humorous story of the forces that came together to shape the central role Twitter now plays in contemporary politics and culture Is Twitter a place for sociability and conversation, a platform for public broadcasting, or a network for discussion? Digital platforms have become influential in every sphere of communication, from the intimate and everyday to the public, professional, and political. Since the scrappy startup days of social media in the mid-2000s, not only has the worldwide importance of platforms grown exponentially, but also their cultures have shifted dramatically, in a variety of directions. These changes have brought new opportunities for progressive communities to thrive online, as well as widespread problems with commercial exploitation, disinformation, and hate speech. Twitter’s growth over the past decade, like that of much social media, has far surpassed its creators’ vision. Twitter charts this trajectory in the format of a platform biography: a new, streamlined approach to understanding how platforms change over time. Through the often surprising, fast-moving story of Twitter, it illuminates the multiple forces—from politics and business to digital ideologies—that came together to shape the evolution of this revolutionary platform. Jean Burgess and Nancy K. Baym build a rich narrative of how Twitter has evolved as a technology, a company, and a culture, from its origins as a personal messaging service to its transformation into one of the most globally influential social media platforms, where history and culture is not only recorded but written in real time.

http://books.google.com/books?id=VLHWDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:1479811068&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Google Rules: The History and Future of Copyright Under the Influence of Google

Blockbuster lawsuits, artificial intelligence, backroom deals, millions in lobbying dollars and grand Silicon Valley idealism - the story of Google and copyright law is action-packed. By tracing Google's legal, commercial and political negotiations over copyright, Google Rules explains how Google became one of the most influential actors in the history of digital copyright. Today, Google reigns over a technological and economic order that features empowered private companies and rapidly changing technological conditions, and how to protect the public interest in this environment is one of the most pressing policy questions of our time. In Google Rules, Joanne E. Gray provides pragmatic strategies for taking up this challenge. Google Rules is a book that will appeal to anyone interested in understanding Google's accumulation of power, the recent history of digital copyright, or the future of our digital lives under the influence of an extremely powerful and motivated technology company.

Oxford University Press

http://books.google.com/books?id=a3LKDwAAQBAJ&dq=isbn:9780190072087&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Sex and Social Media offers a curious reader an academically informed yet accessible discussion of the nuances of sexual social media and socially mediated sex, giving a much-deserved space to explore the multiplicity and richness of sexual practices online.

Emerald Group Publishing

http://books.google.com/books?id=OQLuDwAAQBAJ&dq=isbn:9781839094088&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

emily.vandernagel@monash.edu

Launched in 2007, tumblr became a safe haven for LGBT youth, social justice movements, and a counseling station for mental health issues. For a decade, this micro-blogging platform had more users than either Twitter or Snapchat, but it remained an obscure subculture for nonusers. Katrin Tiidenberg, Natalie Ann Hendry, and Crystal Abidin offer the first systematic guide to tumblr and its crucial role in shaping internet culture. Drawing on a decade of qualitative data, they trace the prominent social media practices of creativity, curation, and community-making, and reveal tumblr’s cultlike appeal and position in the social media ecosystem. The book demonstrates how diverse cultures can – in felt and imagined silos - coexist on a single platform and how destructive recent trends in platform governance are. The concept of “silosociality” is introduced to critically re-think social media, interrogate what kinds of sociality it affords, and what (unintended) consequences arise. This book is an essential resource for students and scholars of media and communication, as well as anyone interested in an influential but overlooked platform.

http://books.google.com/books?id=1L0lzgEACAAJ&dq=isbn:9781509541096&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

emily.vandernagel@monash.edu

What it means when media moves from the new to the habitual—when our bodies become archives of supposedly obsolescent media, streaming, updating, sharing, saving. New media—we are told—exist at the bleeding edge of obsolescence. We thus forever try to catch up, updating to remain the same. Meanwhile, analytic, creative, and commercial efforts focus exclusively on the next big thing: figuring out what will spread and who will spread it the fastest. But what do we miss in this constant push to the future? In Updating to Remain the Same, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun suggests another approach, arguing that our media matter most when they seem not to matter at all—when they have moved from “new” to habitual. Smart phones, for example, no longer amaze, but they increasingly structure and monitor our lives. Through habits, Chun says, new media become embedded in our lives—indeed, we become our machines: we stream, update, capture, upload, link, save, trash, and troll. Chun links habits to the rise of networks as the defining concept of our era. Networks have been central to the emergence of neoliberalism, replacing “society” with groupings of individuals and connectable “YOUS.” (For isn't “new media” actually “NYOU media”?) Habit is central to the inversion of privacy and publicity that drives neoliberalism and networks. Why do we view our networked devices as “personal” when they are so chatty and promiscuous? What would happen, Chun asks, if, rather than pushing for privacy that is no privacy, we demanded public rights—the right to be exposed, to take risks and to be in public and not be attacked?

Technology & Engineering

http://books.google.com/books?id=HlT5DwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:9780262534727&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

emily.vandernagel@monash.edu