Social Media Sociology

Silicon Valley technology is transforming the way we work, and Uber is leading the charge. Upending our understanding of work in the digital age, Uberland paints a future where any of us might be managed by a faceless boss. Based on award-winning technology ethnographer Alex Rosenblat's experience of riding over 5,000 miles with Uber drivers, daily visits to online forums, and face-to-face discussions with senior Uber employees, Uberland goes beyond the headlines to reveal the complicated politics of popular technologies that are manipulating both workers and consumers.

Sonic Encounters: The Islamic Call to Prayer recounts the author’s experience gathering field recordings of the Islamic Call to Prayer. It touches on key questions and problems faced along the way, as well as discussing technologies and methods for recording, what it means to develop art from ethnographic research, and the ethics and considerations of working with Islamic communities around the globe. The book uses a sound studies framework to explore artistic research methods and practices in ethnography as they relate to religious recitation.

Una novela sobrecogedora sobre los peligros de la sobreexposición en redes, la explotación infantil y la falsa felicidad.

Mélanie Claux y Clara Roussel. Dos mujeres conectadas a través de una niña. Mélanie ha participado en un reality show televisivo y es seguidora de sus sucesivas ediciones. Cuando se convierte en madre de un niño y una niña, Sammy y Kimmy, empieza a grabar su día a día y cuelga los vídeos en YouTube. Crecen en visitas y seguidores, llegan los patrocinadores, Mélanie crea su propio canal y el dinero fluye...

Gary Webb had an inborn journalistic tendency to track down corruption and expose it. For over thirty-four years, he wrote stories about corruption from county, state, and federal levels. He had an almost magnetic effect to these kinds of stories, and it was almost as if the stories found him. It was his gift, and, ultimately, it was his downfall.

This is the story of what the most vulnerable wage earners—gig workers, restaurant staff, early-career creatives, and minimum-wage laborers—do when the economy suddenly collapses. In Side Hustle Safety Net, Alexandrea J. Ravenelle builds on interviews with nearly two hundred gig-based and precarious workers, conducted during the height of the pandemic, to uncover the unique challenges they faced in unprecedented times.

Das Smartphone zählt unsere Schritte, die Smartwatch misst unsere Herzfrequenz, und das Smart Home detektiert Zigarettenrauch und Schimpfwörter. Endlich gibt es all diese klugen kleinen Helfer, die uns liebevoll behüten und umsorgen, unser Leben erleichtern. Falsch! Adrian Lobe zeigt, wie uns die Digitaltechnik geradewegs in ein Datengefängnis führt, das wir selbst gebaut haben und so bald nicht wieder verlassen werden.

Plattformen wie YouTube, Facebook, Twitter oder Amazon sind die neuen sozialen Magneten - Clanbildner einer sich anbahnenden globalen digitalen Stammesgesellschaft. Während die herkömmlichen sozialen Bindungskräfte von Familien, Institutionen, Parteien, Verbänden und Staaten zunehmend schwinden, entstehen um digitale Plattformen wimmelnde Kollektive, die sich wie Schwärme oder Horden ausnehmen. Ihre Benutzer sind "Follower", digitale Gefolgschaft hält die neuen Clans zusammen.

Women in today's advanced capitalist societies are encouraged to "lean in." The media and government champion women's empowerment. In a cultural climate where women can seemingly have it all, why do so many successful professional women - lawyers, financial managers, teachers, engineers, and others - give up their careers after having children and become stay-at-home mothers? How do they feel about their decision and what do their stories tell us about contemporary society?

Denby has fun snarking the snarkers, expelling the bums and promoting the true wits, but he is also making a serious point: the Internet has put snark on steroids. In politics, snark means the lowest, most insinuating and insulting side can win. For the young, a savage piece of gossip could ruin a reputation and possibly a future career. And for all of us, snark just sucks the humor out of life. Denby defends the right of any of us to be cruel but shows us how the real pros pull it off. Snark, he says, is for the amateurs.

Demography, literally the study of people, addresses the size, distribution, composition, and density of populations, and considers the impact the drivers which mediate these will have on both individual lives and the changing structure of human populations. This Very Short Introduction considers the way in which the global population has evolved over time and space. Sarah Harper discusses the theorists, theories, and methods involved in studying population trends and movements.

Con l'avvento dei social media è scomparso il solco che divideva mondo reale e mondo virtuale, consentendoci di identificarli abbastanza nettamente. Oggi quello che troviamo on line è un mondo post-verità, al cui interno le notizie deliberatamente false o distorte sono usate per orientare anche in maniera significativa le decisioni individuali, soprattutto in relazione allo scontro politico e alle scelte elettorali.

Fridays of Rage provides a glimpse into how Al Jazeera strategically cast its journalists as martyrs in the struggle for Arab freedom while promoting itself as the mouthpiece and advocate of the Arab public.

Couple Therapy: The Basics provides a comprehensive introduction to couple therapy. Taking both a general overview and a psychoanalytic focus, it addresses the basic questions that both couples and those interested in becoming couple therapists can expect to ask.

IRL, Chris Stedman's personal and searing exploration of authenticity in the digital age, shines a light on how age-old notions of realness - who we are and where we fit in the world - can be freshly understood in our increasingly online lives. Stedman offers a different way of seeing the supposed split between our online and offline selves: the internet and social media are new tools for understanding and expressing ourselves, and the not-always-graceful ways we use these tools can reveal new insights into far older human behaviors and desires.

Identity Economics bridges a critical gap in the social sciences. It brings identity and norms to economics. People’s notions of what is proper, and what is forbidden, and for whom, are fundamental to how hard they work, and how they learn, spend, and save. Thus people’s identity—their conception of who they are, and of who they choose to be—may be the most important factor affecting their economic lives.

Whether we need to make better financial choices, find the love of our life, or transform our career, crowdsourcing is the key to making quicker, wiser, more objective decisions. But few of us even come close to tapping the full potential of our online personal networks. Zoref's clients are using his techniques to innovate and problem-solve in record time. Now he reveals how crowdsourcing has the ability to supercharge our thinking and upgrade every aspect of our lives.

How does it feel to receive a phone call from your 14-year-old son who is in the back of a squad car because he laughed at a police officer? How does a young person of color cope with being frisked several times a week since the age of 15? These are just some of the stories in No Place on the Corner, which draws on three years of intensive ethnographic fieldwork in the South Bronx before and after the landmark 2013 Floyd v. City of New York decision that ruled that the NYPD's controversial "stop and frisk" policing methods were a violation of rights.

This Must Be the Place introduces and examines music's relationship to cities. Not the influence cities have on music, but the powerful impact music can have on how cities are developed, built, managed, and governed.

Facts are and must be the coin of the realm in a democracy. Unfortunately, for citizens in the United States and throughout the world, distinguishing between fact and fiction - always a formidable challenge - is now more difficult than ever, as a constant stream of questionable information pours into media outlets. Lewis argues forcefully that while data points and factoids abound, it is much harder to get to the whole truth of complex issues in time for that truth to guide citizens, voters, and decision makers.

International bestselling author and optimistic internet thinker Jeff Jarvis examines the way the Internet has changed the way we form communities, create identities, engage in commerce, and live our lives. A visionary and optimistic thinker examines the tension between privacy and publicness...