Social Media Study

"Aren't you a terrorist?" "There are no roles for people who look like you." "That's a sin." "No girls allowed." They've heard it all. Actress Alia Shawkat reflects on all the parts she was told she was too "ethnic" to play. Former NFL player Wade Davis recalls his bullying of gay classmates in an attempt to hide his own sexuality. Holocaust survivor Fanny Starr tells of her harrowing time in Aushwitz, where she watched her family disappear, one by one. What made them rise up through the hate? What made them overcome the obstacles of their childhood to achieve extraordinary success?

Drawing on private correspondence, notes from secret meetings, unpublished articles, and interviews, veteran journalists Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff go behind the headlines and datelines to show how a dedicated cadre of newsmen - first black reporters, then liberal Southern editors, then reporters and photographers from the national press and the broadcast media - revealed to a nation its most shameful shortcomings and propelled its citizens to act.

An incisive observer, writer, and participant in today's social movements, Zeynep Tufekci explains in this accessible and compelling book the nuanced trajectories of modern protests - how they form, how they operate differently from past protests, and why they have difficulty persisting in their long-term quests for change.

The word “refugee” sparks conversation and fuels emotion. There are more than 22 million refugees worldwide and another 65 million who have been forcibly displaced. But who are these people? Images filter into our consciousness via dramatic photographs - but these photos only offer a glimpse into their stories. As a young ER nurse in Boston, Roberta Gately was stopped cold by stark images of big-bellied babies with empty haunting stares in the news. She called the aid organization featured in the news story, and, within two months, she had become a humanitarian aid worker.

What is the new way to pump a phenomenon, so people tire of it or fear it? How can powerful entities water down opponent’s tea? How can powerful entities steamroll grand policy? With mass formation psychosis. In 2021, a few M.D.s ventured opinions about mass formation psychosis. The people who control the news media and the public schools have the ability to not only smother opposition. But to create an idiocracy that doesn’t question.

An entertaining and insightful examination of the Emmy-award winning American satirical news show, broadcast on Comedy Central in the US, and (in an edited edition) on More4 in the UK and CNN International around the world.

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

Unlikeable Female Characters traces the evolution of highly memorable female characters, examining what exactly makes them popular, how audiences have reacted to them, and the ways in which pop culture is finally allowing us to celebrate the complexities of being a woman. Anna Bogutskaya, film programmer, broadcaster, and cofounder of the horror film collective and podcast The Final Girls takes us on a journey through popular film, TV, and music, looking at the nuances of womanhood on and off-screen to reveal whether pop culture—and society—is finally ready to embrace complicated women.

Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a new American cultural phenomenon - one that is at odds with our heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern, secular knowledge and science. With mordant wit, Jacoby surveys an antirationalist landscape extending from pop culture to a pseudo-intellectual universe of "junk thought".

Taking listeners back to the days of TaB cola, dot matrix printers, and digging through the couch for just one more quarter, Alex Rubens combines his knowledge of the tech industry and experience as a gaming journalist to conjure the wild silicon frontier of the 8-bit ’80s. 8-Bit Apocalypse: The Untold Story of Atari's Missile Command offers the first in-depth, personal history of an era for which fans have a lot of nostalgia.

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

Papyrus rolls and Twitter have much in common, as each was their generation's signature means of "instant" communication. Indeed, as Tom Standage reveals in his scintillating new audiobook, social media is anything but a new phenomenon. From the papyrus letters that Roman statesmen used to exchange news across the Empire to the advent of hand-printed tracts of the Reformation to the pamphlets that spread propaganda during the American and French revolutions, Standage chronicles the increasingly sophisticated ways people shared information with each other....

In 1981, emboldened by Ronald Reagan’s election, a group of some 50 Republican operatives, evangelicals, oil barons and gun lobbyists met in a Washington suburb to coordinate their attack on civil liberties and the social safety net. These men and women called their coalition the Council for National Policy. Over four decades, this elite club has become a strategic nerve centre for channelling money and mobilising votes behind the scenes.

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

Clean water, paved roads, public transit, electricity and gas, sewers, waste processing, telecommunication, even the Internet—all this infrastructure is what makes cities work and powers our lives, often seamlessly and silently. Virtually everything we do and consume depends on infrastructure. Yet, most people have no idea how these systems work. How is water treated? How do cities manage rainwater? Why do traffic jams exist? How is electricity generated and distributed? What happens to trash after it is picked up? How does the Internet work?

Tip of the Spear boldly and compellingly argues that prisons are a domain of hidden warfare within US borders. With this book, Orisanmi Burton explores what he terms the Long Attica Revolt, a criminalized tradition of Black radicalism that propelled rebellions in New York prisons during the 1970s. The reaction to this revolt illuminates what Burton calls prison pacification: the coordinated tactics of violence, isolation, sexual terror, propaganda, reform, and white supremacist science and technology that state actors use to eliminate Black resistance within and beyond prison walls.

Librarians spend their lives weeding - not weeds, but books - books that have reached the end of their shelf life both literally and figuratively. They remove books that patrons no longer check out, and they put back books they treasure. Annie Spence, who has a decade of experience as a Midwestern librarian, does this not only at her Michigan library but also at home, for her neighbors, at cocktail parties - everywhere. In Dear Fahrenheit 451, she addresses those books directly.

Tyrants on Twitter is the first detailed analysis of how Chinese and Russian agents weaponize Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube to subvert the liberal international order. In addition to examining the 2016 US election, David L. Sloss explores Russia's use of foreign influence operations to threaten democracies in Europe, as well as China's use of social media and other digital tools to meddle in Western democracies and buttress autocratic rulers around the world.

Ambika Kamath and Melina Packer reveal how scientists studying animal behavior have long projected human norms and values onto animals while seeking to understand them. When scientific studies conclude that these norms and values are natural in animals, it makes it easier to think of them as natural in humans too. And because scientists, historically and to this day, largely belong to elite, powerful segments of society, the norms and values embedded into animal behavior science match those of the already powerful.

An urgent account of the revolution that has upended the news business, authored by one of the most accomplished journalists of our time.