Social Sciences Media Studies

Our smartphones have brought digital technology into the most intimate spheres of life. It's time to take control of them, repurposing them as pathways to a democratically designed and maintained digital commons that prioritizes people over profit. Smartphones have appeared everywhere seemingly overnight: since the first iPhone was released, in 2007, the number of smartphone users has skyrocketed to over two billion.

You've heard the stories about the dark side of the internet—hackers, #gamergate, anonymous mobs attacking an unlucky victim, and revenge porn—but they remain just that: Stories. Surely these things would never happen to you. Zoe Quinn used to feel the same way. She is a video game developer whose ex-boyfriend published a crazed blog post cobbled together from private information, half-truths, and outright fictions, along with a rallying cry to the online hordes to go after her. They answered in the form of a so-called movement known as #gamergate.

In recent decades, we have witnessed an explosion in the number of visual images we encounter, as our lives have become increasingly saturated with screens. From Google Images to Instagram, video games to installation art, this transformation is confusing, liberating and worrying all at once, since observing the new visuality of culture is not the same as understanding it.

The one real difference between the American press and the Soviet state newspaper Pravda was that the Russian people knew they were being lied to. To expose the lies our media tell us today, controversial journalist James O'Keefe created Project Veritas, an independent news organization whose reporters go where traditional journalists dare not. Their investigative work - equal parts James Bond, Mike Wallace, and Saul Alinsky - has had a consistent and powerful impact on its targets.

In this startling group memoir, four friends - Black and White, gay and straight, immigrant and American-born - use Toni Morrison’s novels as a springboard for intimate and revealing conversations about the problems of everyday racism and living whole in times of uncertainty. Tackling everything from first love and Soul Train to police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement, the authors take up what it means to read challenging literature collaboratively and to learn in public as an act of individual reckoning and social resistance.

As English and German settlers migrated to Pennsylvania, they brought their beliefs in magic with them from the Old World—sometimes with dangerous consequences. In 1802, for example, an Allegheny County judge helped an accused witch escape an angry mob. But Susan Mummey was not so fortunate. In 1934, she was killed in her home by a young Schuylkill County man who was convinced that she had cursed him.

Screenwise offers a realistic and optimistic perspective on how to thoughtfully guide kids in the digital age. Many parents feel that their kids are addicted, detached, or distracted because of their digital devices. Using the foundation of their own values and experiences, parents and educators can learn about the digital world to help set kids up for success in a world fueled by technology.

Popularized by Joseph Campbell, the hero's journey features narrative stages along which a person matures and transforms. But where heroes transform is just as important as what they do to get there. Holly Bellebuono shows you how the location of each hero's journey step is intimately tied to the challenges faced, setting the tone for the entire adventure.

The Einstein Intersection won the Nebula Award for best science fiction novel of 1967. The surface story tells of the problems a member of an alien race, Lo Lobey, has assimilating the mythology of Earth, where his kind have settled among the leftover artifacts of humanity. The deeper tale concerns, however, the way those who are "different" must deal with the dominant cultural ideology. The tale follows Lobey's mythic quest for his lost love, Friza. In luminous and hallucinated language, it explores what new myths might emerge from the detritus of the human world....

Media and law enforcement work at cross-purposes. Law enforcement want to solve a case as fast as possible and put the guilty behind bars. The media want a case to drag on as long as humanly possible and do all they can to extricate every last bit of drama, drop by bloody drop, in order to hold the attention of the millions of viewers who have gotten hooked. Law enforcement must abide by rules. The media make their own rules, and even then break them or find ways to work loopholes into them.

Joshua Myers considers the work of thinkers who broke with the racial and colonial logic of academic disciplinarity and how the ideas of Black intellectuals created different ways of thinking and knowing in their pursuit of conceptual and epistemological freedom. Bookended by meditations with June Jordan and Toni Cade Bambara, Of Black Study focuses on how W.E.B. Du Bois, Sylvia Wynter, Jacob Carruthers, and Cedric Robinson contributed to Black Studies approaches to knowledge production within and beyond Western structures of knowledge.

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

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.

A fascinating guided tour of the complex, fast-moving, and influential world of algorithms - what they are, why they’re such powerful predictors of human behavior, and where they’re headed next. Algorithms exert an extraordinary level of influence on our everyday lives - from dating websites and financial trading floors, through to online retailing and internet searches - Google's search algorithm is now a more closely guarded commercial secret than the recipe for Coca-Cola.

Let's take stock of young America. Compared to previous generations, American youth have more schooling (college enrollments have never been higher); more money ($100 a week in disposable income); more leisure time (five hours a day); and more news and information (Internet, The Daily Show, RSS feeds). What do they do with all that time and money? They download, upload, IM, post, chat, and network. (Nine of their top ten sites are for social networking.) They watch television and play video games (2 to 4 hours per day).

It was the 1960s - a time of economic boom and social strife. Young women poured into the workplace, but the “Help Wanted” ads were segregated by gender and the “Mad Men” office culture was rife with sexual stereotyping and discrimination. Lynn Povich was one of the lucky ones, landing a job at Newsweek, renowned for its cutting-edge coverage of civil rights and the “Swinging Sixties.” Nora Ephron, Jane Bryant Quinn, Ellen Goodman, and Susan Brownmiller all started there as well. It was a top-notch job - for a girl - at an exciting place. But it was a dead end.

In The Invisible Toolbox, Kim shares with parents the single most important thing they can do to foster their child's future-learning potential and nurture the parent-child bond that is the foundation for a child's motivation to learn. She is convinced that the simple act of reading aloud has a far-reaching impact that few of us fully understand and that the importance of that act has recently been further occluded by our nearly universal saturation in technology.

Technology insider Alice Marwick contends in this insightful book, “Web 2.0” only encouraged a preoccupation with status and attention. Her original research - which includes conversations. Marwick analyzes status-building techniques - such as self-branding, micro-celebrity, and life-streaming - to show that Web 2.0 did not provide a cultural revolution, but only furthered inequality and reinforced traditional social stratification, demarcated by race, class, and gender.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there were only three major television networks. And there was only one Harlan Ellison taking them all to task in a series of weekly essays he wrote for the countercultural, underground newspaper, the Los Angeles Free Press, a.k.a. “The Freep”. For nearly four years, he channel-surfed through the mire of ABC, CBS, and NBC, finding little of value but much to critique. No one offered a more astute analysis of the idiot box’s influence on American culture, or its effects on the intelligence and psyche of viewers.

Unfiltered: How to Be as Happy as You Look on Social Media is for anyone who needs to be reminded that we're all a work in progress, no matter what judgments we make when measuring our lives against what others share online. In her debut book, award-winning journalist and sought-after speaker Jessica Abo addresses the relationship between our psychology and technology and how we can take back our happiness IRL (in real life) without falling into the compare-and-despair trap.