Social Sciences Media Studies

The belief that all life-forms are interconnected and share the same breath - known in the Rarámuri tribe as iwigara - has resulted in a treasury of knowledge about the natural world, passed down for millennia by native cultures. Ethnobotanist Enrique Salmon builds on this concept of connection and highlights 80 plants revered by North America's indigenous peoples. Salmon teaches us the ways plants are used as food and medicine, the details of their identification and harvest, their important health benefits, plus their role in traditional stories and myths.

We've all heard that a picture is worth 1,000 words, but what if we don't understand what we're looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous - and easier to share than ever. However, they can also lead us astray. Charts lie in a variety of ways - displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty. In How Charts Lie, data visualization expert Alberto Cairo teaches us to not only spot the lies in deceptive visuals, but also to take advantage of good ones to understand complex stories.

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....

Dans ce nouvel ouvrage, après « Discours de la servitude intellectuelle » et « Complosophisme », Alexis Haupt met en lumière l’importance de l’aveuglement face aux médias. En baignant dans leur monde virtuel–TV, la radio, smartphone, ordinateur, publicités urbaines…–l’homme d’aujourd’hui se noie dans ce que l’auteur nomme le « médiavers » (univers-média).

Virtually anyone, anywhere knows that six million Jewish human beings were killed in the Jewish Holocaust. But how many African human beings were killed in the Black Holocaust - from the start of the European slave trade (c. 1500) to the Civil War (1865)? And how many were enslaved? The Black Holocaust, a travesty that killed millions of African human beings, is the most underreported major event in world history.

Mythopedia is a fun, fact-filled A-Z treasury of myths inspired by natural events. Bringing together fifty legends from antiquity to the present, this delightfully entertaining book takes you around the world to explore sunken kingdoms and lost cities, accursed mountains and treacherous terrains, and lethal lakes and singing sand dunes, explaining the historical background and latest science underlying each tale.

Our media environment is in crisis. Polarization is rampant. Polluted information floods social media. Even our best efforts to help clean up can backfire, sending toxins roaring across the landscape. In You Are Here, Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner offer strategies for navigating increasingly treacherous information flows. Using ecological metaphors, they emphasize how our individual me is entwined within a much larger we, and how everyone fits within an ever-shifting network map.

Low-level dishonesty is rife everywhere, in the form of exaggeration, selective use of facts, economy with the truth, careful drafting - from Trump and the Brexit debate to companies that tell us 'your call is important to us'. How did we get to a place where bullshit is not just rife but apparently so effective that it's become the communications strategy of our times? This brilliantly insightful book steps inside the panoply of deception employed in all walks of life and assesses how it has come to this.

Following the death of the family patriarch, a box of newly procured family documents reveals writer-filmmaker Chase Joynt’s previously unknown connection to Canadian media maverick Marshall McLuhan. Vantage Points takes up the surprising appearance of McLuhan in Joynt’s family archive as a way to think about legacies of childhood sexual abuse and how we might process and represent them.

People have been complaining about social media for some time now. Some people oppose their presence at all. But is it that bad? Does it need to be removed? Only time can tell. But it is not wrong that social media is causing a side effect, but then everything has a side effect. The only thing that needs to be assessed is whether or not it is life-threatening bad. People have been debating that while there is a bad side to social media, it is only there because of the manner the people are using it.

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.

Modern presidents engage in public leadership through national television addresses, routine speechmaking, and by speaking to local audiences. With these strategies, presidents tend to influence the media's agenda. In fact, presidential leadership of the news media provides an important avenue for indirect presidential leadership of the public, the president's ultimate target audience. Although frequently left out of sophisticated treatments of the public presidency, the media are directly incorporated into this book's theoretical approach and analysis.

Spätestens seit der Allianz von Donald Trump und Elon Musk ist klar: Die Tech-Milliardäre sind nicht nur die reichsten Männer der Welt, es geht ihnen auch um politische Macht und um die radikale Umgestaltung von Gesellschaft und Natur. Als Douglas Rushkoff eine Einladung in ein exklusives Wüstenresort erhält, nimmt er an, dass er dort über Zukunftstechnologien sprechen soll. Stattdessen sieht er sich Milliardären gegenüber, die ihn zu Luxusbunkern und Marskolonien befragen.

Valkyries: the female supernatural beings that choose who dies and who lives on the battlefield. They protect some, but guide spears, arrows, and sword blades into the bodies of others. Viking myths about valkyries attempt to elevate the banality of war - to make the pain and suffering, the lost limbs and deformities, the piles of lifeless bodies of young men, glorious and worthwhile. Rather than their death being futile, it is their destiny and good fortune, determined by divine beings.

The American Revolution was a home-front war that brought scarcity, bloodshed, and danger into the life of every American, and Carol Berkin shows us that women played a vital role throughout the struggle. Berkin takes us into the ordinary moments of extraordinary lives. We see women boycotting British goods in the years before independence, writing propaganda that radicalized their neighbors, raising funds for the army, and helping finance the fledgling government. We see how they managed farms, plantations, and businesses while their men went into battle.

Streaming video games is now a billion-dollar industry. In 2022, Twitch alone had over 140 million active monthly users, with top players earning millions each year. But success breeds envy, and when big money's being made, everyone wants a piece.

In 1949, George Orwell painted a chilling portrait of a totalitarian future where Big Brother watched every move, the Ministry of Truth rewrote history, and thoughtcrime was punishable by death. Seventy-five years later, his dystopian nightmare has become our digital reality—and we handed over the keys willingly.

The Facebook Narcissist is the first book dedicated to exploring the relationship between narcissism and social media. Lena Derhally, a licensed psychotherapist certified in Imago therapy, delves into how social media enhances individual and cultural narcissism and how it may create or exacerbate toxic narcissistic tendencies in people who use it. Social media is here to stay, but with education and awareness on how it makes us and the world more narcissistic, we can change the narrative and focus on the ways in which social media can be positive, and even improve the world.

Psyche A. Williams-Forson is one of our leading thinkers about food in America. In Eating While Black, she offers her knowledge and experience to illuminate how anti-Black racism operates in the practice and culture of eating. She shows how mass media, nutrition science, economics, and public policy drive entrenched opinions among both Black and non-Black Americans about what is healthful and right to eat. Distorted views of how and what Black people eat are pervasive, bolstering the belief that they must be corrected and regulated.

The second edition of this pathbreaking, widely taught book offers five new chapters, on breastfeeding and Black infant health; Black birthing during COVID; Black doulas rethinking birthing practices; the recent buildup of a US national movement; and expanding the global movement for sexual and reproductive wellbeing. Other chapters are updated throughout. Birthing Justice puts black women's voices at the center of the debate on what should be done to fix the broken maternal care system.