Social Sciences Media Studies

Tackling the complex subject of bias head on, Skewed investigates the hidden messages we absorb from birth. Looking closely at what the research can tell us, Caryn Franklin and Dr Keon West explain how our inner worlds are shaped by false information, media trends, and the brain’s preference for patterns and stereotypes. Exploring biases around gender, sexuality, race, age and appearance, Caryn and Keon explain how bias impacts all of our lives.

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. Roberts, an award-winning social media scholar, offers the first extensive ethnographic study of the commercial content moderation industry.

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.

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.

In the nineteenth century, residents of Marblehead, Massachusetts, reported malicious pixies leading them in circles at dusk. In Aroostook County, Maine, elves called lutins exasperated farmers with their mischievous tricks and games. In Uncasville, Connecticut, beguiling creatures emerged for centuries at twilight to collect corn-filled baskets from members of the Mohegan Tribe. And in Harrisville, Rhode Island, a vision of fearful banshees augured death to an Irish seer.

When ships under the command of white Europeans first sailed into the Delaware Bay in 1609, southeastern Pennsylvania's documented history of the strange and unusual began. This book tackles seven true "dark histories" from Chester and Delaware counties, which include tales of murder, witchcraft, cannibalism, tragic accidents, and macabre events that actually happened in the Greater Philadelphia region. All stories are meticulously researched and placed within the greater context of Pennsylvania and world history.

The author of the acclaimed Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them) brings “her singular sensibility, her genius for language, her love of our deeply imperfect world” (Karen Karbo, author of In Praise of Difficult Women) to this insightful exploration of reality TV and the shifting definitions of truth in America.

On any given day, at any given hour, across the various platforms constituting what we call social media, someone is angry. Facebook. Instagram. Twitter. Reddit. 4Chan. In The Rhetoric of Outrage: Why Social Media Is Making Us Angry, Jeff Rice addresses the critical question of why anger has become the dominant digital response on social media. He examines the theoretical and rhetorical explanations for the intense rage that prevails across platforms and sheds new light on how our anger is not merely a reaction against singular events but generated out of aggregated beliefs and ideas.

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.

Who gets to control the media we consume? Can we intervene, or at least mitigate the influence of constant content? Mixing personal anecdotes with historical and political criticism, Image Control explores art, social media, photography, and other visual mediums to understand how our culture and our actions are manipulated, all the while building toward the idea that if fascism emerges as aesthetics, then so too can anti-fascism.

Dieses Hörbuch ist den Gedanken der journalistischen Aufklärung verpflichtet. Zu ihren Kernaufgaben zählen die Kritik und Kontrolle politischer Macht. In der Praxis jedoch wird die Presse häufig zum Apologeten der Mächtigen und zum publizistischen Verteidiger des Status Quo. Statt Macht- und Gewaltverhältnisse aufzuklären, vernebelt sie oft die Interessen von Machteliten und wird so zum Helfer der Gegenaufklärung. Dieses Hörbuch zeigt, wie Kritik und Kontrolle von Eliten wieder in den Mittelpunkt der Recherche rücken können. Baab bietet einen Werkzeugkasten mit Instrumenten der Aufklärung.

As World War II approached, the six most powerful media moguls in America and Britain tried to pressure their countries to ignore the fascist threat. The media empires of Robert McCormick, Joseph and Eleanor Patterson, and William Randolph Hearst spanned the United States, reaching tens of millions of Americans in print and over the airwaves with their isolationist views.

"Why do conservatives hate comedy? Why is there no right-wing Jon Stewart?" These sorts of questions launch a million tweets, a thousand op-eds, and more than a few scholarly analyses. That's Not Funny argues that it is both an intellectual and politically strategic mistake to assume that comedy has a liberal bias. Matt Sienkiewicz and Nick Marx take listeners—particularly self-described liberals—on a tour of contemporary conservative comedy and the "right-wing comedy complex."

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.

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.

Selling sex has never been more profitable—or dangerous—for everyone on both sides of the screen. Jewels Jade should know. She has spent most of her life working in the adult entertainment industry. Porn isn’t just for men in trench coats and shady video store backrooms anymore. From vanilla to vile, it’s all online. Just like social media, though, online porn banks on fresh content and takes viewer data mining to the bank, creating a snowballing cycle of algorithms, addictive behaviors, and extreme performances that have consequences beyond our wildest dreams and nightmares.

How Media Ownership Matters provides a fresh approach to understanding news media power, moving beyond the typical emphasis on market concentration or media moguls. Through a comparative analysis of the US, Sweden, and France, as well as interviews of news executives and editors and an original collection of industry data, this book maps and analyzes four ownership models: market, private, civil society, and public.

After spotting Netflix and the deep-pocketed Amazon Prime Video a decade’s head start, rivals from the tech and start-up realm (Apple, Quibi) and traditional media (Disney, WarnerMedia, NBCUniversal) all decided to move mountains to enter the streaming game. At a cost of billions, each went after their own piece of the market, launching five new services in a seven-month span. And just as the derby was heating up, the coronavirus pandemic arrived, a black-swan event bringing short-term benefits but also stiff challenges.

Journalists today are inundated with data about which stories attract the most clicks, likes, comments, and shares. These metrics influence what stories are written, how news is promoted, and even which journalists get hired and fired. Do metrics make journalists more accountable to the public? Or are these data tools the contemporary equivalent of a stopwatch wielded by a factory boss, worsening newsroom working conditions and journalism quality?

Los datos nos rodean. Se han convertido en un activo esencial, pero no solo para las empresas que se dedican a sacarles provecho, sino también para cualquier gobierno, institución o persona que quiera tomar mejores decisiones. Tanto si queremos escoger la escuela de nuestros hijos, como estudiar las ballenas, hacer fichajes de futbolistas o entender los grandes acontecimientos sociales y políticos, hoy es fundamental descifrar lo que nos dicen los números. Casi nada en nuestra vida vida quedará fuera.