Social Technology

What kind of fossils will we leave, as relics into the far future? A blizzard of new objects has suddenly appeared on Earth: plastic bottles, ballpoint pens, concrete flyways, chicken bones, cans, teabags, phones, shirts. They're produced for our comfort and pleasure then quickly discarded. This new-made treasure chest underpins our lives. But it is also giving a completely new style of fossilization to our planet. Designed to resist corrosion and decay, many will remain, petrified, as future geology.

Why Social Media Is Ruining Your Life tackles head on the pressure cooker of comparison and unreachable levels of perfection that social media has created in our modern world. In this audiobook, Katherine Ormerod meets the experts involved in curating, building and combating the most addictive digital force humankind has ever created.

L. Williams, in translating Giordano Bruno's Gli Eroici Furori (Heroic Enthusiasts) from the original Italian into English back in 1887 and 1889, has done a great service to humanity. His introduction is especially illuminating as it contextualizes Bruno's life until his tragic death at the age of 52 and provides us with a tantalizing glimpse into his cosmological philosophy. It is my hope that this small book, which is drawn exclusively from Williams' work, will serve as an intellectual appetizer and lead to a deeper plunge into Bruno's fascinating thought.

Blinded at age three, Mike May defied expectations by breaking world records in downhill speed skiing, joining the CIA, and becoming a successful inventor, entrepreneur, and family man. He had never yearned for vision. Then, in 1999, a chance encounter brought startling news: a revolutionary stem-cell transplant surgery could restore May's vision.

In late 2010, thousands of hacktivists joined a mass digital assault by Anonymous on the websites of VISA, MasterCard, and PayPal to protest their treatment of WikiLeaks. Splinter groups then infiltrated the networks of totalitarian governments in Libya and Tunisia, and an elite team of six people calling themselves LulzSec attacked the FBI, CIA, and Sony. They were flippant and taunting, grabbed headlines, and amassed more than a quarter of a million Twitter followers.

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.

Sometimes designed objects reject their users: a computer mouse that doesn't work for left-handed people, for example, or a touchscreen payment system that only works for people who read English phrases, have 20/20 vision, and use a credit card. These mismatches are the building blocks of exclusion. In Mismatch, Kat Holmes describes how design can lead to exclusion, and how design can also remedy exclusion.

Whether you are a startup entrepreneur or a web development agency, picking the right web hosting service will be a key to your success in the business. This will be especially important if you are using the internet to sell your services or products. This guide is intended to help you make an informed decision and pick the right web hosting service for yourself. By the time you are finished listening to this book, you will know what you should be looking for in order to make the right decision for your business.

High-tech innovations are created at a dazzling speed, and it all points to a world that is getting faster at a dizzying pace. Azeem Azhar knows this better than most. Over the last three decades, he has founded companies bought by Amazon and Microsoft, served as the Economist’s first ever internet correspondent, and created a leading international tech newsletter and podcast, the Exponential View. Now, Azhar offers a revelatory new model for understanding how technology is changing the world.

Mary Aiken is the world's leading expert in forensic cyberpsychology - a discipline that combines psychology, criminology, and technology to investigate the intersection where technology and human behavior meet. In this, her first book, Aiken has created a starting point for all future conversations about how the Internet is shaping development and behavior, societal norms and values, children, safety, security, and our perception of the world.

Uncover everything you need to know about "deepfakes" and what could become the biggest information and communications meltdown in world history.

To a generation in revolt against authority, "Tune in, turn on, drop out" was a mantra, and its popularizer, Dr. Timothy Leary, a guru. A charismatic and brilliant psychologist, Leary became intrigued, and then obsessed, by the effects of psychedelic drugs in the 1960s while teaching at Harvard. What began as research into human consciousness turned into a mission to alter consciousness itself. Timothy Leary is the first major biography of one of the most controversial figures in postwar America.

Hoy en día, el mundo se vacía de cosas y se llena de información inquietante como voces sin cuerpo. La digitalización desmaterializa y descorporeíza el mundo. En lugar de guardar recuerdos, almacenamos inmensas cantidades de datos. Los medios digitales sustituyen así a la memoria, cuyo trabajo hacen sin violencia ni demasiado esfuerzo. La información falsea los acontecimientos.

For fans of The Astronaut Wives Club, The Mercury 13 reveals the little-known true story of the remarkable women who trained for NASA space flight. In 1961, just as NASA launched its first man into space, a group of women underwent secret testing in the hopes of becoming America’s first female astronauts. They passed the same battery of tests at the legendary Lovelace Foundation as did the Mercury 7 astronauts, but they were summarily dismissed by the boys’ club at NASA and on Capitol Hill.

The global battle among the three dominant digital powers-the United States, China, and the European Union-is intensifying. All three regimes are racing to regulate tech companies, with each advancing a competing vision for the digital economy while attempting to expand its sphere of influence in the digital world. In Digital Empires, her provocative follow-up to The Brussels Effect, Anu Bradford explores a rivalry that will shape the world in the decades to come.

This book predicts the decline of today's professions and describes the people and systems that will replace them. In an Internet society, according to Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind, we will neither need nor want doctors, teachers, accountants, architects, the clergy, consultants, lawyers, and many others to work as they did in the 20th century.

Most kids get their first smartphone at the same time that they're experiencing major developmental changes. Making mistakes has always been a part of growing up, but how do parents help their kids navigate childhood and adolescence at a time when social media has the potential to magnify the consequences of those mistakes? Rather than spend all their time worrying about the worst-case scenario, listeners get a bigger-picture understanding of their kids' digital landscape.

Paul Kennedy, award-winning author of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers and one of today’s most renowned historians, now provides a new and unique look at how World War II was won. Engineers of Victory is a fascinating nuts-and-bolts account of the strategic factors that led to Allied victory. Kennedy reveals how the leaders’ grand strategy was carried out by the ordinary soldiers, scientists, engineers, and businessmen responsible for realizing their commanders’ visions of success.

Ready to take your social media game to the next level? "TikTok & Twitch for Beginners" is your guide to mastering the intricacies of these two leading content platforms. This book will teach you how to maximize visibility, build relationships, and monetize your content, helping you unlock millions of views and turn your passion into a profitable venture.

Social worker, activist, and cultural commentator Feminista Jones explores how Black women are changing culture, society, and the landscape of feminism by building digital communities and using social media as powerful platforms. As Jones reveals, some of the best-loved devices of our shared social media language are a result of Black women’s innovations, from well-known, movement-building hashtags (#BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName, and #BlackGirlMagic) to the now ubiquitous use of threaded tweets as a marketing and storytelling tool.