New Books in Communications

The millennial generation (those born from 1980 through the beginning of the 21st century) now comprises the largest voting bloc in the American electorate. In Media, Millennials, and Politics: The Coming of Age of the Next Political Generation (Lexington Books, 2016), Alison N. Novak argues that these 50 million young citizens are misunderstood, marginalized and sometimes overtly insulted by the news media. Writers, newscasters and pundits label them “apathetic, uninvolved and entitled,” while ignoring clear evidence that many millennials are deeply concerned about the course of the nation. Novak examines coverage of millennials in cable television and online news, finding that journalists often substitute stereotypes and rhetorical shortcuts for rigorous examination of how members of this generation think and act. She concludes by calling the media to task and demanding that it present a fuller, more nuanced picture of a group that will soon inherit the reins of power in the United States. James Kates is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He has worked as an editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and other publications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In his new book The Defender: How The Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), Ethan Michaeli charts the riveting history of the Chicago Defender, one of the nation’s longest running and most significant black periodicals. Founded in 1905 by publisher Robert S. Abbott, the Defender came to play a central role in regional and national black politics; drawing African Americans north to Chicago as part of the Great Migration out of the South, condemning Jim Crow and bolstering the electoral power of black America, and helping to secure the election of presidents such as Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama. Relying on exhaustive research, including dozens of interviews and extensive archival material, Ethan has constructed the most in-depth and illuminating history of the Defender ever published – highlighting not only the impact of publisher Abbott and iconic columnists such as Ida B. Wells and Langston Hughes, but also the hundreds of other journalists and editors who contributed to the legendary newspaper’s development. Alex Kotlowitz has described The Defender as “a majestic, sweeping history, both of a newspaper and of a people,” and Carol Anderson has applauded the text as a landmark study which will “become an essential resource in African American cultural and political studies.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In a fragmented media world where anyone can speak, professional journalists are no longer the “gatekeepers” who decide what the public will see and hear. Instead, citizens are barraged with claims, assertions and innuendo that have not been subjected to the journalistic discipline of verification. Fact-checking, pioneered by bloggers and developed by professional news organizations, attempts to get at the elusive truth by subjecting political figures’ words to careful scrutiny. In Deciding What’s True: The Rise of Political Fact-Checking in American Journalism (Columbia University Press, 2016) Lucas Graves examines the fact-checkers’ work and plumbs its potential, its limits and its hazards. He concludes that fact-checking, while imperfect, is a genuine reform movement that is reshaping American journalism and the long-cherished ideal of objectivity. James Kates is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He has worked as an editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and other publications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

I serve on a planning committee for the annual Holocaust Commemoration in Wichita, where I live and teach. Every year when we convene, we remind ourselves that we need to invite survivors to speak. With survivors aging, the time is quickly approaching when we will no longer be able to hear about their experiences firsthand. But of course this isn’t quite true. For more than a quarter century, organizations have devoted time, attention and resources to preserving the memories of survivors. In this way, those of us interested in hearing these stories–whether academic researchers or ‘ordinary’ people–can access the power and authenticity of survivor narratives through recorded video testimony. All of this is a good thing. But as Noah Shenker reminds us, the appearance of authenticity can distract us from the very real impact of the ways interviews are staged. Previous scholarship has alerted us to the need to consider the dynamics between the interviewer and interviewee in. In Reframing Holocaust Testimony (Indiana University Press, 2016), Shenker presents a compelling argument that we need to move beyond this to include the mechanics and institutional dynamics of the interviews as well. The training of interviewers, the kinds of scripts used in conducting them, the ways in which images are created, filed, and distributed and many other factors shape the way in which survivors recall and represent their experiences. Shenker looks specifically at three repositories–the Fortunoff Video Archive, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Shoah Foundation. He demonstrates that each had different goals, emphases and methods of conducting interviews. And, in a close reading of the testimony of several survivors who gave testimony to each of these institutions, he shows how the differences in approaches created a different kind of testimony. It’s a valuable reminder of the need to honor the memories of survivors by asking the questions necessary to truly understand their testimony. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

With the 2016 presidential election in full swing and rhetoric surrounding each candidate becoming more polarized, how does gender impact the way that people behave politically? Monika McDermott in her new book Masculinity, Femininity, and American Political Behavior (Oxford University Press, 2016) seeks to answer this question. In her analysis, McDermott argues that gendered personalities are a powerful determinant of political behavior and involvement. The campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump also provide interesting insights into how the politics of gendered personalities are enacted in the contemporary political climate. Monika McDermott is currently an Associate Professor of Political Science at Fordham University as well as an election polling analyst for CBS News and The New York Times. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

It feels like schools are in the midst of unprecedented change — sometimes more in different places and sometimes more in different ways. Many people are thinking about education differently than they did a few years ago. Others still are learning and assessing in new ways, using different tools, and collaborating with different partners. But in what ways are schools changing the most? What happens when multiple changes occur simultaneously? How can people who have different relationships to schools prepare themselves and support change? In Education Nation: Six Leading Edges of Innovation in Our Schools (Jossey-Bass, 2012), Milton Chen draws upon his years of experience using television and the Internet to share educational material in order to explain what schools look like when separate school innovations begin to converge. Chen joins New Books in Education for the interview. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at @miltonchen2. Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Our modern networked world owes an oftentimes unacknowledged debt to Guglielmo Marconi. As Marc Raboy demonstrates in Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World (Oxford University Press, 2016), it was he who pioneered the concept of wireless global communications. As a teenager he was fascinated by the recent discovery of radio waves, and by the time he was in his early twenties he had developed an apparatus that used these waves to transmit and receive messages. Traveling to London, he demonstrated a gift for publicity as he established himself as a technological pioneer in an age of rapidly emerging wonders. Thanks to his unassailable patents, Marconi soon created a global communications empire, one that made his name synonymous with radio and was so dominant that it brought the nations of the world together in an unprecedented international agreement to regulate the field of wireless telegraphy. Raboy recounts Marconi’s roving life as a celebrated figure, the development of his multinational business concerns, and his later relationship with the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini and the shadow it cast over his posthumous reputation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

New technology has made us more connected than ever before. This has its advantages: instantaneous communication, expanded circles of influence, access to more information. And, of course, our connectedness has concomitant drawbacks including issues with privacy and safety. In Superconnected: The Internet, Digital Media, and Techno-Social Life (Sage, 2016), Mary Chayko, a professor at the Rutgers University School of Communication and Information, examines the influence technology is having on society and the ways that members of society are shaping the uses of new technology. Using scholarship from communications, information studies, sociology and other fields, Chayko weaves together an interdisciplinary analysis of what our myriad connections mean for the present and for the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Television had been transformed by the rise of the format. In The Format Age: Television’s Entertainment Revolution Jean Chalaby, Professor of International Communication at City University London, charts the beginnings of the format for TV shows, through the globalization of the trade in TV formats, to conclude with reflections on the future of local and global TV markets. The book uses an eclectic set of theoretical frames, including Global Value Chains, World Systems Theory and work of the Annales School, to chart the political economy of the TV format. Using a wide range of examples, detailed case studies of local markets and local production systems (including the UK), the book shows how the format is now crucial to the modern television industry encompassing everything from the game show to the long form drama. The book will be of interest to all media and communications scholars, as well as anyone keen to know why we have the sorts of television programmes we have on our screens. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Daniel Kreiss is back on the podcast with his new book Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2016). Kreiss is associate professor in the School of Media and Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an affiliated fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. Why did it take more than 20 people to write a tweet for the Romney campaign? Why did dozens of new companies emerge from recent Democratic campaigns? Prototype Politics argues that each party has adopted digital technologies in some very different ways and that these differences have had major consequences. Democrats and Republicans have had varied approaches to investing in technology and in technology expertise. Once the technology leaders, Republicans have lagged behind Democrats in recent cycles, investing smaller amounts of money overall and placing much less organization emphasis on digital strategy. It remains to be seen how these differences will shape the 2016 election, but Prototype Politics offers a fascinating account of the changing role of technology has moved to the center of campaign politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In her new book Laws of Image: Privacy and Publicity in America (Stanford Law Books, 2016), Samantha Barbas provides a history of Americans’ use of law to manage their public image. She approaches this endeavor from the perspective of a legal and cultural historian, tracking the correlation between a growing American image consciousness and the rise of laws, such as the tort of invasion of privacy and damages for emotional distress, which enabled individuals to control and defend their public persona. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Seinfeld is often referred to as the greatest television show of all time. Although this may be debated, there few who would argue that it holds a prominent place in television history and popular culture. In her new book, Seinfeldia: How a Show About Nothing Changed Everything (Simon and Schuster, 2016), author Jennifer Keishin Armstrong presents the history of Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld’s “silly little show” from its struggling beginnings to its life today beyond the screen. Keishin Armstrong brings readers behind-the-scenes of Seinfeld’s inception and into the world of a show which blurs the lines between television and reality. Well-researched and thoughtfully written, Seinfeldia introduces readers to the many levels of Seinfeld’s success. From David and Seinfeld’s unorthodox way of running a television show and the writers’ negotiating for their bit in a script to the myriad of ways Seinfeld is still relevant in todays popular culture, Seinfeldia presents a thorough and easy to read history of a show that has impacted television, culture, and fandom even almost 20 years after it first aired on network television. Those who fans will appreciate Keishin Armstrong’s commitment to showing all the details that went into such classic episodes as “The Junior Mint” and “The Contest” and those who are not may start to learn a little about why Seinfeld has such staying power. Rebekah Buchanan is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative–both analog and digital–in people’s lives. She is interested in how personal narratives produced in alternative spaces create sites that challenge traditionally accepted public narratives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Sexual Abuse, Shonda and Concealment in Orthodox Jewish Communities (McFarland, 2014) analyzes how and why cases of child sexual abuse have been systematically concealed in Orthodox Jewish communities. The book (the first of its kind) thoroughly examines a number of recent cover-ups in detail, showing how denial, backlash against victims, and the manipulation of the secular justice system have placed Orthodox Jewish community leaders in the position of defending, protecting, and enabling child abusers. The book also examines the disappointing treatment of this issue in popular media, while dissecting the institutions that contribute to the cover-ups, including two–rabbinic courts and local Orthodox “patrols”–that are more or less unique to Orthodox Jewish communities. Finally, the book explores the cultural factors that have contributed to this tragedy, and concludes with hopes and proposals for future reform Michael Lesher, a writer and a lawyer, has published a number of articles about child abuse and is co-author of a book on the American family court system’s poor record of protecting children. An Orthodox Jew, he has also published short fiction and poetry and lives in Passaic, New Jersey. The second part of this interview can be listened to here. Jasun Horsley is the author of Seen & Not Seen: Confessions of a Movie Autist and several other books on extra-consensual perceptions. He has a weekly podcast called The Liminalist: The Podcast Between and a blog. For more info, go to http://auticulture.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Paul Roquet’s wonderful new book begins with an offering of jellyfish and proceeds to teach us how to read the air. Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) looks carefully at the phenomenon of ambient subjectivication or, the emergence of self with and through ambient media in modern Japan. Beginning in the 1970s, atmosphere was becoming ambient, according to Roquet, and the emergence and proliferation of new techniques of ambient subjectivication reflected a shift in how the person was understood, away from collective self-understanding and toward a model rooted in a liberal ideal of autonomy and self-determination. Each chapter of the book looks at some specific way that music, film, video, and literature from the 1970s onward have incorporated forms of ambient subjectivication, from the Erik Satie boom and the birth of environmental music of the late 1970s to the music of artists like Hatakeyama Chihei (whose 2006 Minima Moralia I highly recommend!), to films like Ichikawa Jun’s Tony Takitani, and much much more. The book is also a gateway into a world of arresting and inspiring electronic media, and I recommend reading with an internet connection at hand to explore experiences like Ryoichi Kurokawa’s rheo: 5 horizons, Tsuchiya Takafumis’ Apoptosis, and Ise Shoko’s Noema while you work through Roquet’s text. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture (New York University Press, 2014), Josh Lambert, Academic Director of the Yiddish Book Center and Visiting Assistant Professor of English at UMass Amherst, explores the role of Jews in the history of obscenity in America. Through a series of case studies, he shows how Jews battled censorship as writers, editors, publishers, critics, and lawyers. In their engagements in battles over obscenity, Jews have played a previously underappreciated role in transforming American culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Something we might think of as the Soviet internet once existed, according to Benjamin Peters‘ new book, and its failure was neither natural nor inevitable. How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (MIT Press, 2016) traces the history of early efforts to network the Soviet state, from the global spread of cybernetics in the middle of the 20th century (paying careful attention to the different ways that cybernetic thought was articulated in different international settings) to the undoing of the All-State Automated System (OGAS) between 1970-1989. The book argues that the primary reason that the Soviets struggled to network their nation rests on the institutional conditions supporting the scientific knowledge base and the command economy. In developing this argument, Peters guides readers through a story about economic cybernetics, the relationships between military and civilian sectors of Soviet society, computer networks as metaphors for brains or bodies, saxophone-playing robots, fake passports to fake countries, computer chess, and much more. The conclusion of the book also considers some of the implications of the Soviet experience for rethinking our current networked world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

I like to think (it has to be!) of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace. – Richard Brautigan, 1967 By the time Richard Brautigan distributed his fifth collection of poetry, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, on the streets of San Francisco, his reference to “a cybernetic ecology” was not an obscurantist metaphor so much as a direct nod to a pervasive and generative intellectual discourse. In The Cybernetics Moment, Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015), historian of technology Ron Kline traces the emergence of this protean discourse, along with the shifting demarcations occurring within and around it as cybernetics worked its way between technology and theorization of the social world. In doing so, he provides perhaps the most comprehensive and incisive history to date of American cybernetics and information theory. While cybernetics began as a distinctly postwar science of communication and control, Kline shows how it was linked to but split off from discussions of the physical definition of information. Cyberneticians’ emphasis on circular causality was a major influence on mid-century social science, and cybernetic theory was a common frame through which electronic computers were discussed in the media. As the subtitle suggests, Kline also grapples with the coherence of the term ‘information age,’ whose advocates departed from cybernetics yet, as he argues, remained under its shadow. Through historicizing cybernetics as a ‘moment,’ Kline characterizes the activities of its larger-than-life adherents with a sociologist’s eye, while unearthing both the material and conceptual artifacts left in its wake. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

How did two right wing presidents use culture to govern France? In Government through Culture and the Contemporary French Right (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Jeremy Ahearne, a Professor of French Studies and Cultural Policy Studies at the University of Warwick, explores are range of examples to probe the decade of Right Wing government between 2002 and 2012. Drawing on the implicit/explicit distinction in cultural policy studies, Ahearne considers how core cultural concepts have changed in France, for example the French idea of ‘laicity’ and state secularism, as well as discussing specific cultural examples. These include television and media policy, museum building, eduction policy and the political uses of French history. Overall the book is framed by the continuities and differences between the Chriac and Sarkozy regimes in France, along with the struggle for hegemony over culture and thus over government. The book will be of interest to cultural policy, cultural and media studies and French scholars, as well as those interested in examples of the governmental use of culture. Dave O’Brien is the host of New Books In Critical Theory and is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Policy at the Institute for Cultural and Creative Entrepreneurship, Goldsmiths College, University of London. His research covers a range of areas between sociology and political science, including work on the British Civil Service, British Cultural Policy, cultural labour, and urban regeneration. His most recent books are Cultural Policy: Management, Value and Modernity in the Creative Industries and After Urban Regeneration (edited with Dr. Peter Matthews). He tweets @Drdaveobrien. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

The application of behavioral science inside government has gained steam over the past few years with the creation of so-called “Nudge units” popping up in countries around the world. Their goals are simple: Use the lessons of behavioral science to make government work better. The Behavioural Insights Team in the United Kingdom and the White House Social and Behavioral Sciences team in the U.S. Canada has a team now. Australia. Singapore. All the Scandinavian countries. Behavioral science teams now have a bit of buzz. Before this buzz, there was BIAS – the Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project, the first major opportunity to apply a behavioral science lens to programs that serve poor and vulnerable families in the United States. The project, which began in 2010 funded through the Administration of Children and Families in the Department of Health and Human Services, sought to apply behavioral insights to issues related to the design and implementation of social service programs and policies with a goal of learn how such tools could be used to improve the well-being of low-income children, adults, and families. The non-profit education and social policy organization MDRC led the project. (Disclosure: I worked on BIAS in 2010-2011 at one of the partner organizations, ideas42, also participating.) Traditionally, many social programs were designed in ways that individuals must make active decisions and go through a series of steps in order to benefit from them. They must decide which programs to apply to or participate in, complete forms, attend meetings, show proof of eligibility, and arrange travel and child care. Program designers have often assumed that individuals will carefully consider options, analyze details, and make decisions that maximize their well-being. BIAS drew heavily from that past three decades of research in the behavioral sciences showing that human decision making is often imperfect and imprecise. People clients and program administrators alike procrastinate, get overwhelmed by choices, miss details, lose their self-control, rely on mental shortcuts, and permit small changes in the environment to influence their decisions. As a result, programs and participants may not always achieve the goals they set for themselves. Working through ACF programs, the BIAS team designed and tested 15 behaviorally-informed interventions in seven states involving nearly 100,000 people. Many of the interventions involved a redesign of communications materials. Projects ranged from increasing child support collections, to improving child care recertification processes, to changing messaging around TANF participation. Along the way, BIAS researchers published a series of reports laying out not just which designs worked and didn’t, but how they went about implementing the designs in difficult bureaucratic and technological environments and when they faced challenges that altered their work. A final report is due out later this year. Of the 15 interventions, 11 showed positive signs of impact, making the overall project today one proof point among a growing number about the promise of applying insights from behavioral science to make government work better. John Balz is Director of Strategy at VML, a full-service marketing agency with offices around the globe. He has spent his career applying behavioral science strategies in the marketing and advertising field through direct mail and email, display and .coms, mobile messaging, e-commerce and social media. You can follow him on Twitter @Nudgeblog and contact him at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Meredith Conroy is the author of Masculinity, Media, and the American Presidency (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015). Conroy is assistant professor of Political Science at California State University, San Bernardino. Joining the conversation is Lilly Goren, professor of political science at Carrol University. Does gendered language relate to electoral success? Does the most masculine candidate win the race? In this book, Conroy unpacked how sex, gender, and identity interact during presidential campaigns. She finds that the media portrays presidential candidates as masculine, feminine, or neutral, and that these descriptions relate to candidate success. In the last several elections, only Barack Obama in 2008 won despite being portrayed as the less masculine candidate. Conroys findings provide a lens through which the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump can be better understood, and suggest ways that subtle gender bias shapes elections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Cass Sunstein‘s son, Declan, got dad hooked on Star Wars. And dad, a Harvard Law professor, ended up writing a book about it. “If you’d told me a year ago that I’d write a book about Star Wars,” Sunstein recently told the Boston Globe,“I’d say it’s more likely that I’d become an astronaut or a poet.” In The World According to Star Wars (Harper Collins, 2016) Sunstein explores its lessons as they relate to childhood, fathers, the Dark Side and redemption. Calling it our Modern Myth, Sunstein says Star Wars also has a lot to teach us about constitutional law, economics, and political uprisings. From those topics, it answers questions like these. No one predicted the film’s massive success so how did it happen? When Star Wars heroes are told they are free to choose, what does that mean in their epic story world? What does it say about our never-ending ability to make the right decision when the chips are down in our real one? How are constitutional law opinions similar to serialized blockbusters? An intelligent book for a general audience, Sunstein doesn’t shy away from putting on his subjective movie critic’s hat and declaring which Star Wars is the best. Spoiler: He puts Empire Strikes Back at No. 1. Why? Listen to the podcast to find out. John Balz is Director of Strategy at VML, a full-service marketing agency with offices around the globe. He has spent his career applying behavioral science strategies in the marketing and advertising field through direct mail and email, display and .coms, mobile messaging, e-commerce and social media. You can follow him on Twitter @Nudgeblog and contact him at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

What role does Bangalore’s private news culture play in shaping the southern Indian metropolis’ ongoing urban transformation? Sahana Udupa‘s new book Making News in Global India: Media, Publics, Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2015) answers this question through a fascinating and fine grained ethnography of the city’s bi-lingual news media. Exploring differences amongst the English language and local language press, class-based civic activism, novelties in news room practices and layers of journalistic identities the book shows the ways in which a certain type of aspiration that has come to characterize some news outlets, conflicts and contends with the visibility of local urban cultures and the struggle for dominance amongst different actors in the news field. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

The landscape described in Bernard Harcourt‘s new book is a dystopia saturated by pleasure. We do not live in a drab Orwellian world, he writes. We live in a beautiful, colorful, stimulating, digital world a rich, bright world full of passion and jouissance–and by means of which we reveal ourselves and make ourselves virtually transparent to surveillance. Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age (Harvard University Press, 2015) guides us through our new digital age, one that makes it so easy for others to monitor, profile, and shape our every desire. We are building what he calls the expository society a platform for unprecedented levels of exhibition, watching, and influence that is reconfiguring our political relations and reshaping our notions of what it means to be an individual. Other actors from advertisers to government agencies can compile huge amounts of information about who we are and what we do. Whether they use it to recommend other products to buy or track our movements, Harcourt argues that the influence and interests of other actors is often hidden from us. Despite leaks of classified materials about the extent of this surveillance, public outrage is limited and mild. The scale of data collection and tracking is not a national let alone a global scandal. According to Exposed, are appetites are too well satisfied and our attentions too distracted. Harcourt prods us to practice digital disobedience, lest we will remain in a digital mesh that will only continue to restrict our privacy and anonymity underneath its beautiful, shiny suit. John Balz is Director of Strategy at VML, a full-service marketing agency with offices around the globe. He has spent his career applying behavioral science strategies in the marketing and advertising field through direct mail and email, display and .coms, mobile messaging, e-commerce and social media. You can follow him on Twitter @Nudgeblog and contact him at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

“One of the things that was most shocking to me getting into the media business, an MSNBC.com producer tells Josh Braun, was the realization that regular people were making it. Television to me . . . was just like sunlight. You push the button and it just comes off the screen. Today, television just comes off lots of screens. Computers, tablets, phones, city billboards, stadium jumbotrons. The path from the recording pictures to showing them to us their physical distribution is neither simple nor elegantly planned. In This Program is Brought to You By . . . Distributing Television Online (Yale University Press 2015), Joshua Braun, an Assistant Professor of Journalism Studies in the Journalism Department at University of Massachusetts-Amherst, explores changes in the technology platforms for online news at MSNBC between 2007 and 2012. A book of media sociology, Braun uses a series of examples at MSNBC such as a more flexible video player, online community forums, and a blog for the Rachel Maddow Show, to make an argument about the shapes these distribution solutions take. Developed through project-based management, involving multiple teams with differing objectives and resources, each solution is ultimately unique to the particular task at hand. These digital systems, he argues, are a sociological phenomenon that come together like physical infrastructure such as power grids and highways. Josh takes an inside look at MSNBC between 2007 and 2012, a time when the network was consolidating the brands of its television network and online news hub and rolling out new technologies internally like blogs, video players and community forums that could support viewer and visitor demands. This Program is Brought to You By unmasks the magic behind the pictures and sounds that just come off the screen. John Balz is Director of Strategy at VML, a full-service marketing agency with offices around the globe. He has spent his career applying behavioral science strategies in the marketing and advertising field through direct mail and email, display and .coms, mobile messaging, e-commerce and social media. You can follow him on Twitter @Nudgeblog and contact him at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

How can academics respond to the rise of social media? Or should they respond at all? In Social Media for Academics (Sage, 2016), Mark Carrigan, from the Centre for Social Ontology, offers an informed and reflective take on social media, with some practical guidelines for academics. The book introduces key concepts, such as digital scholarship, social media and ‘the public’, alongside discussions of specific platforms including twitter (Mark himself tweets @mark_carrigan). The book is not only a guide for academics who are interested in social media, as it considers the impact of new media forms on scholarship itself, with considerations of academic identities, academic networks and relationships, as well as the benefits and risks of embracing social media.The book is essential reading for any academic seeking an informed understanding of both the ‘how to’ and, perhaps more importantly, the ‘why’ and ‘what’ of social media for academics. Dave O’Brien is the host of New Books In Critical Theory and is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Policy at the Institute for Cultural and Creative Entrepreneurship, Goldsmiths College, University of London. His research covers a range of areas between sociology and political science, including work on the British Civil Service, British Cultural Policy, cultural labour, and urban regeneration. His most recent books are Cultural Policy: Management, Value and Modernity in the Creative Industries and After Urban Regeneration (edited with Dr Peter Matthews). He tweets@Drdaveobrien Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Seth Jacobowitzs new book opens with a balloon ride and closes with a record-scratching cat, and in between it offers a fascinating history of Meiji media focused on technologies of writing and script. Inspired, in part, by the work of Friedrich Kittler, Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Japanese Literature and Visual Culture (Harvard University Asia Center, 2015) traces the story of shorthand in Japan. First introduced for recording political speeches and the conduct of the state, by the mid-1880s shorthand was used to transcribe popular theatrical storytelling and enabled a kind of unvarnished vernacular writing that was the forerunner of genbun itchi, the unification of speech and writing, or the unified style. Its history interweaves in important ways with the histories of standardization movements, script reform, the rise of communications systems like telegraphy and the postal system, and the development of new literary styles of realism. (Also, in case you missed it above: there’s a record-scratching cat.) Jacobowitzs study spans fiction, photography, visual art, and more, and its highly recommended for anyone interested in the histories of writing and literature in Japan and beyond. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South (Harvard University Press, 2016) maps the intricate, intersecting channels of information exchange in the early American South, exploring how people in the colonial world came into possession of vital knowledge in a region that lacked a regular mail system or a printing press until the 1730s. Challenging the notion of early colonial America as an uninformed backwater, Alejandra Dubcovsky uncovers the ingenious ways its inhabitants acquired timely news through largely oral networks. Information circulated through the region via spies, scouts, traders, missionaries, and other ad hoc couriers and by encounters of sheer chance with hunting parties, shipwrecked sailors, captured soldiers, or fugitive slaves. For many, content was often inseparable from the paths taken and the alliances involved in acquiring it. The different and innovative ways that Indians, Africans, and Europeans struggled to make sense of their world created communication networks that linked together peoples who otherwise shared no consensus of the physical and political boundaries shaping their lives. Exchanging information was not simply about having the most up-to-date news or the quickest messenger. It was a way of establishing and maintaining relationships, of articulating values and enforcing prioritiesa process inextricably tied to the regions social and geopolitical realities. At the heart of Dubcovskys study are important lessons about the nexus of information and power in the early American South. Andrew Bard Epstein is a graduate teacher and researcher at Yale University. Follow him on twitter @andeps. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

We are said to be in a golden age of TV. The best stories today are told on television screens in serialized forms. The Wire, Lost, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos are a few of the shows that have elevated the cache of television, introducing riskier forms of storytelling in a medium that has been typically formulaic and convention bound. Fans and critics alike celebrate them for innovation and television networks are filled programming with more and more of them. In Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television (NYU Press 2015), is film and television scholar Jason Mittell of Middlebury College offers a sustained analysis of the poetics of television narrative, focusing on how storytelling has changed in recent years and how viewers make sense of these innovations. Complex television, Mittell says, is not a genre. It is a storytelling mode and set of associated production and reception practices that span a wide range of programs across an array of genres. Through close analyses of key programs, includingThe Wire, Lost, Veronica Mars, and Mad Mento name a four, the book traces the emergence of this narrative mode, focusing on issues such as viewer comprehension, transmedia storytelling, serial authorship, character change, and cultural evaluation. Developing a television-specific set of narrative theories, Complex TV argues that television is the most vital and important storytelling medium of our time. It is not that the best stories today are on the small screen. Rather, that the most sophisticated, freshest, and the most complex techniques for telling them are. John Balz is Director of Strategy at VML, a full-service marketing agency with offices around the globe. He has spent his career applying behavioral science strategies in the marketing and advertising field through direct mail and email, display and .coms, mobile messaging, e-commerce and social media. You can follow him on Twitter @Nudgeblog and contact him at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Teenagers live in their phones. As an educator you can try to pull them away or meet them where they are. The 160-Character Solution: How Text Messaging and Other Behavioral Strategies Can Improve Education (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015) urges educators to meet teens on their must-have device. Author Benjamin Castleman of the University of Virginia shows how text messaging combined with insights from behavioral science―more specifically the fields of behavioral economics and social psychology―can be leveraged to help students complete assignments, perform to their full potential on tests, and choose schools and colleges where they are well positioned for success. In his own research, Castleman has studied how to use personalized text messages to reduce “summer melt,” in which up to 40 percent of high school graduates who have been accepted to college, mostly from underserved communities, fail to show up for the fall semester. Behavioral strategies extend beyond texting and even beyond smartphone technology. By focusing on behavioral changes, Castleman demonstrates that small tweaks in how we ask questions, design applications, and tailor reminders can lead to better decision making and have remarkable impacts on student and school success. The 160-Character Solution makes a broader case for employing these behavioral strategies to improve educational outcomes from preschool all the way to college. John Balz is Director of Strategy at VML, a full-service marketing agency with offices around the globe. He has spent his career applying behavioral science strategies in the marketing and advertising field through direct mail and email, display and .coms, mobile messaging, e-commerce and social media. You can follow on Twitter @Nudgeblog and contact him at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Thanks to mobile phones, getting online is easier and cheaper than ever. In After Access: Inclusion, Development, and a More Mobile Internet (MIT Press, 2015), Jonathan Donner challenges the optimistic narrative that mobile phone will finally close the digital divide. How we log on, how long we stay, what we choose to do, what we can do – all are shaped by our environments, resources and digital literacies. After Access examines the implications of the shift to a more mobile, more available Internet throughout the developing world. Donner addresses these implications specifically for socioeconomic development and broad-based inclusion in a global society. He offers a note of caution about the Panglossian views of mobile phones arguing that access and effective use are not the same thing, and the digital world does not run on mobile handsets alone. Donner, a Senior Director of Research at Caribou Digital, a UK-based consultancy focused on building inclusive digital economies in the developing world. After Access draws on ethnographic and survey research in South Africa and India, as well as the burgeoning literature from the ICT4D (Internet and Communication Technologies for Development) and mobile communication communities. It introduces a conceptual framework for understanding effective use of the Internet by those whose “digital repertoires” contain exclusively mobile devices. In showing that there is no singular internet experience, Donner argues that both the potentialities and constraints of the shift to a more mobile Internet are important considerations for scholars and practitioners interested in internet use in the developing world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Erika Franklin Fowler, Michael M. Franz, and Travis N. Ridout are the co-authors of Political Advertising in the United States (Westview Press 2016). Fowler is assistant professor of government at Wesleyan University, Franz is associate professor of government and legal studies at Bowdoin College, and Ridout is Thomas S. Foley Distinguished Professor of Government and Public Policy in the School of Politics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs at Washington State University. The authors, co-directors of the Wesleyan Media Project, draw from the latest data to analyze how campaign finance laws have affected the sponsorship and content of political advertising and how the Internet has changed the distribution of ads. With detailed analysis of presidential and congressional campaign ads and discussion questions in each chapter, Political Advertising provides an ideal explainer for students, scholars and practitioners who want to understand the ins and outs of political advertising. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

With the growth of social media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, we are increasingly heading toward a radically open society. In Sharing our Lives Online: Risks and Exposure in Social Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), author David R. Brake explores some of the social and individual harms that can arise from unwary social media use. Brake draws upon in-depth interviews with bloggers as well as scholarly research to explore why users may inadvertently reveal more online than they suppose. He explains in detail the social, technological, and commercial influences and pressures that keep us posting what we often shouldn’t and that prevent us from fully appreciating the risks when we do so. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

What is the “stuff” that fuels the information society in which we live? In his new book, Metadata (MIT 2015), information scientist Jeffrey Pomerantz asserts that metadata powers our digital society. After defining metadata-data that has the potential to provide information about an object-Pomerantz considers the various kind of metadata. This raw material provides descriptions about individuals and most every other thing in the world. This data allows people, places, and things to be found. According to Pomerantz, metadata has become infrastructural as it plays such a pivotal role about in all of the things we do, yet, it is invisible. This invisible foundational material is created and collected all the time, and has vast implications for governments, corporations, and individuals. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Finn Brunton‘s Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet (MIT Press, 2013) is a cultural history of those communications that seek to capture our attention for the purposes of exploiting it. From pranks on early computer networks in the 1970s to commercial nuisances in the 1990s to the global criminal infrastructure of today driven by botnets and algorithms, spam’s history surfaces and shifts with the Internet itself. Spam is a lively book packed with tales of the people responsible for sharing and stopping spam’s myriad of forms in email, web sites and social networks. This includes everyone from programmers and security professionals, marketers and lawyers, and con artists and thieves to name a few. Each person has personal experiences with spam and opinions about when they’re being spammed, but Brunton, a professor at New York University, reminds us about the critical role that communities, organizations, and governments have played in regulating spam. Ultimately, the governance agreed to by these groups defines spam in the contemporaneous moment, but more importantly, shapes spam’s future forms. As long as open communication platforms exist, so will spam. It is more useful to treat spam as signal about the quality of our digital interactions. The more our attention is captured and exploited the worse our digital communities are functioning. Like the mysterious meat in a can (and with full appreciation for all the spam lovers out there), a digital diet heavy on spam isn’t just unappetizing, it’s unhealthy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

When we consider the television, we think not only about how it’s used, but also it’s impact on culture. The television, tv, telly, or tube, became popular in the West in the late 1940s and early 1950s and was seen as a form of entertainment and enjoyment for the family. Other “technology” that assists with leisure include things like rubber-soled shoes, books, and other digital devices. In their new book, Enjoying Machines (MIT 2015), Barry Brown and Oskar Juhlin, both scholars in the Stockholm University Mobile Life VINN Excellence Center, the success of a particular technology can be measured by how well it creates pleasure. The authors argue that pleasure “is fundamentally social in nature,” and that to understand how technology supports leisure it is important to “produce a more sophisticated definition” of enjoyment. To do this Brown and Juhlin embark on an ethnographic investigation of technology and enjoyment that combines the sociological study of activity and the study of human-machine interaction. Over the course of their examination, the authors are careful to consider both the positives – enjoyment – and negatives – addiction- in relation to devices. Ultimately, Enjoying Machines offers a model of enjoyment useful for better understanding how to design useful machines. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Humans have coped with tragedy using ritual and memorials since the Neolithic era. Doka called a memorial a space invested with meaning, “set aside to commemorate an event such as a tragedy.” Memorialization is a ritual of bereavement, the creation of a place, permanent or not, that facilitates the persistence of memory. This space allows for the restructuring of the social network between the living, those who create the memorial, and the dead, those for which the memorial is created. Memorialization happens in both the analog and digital contexts. In fact, some now decline to recognize a distinction between the on- and offline worlds. In his new book, Journalism and Memorialization in the Age of Social Media (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), Peter J. Gloviczki, an assistant professor at Coker College, conceptualizes online memorials as networked remembrance spaces. These social media posts and groups are “immediate, interactive and public and they function across a great distance.” Online memorials are both user-driven – the users drive the conversations and are responsible for keeping up the sites – and story-driven – the sites are places where users tell stories related to the subject(s) of the memorial. Thorough, fact-based journalism plays an important role in the maintenance of online memorials. According to Gloviczki, news reports provide the foundation for the discussion of events, as well as being central to making sense of those events. So significant is journalism for online memorials that, in some cases, a memorial will cease once coverage of that event ends. But many online memorials continue long after media interests concludes. The persistence of these sites demonstrates how online memorials “disrupt the notion of a finite end.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Megan Prelinger‘s beautiful new book brings together the histories of technology and visuality to ask the question, “What cultural history of electronics can be extrapolated from a close look at the associated graphic art?” Inside the Machine: Art and Invention in the Electronic Age (W. W. Norton, 2015) treats the commercial and advertising art of the mid-twentieth century as an archive to explore the social and cultural engagement with electronics technologies during a particularly vibrant moment for the American graphic commercial arts. Incorporating text and image as sources to be read, Prelinger’s book moves from the beginnings of FM technology and vacuum tubes, to televisions and quartz crystals, to transistors and circuit boards, to digital computing and into space. Of special interest is the attention Prelinger pays to to the importance of graphic designers and staff artists at major labs and research centers. The book models an innovative and inspiring way to read graphic images as historical documents, and the story is a pleasure to read for specialists and non-experts alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Jerome de Bourdon‘s Histoire de la television sous de Gaulle (Presses des Mines, 2014) is a revised version of a book that first appeared in 1990. This edition has been revamped, and includes a new introduction in which Bourdon explores the historiography of the medium in the years since the book’s original publication. A history of television that is also a history of the De Gaulle presidency and the early years of the Fifth Republic, Histoire de la television sous de Gaulle examines a range of issues, from government legislation to programming and content, to the variety of personnel (directors, producers, technicians, administrators) who made television happen during this “era of professionalization.” Exploring the medium as both information and entertainment, the book considers the relationship between television and the cinema, situating television within the broader cultural and political history of France during this critical period. Covering key events and turning points, including the introduction of a second channel in 1964 and a key directors’ strike in 1965, the book also charts the years leading up to 1968 in France, exploring the impact that TV and les eventements had upon one another. This new edition considers the history of TV in light of the technological and cultural developments of the last twenty-five years (reality TV, the Internet) and the new (especially audiovisual) archival material available to researchers of television’s past in France. Bringing together the analysis of government policy, culture, and labour, the book is vital reading for anyone interested in the history of the French media and/or the Fifth Republic’s crucial first decade. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

John Durham Peters‘ wonderful new book is a brilliant and beautifully-written consideration of natural environments as subjects for media studies. Accessible and informative for a broad readership. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (University of Chicago Press, 2015) is structured as a series of meditations on and explorations of water, fire, air, earth, and ether media. After a chapter that sets out some of the foundational ideas shaping the book and charts an intellectual landscape for rethinking media, each of the following chapters offers a carefully curated series of studies of particulars – dolphin jaws, candles, towers, watches, clouds, feet, bells, weathermen, Google, and more – as a means of examining the significance of infrastructure, forgetting, technicity, and other modes of understanding media. Peters asks us to come with a fresh perspective to notions that we otherwise take for granted, and the result is a thoughtful and inspiring account that brings together media studies, theology, philosophy, and the natural sciences in thoroughly compelling ways. Among other things, the book is a call for a “greener media studies” that “appreciates our long natural history of shaping and being shaped by our habitats as a process of mediation.” What if, Peters asks, we took nature instead of the mind as the “epitome of meaning”? What are the stakes of doing so? The result is among the most exciting and enjoyable books that I’ve read in some time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

By now it is incontrovertible that new technology has had an effect on how regular people get information. Whether in the form of an online newspaper or a Google search, new technology has allowed individuals to access masses of information faster than ever before. What, then, has been the effect of digital tools on research practices? In their new book Knowledge Machines: Digital Transformations of the Sciences and Humanities (MIT Press, 2015), Eric T. Meyer, Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, and Ralph Schroeder, Professor at the Oxford Internet Institute, explore how digital tools have transformed research. To do this, Meyer and Schroeder use case studies to examine how new technology has, and continues to, change research in various fields, and what this means for the future of e-research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Did you notice that after 9/11, the depiction of torture on prime-time television went up nearly seven hundred percent? Hilary Neroni did. She had just finished a book on the changing relationship between female characters and violence in narrative cinema, and was attuned to function of violence in film and television. This was around the time the Abu Ghraib torture photos were leaked to the public. Over the next 10 years, torture porn appeared in the Saw and Hostel films, and it seemed that torture quickly became a routine element of thriller plots in movies and TV, such as the series 24. In The Subject of Torture: Psychoanalysis and Biopolitics in Television and Film (Columbia University Press, 2015), Neroni makes a compelling case that, prior to 9/11, the stage had already been set for the dehumanizing fantasy of torture to appear in mass culture – via biopolitics. With this book, Neroni takes on the task of defining and understanding torture through a psychoanalytic lens, using films and television as case studies. The book is both compelling and readable, and argues that the fantasy and depiction of torture play a role as an ideology in national politics and policy, and that it’s all more complicated than it seems–once you stop averting your eyes. Hilary Neroni teaches in the Film and Television Studies Program at the University of Vermont and is also the author of The Violent Woman: Femininity, Narrative, and Violence in Contemporary American Cinema. Her areas of interest include representations of gender and race in contemporary American film, violence in film, women directors, documentary film/video, feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. She has published essays on women directors (in particular Jane Campion and Claire Denis) and on issues surrounding gender and violence in the cinema. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In late imperial China, how did local elites connect with and influence the central government? How was local information made and managed? How did the state incorporate frontier areas into the empire? How were books produced and read, and by whom? In his new book, Joseph R. Dennis helps answer these questions and more by studying the genre of local gazetteers. Focusing on the Ming period, Writing, Publishing, and Reading Local Gazetteers in Imperial China, 1100-1700 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2015) argues that gazetteers were “important points of intersection between the central government and local societies and one of the main vehicles for transmitting local information to central government officials.” In seven chapters that collectively move readers through the life cycle of a gazetteer, Dennis’s story informs the histories of the frontier, the state, kinship, the law, material culture, and the book industry. It will be a must-read for all scholars and students of late imperial Chinese history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

At New Books in Psychoanalysis, interviews are conducted using Skype. As the program is audio rather than video based, it never occurred to me to use the camera on my computer to see on the screen the person I was speaking to. Rather, I kept my ear turned acutely towards the authors, hanging on their every word while privately perusing my list of questions. I have joked with many interviewees that for all I know they are in their pajamas or naked. Truth be told, I have had no interest in seeing the authors during the interview. There was and is something about having the experience that the listener has on hearing, rather than seeing, the interview that may play a role in creating a certain kind of intensity and intimacy. So it was not lost on me that for this particular interview with Gillian Isaacs Russell about a book that looks straightforwardly at the impact of technology on the therapeutic relationship, that we would not be making eye contact. Though we could, I requested that we not do so. And anyway, of course, if you have used it, eye contact is actually impossible on Skype. We can see each other but we cannot lock orbs. Our interview, as you will hear, is full of the same kinds of problems that one might have when working with a patient over the ether. At one point there is a bizarre reverb and everything Isaacs Russell says comes out in triplicate. We did not lose the connection though this has happened to me on several occasions while playing my interlocutory part. And of course we both had our anxieties about the capacity of the technology to connect us and to keep us connected but do bear in mind that we are not analyst and patient. Our relationship is layered with much less meaning or significance than that of the analytic couple. If the technology disconnected us, we would not wonder if it was something that one of us said. No one would have hurt feelings. We could keep it impersonal. In Screen Relations: The Limits of Computer-Mediated Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (Karnac, 2015), Isaacs Russell asks a key question of psychoanalysts: what might be lost in working this way? The interview explores reasons why analysts have jumped in to use Skype and explores what the implications might be of the loss of two bodies in a room together. Her thinking is clear and the ideas she pits forth I found haunting. The age old question of what makes a treatment psychoanalysis came to mind when reading this book as I wondered if you can’t smell the patient, if there is not the risk of touch that is not acted upon, if there is not the walk out the door when the session is over, is essential grist for the mill irreparably lost? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Literary practices are often associated with specific social groups in particular social settings. Kate Pahl‘s Materializing Literacies in Communities: The Uses of Literacy Revisited (Bloomsbury, 2014) challenges these assumptions by showing the varieties of literary practice in Rotherham, England. The book engages with the locally particular to draw out a variety of general findings, relevant to methodological reflection and material culture debates. The book draws on a wealth of projects from the AHRC funded Connected Communities programme, including Fishing as Wisdom, The Imagine Project, and Language as Talisman. The book represents an important intervention into how we understand community, literacy and identity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In the first legal history course I took as an undergraduate, I read Lawrence M. Friedman‘s A History of American Law and American Law in the 20th Century and have been fascinated with the subject ever since. His most recent work, The Big Trial: Law as Public Spectacle (University Press of Kansas, 2015) combines the scintillating narrative style that he employs as the author of several mystery novels with the keen insights about law and society that he has revealed time and again in his numerous cornerstone works of legal scholarship. Per the book jacket, “The trial of O. J. Simpson was a sensation, avidly followed by millions of people, but it was also, in a sense, nothing new. One hundred years earlier the Lizzie Borden trial had held the nation in thrall. The names (and the crimes) may change, but the appeal is enduring–and why this is, how it works, and what it means are what Lawrence Friedman investigates in The Big Trial. What is it about these cases that captures the public imagination? Are the “headline trials” of our period different from those of a century or two ago? And what do we learn from them, about the nature of our society, past and present? To get a clearer picture, Friedman first identifies what certain headline trials have in common, then considers particular cases within each grouping. The political trial, for instance, embraces treason and spying, dissenters and radicals, and, to varying degrees, corruption and fraud. Celebrity trials involve the famous–whether victims, as in the case of Charles Manson, or defendants as disparate as Fatty Arbuckle and William Kennedy Smith–but certain high-profile cases, such as those Friedman categorizes as tabloid trials, can also create celebrities. The fascination of whodunit trials can be found in the mystery surrounding the case: Are we sure about O. J. Simpson? What about Claus von Bulow–tried, in another sensational case, for sending his wife into a coma? An especially interesting type of case Friedman groups under the rubric worm in the bud. These are cases, such as that of Lizzie Borden, that seem to put society itself on trial; they raise fundamental social questions and often suggest hidden and secret pathologies. And finally, a small but important group of cases proceed from moral panic, the Salem witchcraft trials being the classic instance, though Friedman also considers recent examples. Though they might differ in significant ways, these types of trials also have important similarities. Most notably, they invariably raise questions about identity (Who is this defendant? A villain? An innocent unfairly accused?). And in this respect, The Big Trial shows us, the headline trial reflects a critical aspect of modern society. Reaching across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the latest outrage, from congressional hearings to lynching and vigilante justice to public punishment, from Dr. Sam Sheppard (the “fugitive”) to Jeffrey Dahmer (the “cannibal”), The Rosenbergs to Timothy McVeigh, the book presents a complex picture of headline trials as displays of power–moments of “didactic theater”” that demonstrate in one way or another whether a society is fair, whom it protects, and whose interest it serves.” Some of the topics we cover are: (1) Classifications of the different types of headline trials; (2) How telling the story of headline trials also tells the story of the rise of mass media; (3) Why big trials are considered didactic theater. (4) The effect the familiarity we now have with celebrities has upon the trials that involve them. Lawrence Friedman is Marion Rice Kirkwood Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

What do we know about the individuals who make comments on online news stories, blogs, videos and other media? What kind of people take the time to post all manner of information and context to material created by others? Joseph M. Reagle, assistant professor of communication studies at Northeastern University and a faculty associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, examines these online pontificators and provocateurs in his new book Reading the Comments: Likers, Haters and Manipulators at the Bottom of the Web (MIT Press, 2015). Reagle categorizes the different kinds of comments, thereby organizing the different kinds of commenters into groups. In addition, Reagle considers both the function and value of comments in society. Just listen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Sonja D. Williams‘ book Word Warrior: Richard Durham, Radio, and Freedom (University of Illinois Press, 2015) connects its subject to some of the most important events and social movements of his time, including what we now call the Civil Rights Movement and the Great Migration. Durham’s life path, like that of many other African Americans born in the early part of the 20th century, goes from the Jim Crow South, to Chicago, where his family builds a solid middle-class existence founded on educational attainment and hard work. Durham’s writing career included poetry, newspapers, radio, television, and a celebrated biography of Muhammad Ali. Durham also played a significant role in the election of the first black mayor of Chicago, his high school friend, Harold Washington. In this engaging interview, Sonja Williams sheds important light on an unassuming man who was most comfortable quietly but forcefully serving the causes he believed in from behind the scenes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Nicole Starosielski‘s new book brings an environmental and ecological consciousness to the study of digital media and digital systems, and it is a must-read. The Undersea Network (Duke University Press, 2015) looks carefully and imaginatively at the geography of undersea cable networks, paying special attention to the materiality of network infrastructure and its relationships with the histories of the Pacific. The book revises what we think we know about the infrastructure of global networks: they are not “wireless,” but wired; not rhizomatic and distributed, but semicentralized; not deterritorialized, but “territorially entrenched”; not resilient, but precarious and vulnerable; and not urban, but rural and aquatic. After providing a broad overview of three major eras of cable development – the copper cables of the 1850s-1950s, the coaxial cables of the 1950s-1980s, and the fiber-optic cables of the 1990s on, in each case focusing on the importance of security, insulation, and interconnection – Starosielski analyzes how cables have become embedded into existing natural and cultural environments in a number of specific sites in Hawai’i, California, New Zealand, British Columbia, Tahiti, Guam, Fiji, Yap, and beyond. Countering the rhetorical pull of terms like “flow” that tend to provoke an approach to media that is deterritorializing and dematerializing, Starosielski instead turns readers’ attention to the ecological dimension of media and the fixed, material investments grounding today’s communication networks. It is a brilliant book that deserves a wide readership. Don’t miss the website that is woven together with the book: www.surfacing.in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Video games have become an important cultural and economic force in our media environment. In his new book, The Video Game Business (British Film Institute, 2014), scholar Randy Nichols provides an overview of the increasingly diverse global market for video games. Nichols locates the origins of the video game industry back to the dawn of the computer age in the 1960s. He then explores the emergence of an industry around video games, noting the interdependence of hardware and software across a number of key “epochs”: from consoles to computer gaming to the explosion of mobile gaming. Throughout the book, Nichols explores key moments of transition in video games by providing institutional profiles of key industrial players in the industry. His critical analysis of power in the video game industry also explores the role of labor and audiences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Networks seem to be the dominant metaphor for contemporary society. In Networkologies: A Philosophy of Networks for a Hyperconnected Age (Zero Books, 2014), Christopher Vitale sets out a manifesto for understanding and using networks as the basis of a new philosophy. The book draws on continental philosophy, complex systems theory and a range of other elements to both introduce and contextualise, as well as present, the networkology manifesto. The book explores what networks are, how they emerge, how they change and how they are resilient (or not). The book intervenes in the contemporary interest in networks and will thus be of interest beyond just the critical theoretical disciplines. The text is also part of a much broader networkological project, including an original iteration of the manifesto and several papers. You can find out more about the project here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications