New Books in Technology

Over the past 15 years, journalism has experienced a rapid proliferation of data about online reader behavior in the form of web metrics. These newsroom metrics influence which stories are written, how news is promoted, and which journalists get hired and fired. Some argue that metrics help journalists better serve their audiences. Others worry that metrics are the contemporary equivalent of a stopwatch-wielding factory manager. In All the News That's Fit to Click: How Metrics Are Transforming the Work of Journalists (Princeton UP 2021), Caitlin Petre offers a rare behind-the-scenes look at how metrics are reshaping the work of journalism. The book is based on Petre's interviews and ethnographic observations at Chartbeat, Gawker, and the New York Times. Across the organizations, she finds that newsroom metrics are a powerful form of managerial surveillance and discipline. However, unlike the manager's stopwatch that preceded them, digital metrics are designed to gain the trust of wary journalists by providing a habit-forming user experience that mimics key features of addictive games. She details how metrics intersect with newsroom hierarchies and norms, as well as how their ambiguity leads to seemingly arbitrary interpretations of success. As performance analytics spread to virtually every professional field, Petre's findings speak to the future of expertise and labor relations in contexts far beyond journalism. Caitlin Petre is an assistant professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University. Jenna Spinelle is an instructor in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State and host of the Democracy Works podcast. Jenna Spinelle is a journalism instructor at Penn State's Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications. She's also the communications specialist for the university's McCourtney Institute for Democracy, where she hosts and produces the Democracy Works podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Today I talked to Angelica Malin about her new book She Made It: The Toolkit for Female Founders in the Digital Age (Kogan Page, 2021). Female entrepreneurs don’t tend to receive the same funding assistance as do their male counterparts, but in turn they have the advantage of often connecting more effectively with their target markets. It’s their soft skills, in effect, that can see them through observes Angelica Malin. Plus one should never forget the power of having a greater purpose, a sense of mission by, for instance, by addressing a need that other, often male entrepreneurs may overlook. This guest has no fear of public speaking, whatsoever – and it shows. This is a very engaging episode as Angelica gives crisp, lively answers to questions like: why it helps to be personal and quirky in addressing journalists, how Instagram has changed in recent years, and how Taylor Swift helped make She Made It possible. Angelica Malin is the Editor-in-Chief of About Time Magazine and the U.K.’s rising voice for championing women founders and entrepreneurs. She’s appeared on the BBC News and LBC Business Hour and has been featured in The Telegraph, Forbes, and Real Business. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of nine books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His new book is Blah, Blah, Blah: A Snarky Guide to Office Politics. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Our bodies are scanned, probed, imaged, sampled, and transformed into data by clinicians and technologists. In Giving Bodies Back to Data: Image Makers, Bricolage, and Reinvention in Magnetic Resonance Technology (MIT Press, 2021), Silvia Casini reveals the affective relations and materiality that turn data into image–and in so doing, gives bodies back to data. Opening the black box of MRI technology, Casini examines the bodily, situated aspects of visualization practices around the development of this technology. Reframing existing narratives of biomedical innovation, she emphasizes the important but often overlooked roles played by aesthetics, affectivity, and craft practice in medical visualization. Combining history, theory, laboratory ethnography, archival research, and collaborative art-science, Casini retrieves the multiple presences and agencies of bodies in data visualization, mapping the traces of scientists’ body work and embodied imagination. She presents an in-depth ethnographic study of MRI development at the University of Aberdeen’s biomedical physics laboratory, from the construction of the first whole-body scanner for clinical purposes through the evolution of the FFC-MRI. Going beyond her original focus on MRI, she analyzes a selection of neuroscience- or biomedicine-inspired interventions by artists in media ranging from sculpture to virtual reality. Finally, she presents a methodology for designing and carrying out small-scale art-science projects, describing a collaboration that she herself arranged, highlighting the relational and aesthetic-laden character of data that are the product of craftsmanship and affective labor at the laboratory bench. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach 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/technology

Contrary to the claims of many of today’s advocates of computerized instruction and online learning, efforts to use technology to improve the education process are hardly new. In Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning (MIT Press, 2021), Audrey Watters recounts the attempts over the past century to use technology to improve educational procedures. These began over a century ago with psychologist Sidney Pressy’s effort to invent an “automatic teacher” that would eliminate drudgery by automating test scoring. While such efforts gained momentum in the 1930s, the attempts by manufacturers to profit from such technology often complicated their introduction and adoption. In the 1950s B. F. Skinner gave new life to these endeavors by developing devices and processes that applied his theories of behavioral psychology to the learning process. Though the idea of “push-button education” seized the public’s imagination and stimulated efforts to introduce his teaching machines to the classroom, by the end of the 1960s the growing backlash against Skinner’s ideas and regimentation in education ensured the demise of his vision of the automated classroom. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Cultivating Knowledge: Biotechnology, Sustainability and the Human Cost of Cotton Capitalism in India by Andrew Flachs (University of Arizona Press, 2019) tells a story of how farmers in rural south India evaluate agricultural success through shifting calculations of social meaning, performance, and economic aspirations. Navigating multiple avenues of incentives, Dr. Flachs moves beyond the hidden links of consumption and production to concerns about how people engage with global change on the level of the farm field. By choosing to plant either genetically modified or certified organic cotton seeds, farmers risk their livelihoods by participating in diverging courses of sustainable agriculture. The farmer’s choice of seed reflects a performance of transformation regarding knowledge and agrarian sensibilities within rapidly changing socioeconomic and material realities that are influenced by both a colonial past and the neoliberal present. As Andrew put it, “a seed is a choice that cannot be taken back.(3)” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

One of the most fundamental aspects of modern life is that much of it is lived on and through social media. We create profiles, post pictures, update stories, and even find new careers and lovers on various sites and apps. But is all this good for us? Our always-online way of living has been called into question for quite some time now, with many people, young and old, finding themselves burned out and disconnected in a world with no shortage of connections. So what does this prevalence of social media mean for our society at large? This question is one of the starting points for my guest today, Matthew Flisfeder, in his new book Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media (Northwestern UP, 2021). While he is curious about the affects of social media on society, he also spends much of the book trying to flip the question around and ask: what does the structure of our society mean for social media? Flisfeder is interested in thinking of social media in it’s social, political and economic context, seeing the form our current social media takes as a gateway into broader social and economic structures. This broad Marxist vision is brought together with the theories of subjectivity developed in recent critical theory, particularly of Slavoj Žižek, to better understand both the ways social media hooks us into exploitative mechanisms, but it also gives us some offramps for possible resistance. Flisfeder is no luddite; not only is he himself an enthusiastic user of social media, but his critique here is meant as a course-correction rather than an all-out condemnation. If social media today produces alienation rather than true connection, then what does that tell us about society more broadly? And, more provocatively, what does it mean for broader social critique to take the social in social media seriously? Matthew Flisfeder is an associate professor of rhetoric and communications at the University of Winnipeg. He is also the author of Postmodern Theory and Bladerunner and The Symbolic, the Sublime, and Slavoj Žižek’s Theory of Film. You can follow him on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

The history of how a deceptively ordinary piece of office furniture transformed our relationship with information The ubiquity of the filing cabinet in the twentieth-century office space, along with its noticeable absence of style, has obscured its transformative role in the histories of both information technology and work. In The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information (U Minnesota Press, 2021), Craig Robertson explores how the filing cabinet profoundly shaped the way that information and data have been sorted, stored, retrieved, and used. Invented in the 1890s, the filing cabinet was a result of the nineteenth-century faith in efficiency. Previously, paper records were arranged haphazardly: bound into books, stacked in piles, curled into slots, or impaled on spindles. The filing cabinet organized loose papers in tabbed folders that could be sorted alphanumerically, radically changing how people accessed, circulated, and structured information. Robertson's unconventional history of the origins of the information age posits the filing cabinet as an information storage container, an "automatic memory" machine that contributed to a new type of information labor privileging manual dexterity over mental deliberation. Gendered assumptions about women's nimble fingers helped to naturalize the changes that brought women into the workforce as low-level clerical workers. The filing cabinet emerges from this unexpected account as a sophisticated piece of information technology and a site of gendered labor that with its folders, files, and tabs continues to shape how we interact with information and data in today's digital world. Nushelle de Silva is a PhD candidate in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work examines museums and exhibitions, and how the dissemination of visual culture is politically mediated by international organizations in the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Throughout American history to the twenty-first century, regardless of the laws, court decisions, and changing political environment, the Second Amendment has consistently meant this: That the second a Black person exercises this right, the second they pick up a gun to protect themselves (or the second that they don't), their life--as surely as Philando Castile's, Tamir Rice's, Alton Sterling's--may be snatched away in that single, fatal second. In The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomsbury, 2021) historian Carol Anderson powerfully illuminates the history and impact of the Second Amendment, how it was designed, and how it has consistently been constructed to keep African Americans powerless and vulnerable. The Second is neither a “pro-gun” nor an “anti-gun” book; the lens is the citizenship rights and human rights of African Americans. Through compelling historical narrative merging into the unfolding events of today, Anderson's penetrating investigation shows that the Second Amendment is not about guns but about anti-Blackness, shedding shocking new light on another dimension of racism in America. Dr. Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Emory University. She is the author of One Person, No Vote, longlisted for the National Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award; White Rage, a New York Times bestseller and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; Bourgeois Radicals; and Eyes off the Prize. She was named a Guggenheim Fellow for Constitutional Studies. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia. Connect on Twitter @ProfCAnderson Dr. Lee Pierce (they & she) is Assistant Professor of Rhetorical Communication at State University of New York at Geneseo and host of the podcast RhetoricLee Speaking. Connect with Lee on Twitter, Instagram, and Gmail @rhetoriclee Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Retired from life after 38 years in several roles at IBM, the prolific academic production of James W. Cortada now continues telling his side of the story of his long-term employer. In particular the challenges and tribulations of a unique organizational culture, how it was created, how it led to success, how it resisted a process of reconfiguration. IBM: The Rise and Fall and Reinvention of a Global Icon (MIT Press, 2019) covers a significant time span. The 20 chapters in the book are organised into four sections: origins (1880s-1945), market dominance (1945-1985), crisis (1985-1994), and renewal (1995-2012). Reading this title cover to cover is no small feat and not recommended (or intended) for everyone. In this podcast, Cortada tells us about his trajectory as a writter and how the book was put together. Bernardo Batiz-Lazo is currently straddling between Newcastle and Mexico City. You can find him on twitter on issues related to business history of banking, fintech, payments and other mussings. Not always in that order. @BatizLazo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Increasingly we live through our personal screens; we work, play, socialize, and learn digitally. The shift to remote everything during the pandemic was another step in a decades-long march toward the digitization of everyday life made possible by innovations in media, information, and communication technology. In The Digital Environment: How We Live, Learn, Work, and Play Now (MIT Press, 2021), Pablo Boczkowski and Eugenia Mitchelstein offer a new way to understand the role of the digital in our daily lives, calling on us to turn our attention from our discrete devices and apps to the array of artifacts and practices that make up the digital environment that envelops every aspect of our social experience. Boczkowski and Mitchelstein explore a series of issues raised by the digital takeover of everyday life, drawing on interviews with a variety of experts. They show how existing inequities of gender, race, ethnicity, education, and class are baked into the design and deployment of technology, and describe emancipatory practices that counter this--including the use of Twitter as a platform for activism through such hashtags as #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo. They discuss the digitization of parenting, schooling, and dating--noting, among other things, that today we can both begin and end relationships online. They describe how digital media shape our consumption of sports, entertainment, and news, and consider the dynamics of political campaigns, disinformation, and social activism. Finally, they report on developments in three areas that will be key to our digital future: data science, virtual reality, and space exploration. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach 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/technology

While i find it pretty easy to recognize when i'm reading articles in complexity science, i've never been satisfied by definitions of complexity and related concepts. I'm not alone! Researchers' own attempts to define complex systems incorporate a mix of folk wisdom and fraught assumptions anchored to a menagerie of contested examples. The field was ripe for a 2013 article proposing a unified account of complexity, and it's no less ripe today for this book-length expansion. In What Is a Complex System? (Yale UP, 2020), philosopher of science James Ladyman and physicist and mathematician Karoline Wiesner systematically interrogate popular definitions. They break the most commonly cited features into three bins: truisms on which there is universal agreement, the conditions necessary for complexity to arise, and various emergent products of complexity. A key insight of their account, for me, was to understand emergence as a relation between features rather than one feature among many. The book is compact, accessible, and at times profound. Indeed, James and Karoline bring the lessons of their account to some of the most consequential complex systems of our time, including Earth's climate and biosphere as well as our global social media ecosystem. I was honored to host them in conversation on this episode, and i encourage listeners to pick up the book itself for deeper dives into the topics we discussed. James Ladyman is professor of philosophy at the University of Bristol and works mainly in the philosophy of science. Karoline Wiesner is professor of physics at the University of Potsdam and uses information theory to understand complex systems. Cory Brunson is a Research Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida. His research focuses on geometric and topological approaches to the analysis of medical and healthcare data. He welcomes book suggestions, listener feedback, and transparent supply chains. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

In Radiant Infrastructures: Media, Environment, and Cultures of Uncertainty (Duke UP, 2020), Rahul Mukherjee explores how the media coverage of nuclear power plants and cellular phone antennas in India—what he calls radiant infrastructures—creates environmental publics: groups of activists, scientists, and policy makers who use media to influence public opinion. In documentaries, lifestyle television shows, newspapers, and Bollywood films, and through other forms of media (including radiation-sensing technologies), these publics articulate contesting views about the relationships between modernity, wireless signals, and nuclear power. From testimonies of cancer patients who live close to cell towers to power plant operators working to contain information about radiation leaks and health risks, discussions in the media show how radiant infrastructures are at once harbingers of optimism about India's development and emitters of potentially carcinogenic radiation. In tracing these dynamics, Mukherjee expands understandings of the relationship between media and infrastructure and how people make sense of their everyday encounters with technology and the environment. Noopur Raval is a postdoctoral researcher working at the intersection of Information Studies, STS, Media Studies and Anthropology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Death and the dead body have never been more alive in the public imagination--not least because of current debates over modern medical technology that is deployed, it seems, expressly to keep human bodies from dying, blurring the boundary between alive and dead. In Technologies of the Human Corpse (MIT Press, 2020), John Troyer examines the relationship of the dead body with technology, both material and conceptual: the physical machines, political concepts, and sovereign institutions that humans use to classify, organize, repurpose, and transform the human corpse. Doing so, he asks readers to think about death, dying, and dead bodies in radically different ways. Troyer explains, for example, how technologies of the nineteenth century including embalming and photography, created our image of a dead body as quasi-atemporal, existing outside biological limits formerly enforced by decomposition. He describes the "Happy Death Movement" of the 1970s; the politics of HIV/AIDS corpse and the productive potential of the dead body; the provocations of the Body Worlds exhibits and their use of preserved dead bodies; the black market in human body parts; and the transformation of historic technologies of the human corpse into "death prevention technologies." The consequences of total control over death and the dead body, Troyer argues, are not liberation but the abandonment of Homo sapiens as a concept and a species. In this unique work, Troyer forces us to consider the increasing overlap between politics, dying, and the dead body in both general and specifically personal terms. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach 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/technology

This book sounds an alarm: after decades of being lulled into complacency by narratives of technological utopianism and neutrality, people are waking up to the large-scale consequences of Silicon Valley–led technophilia. This book trains a spotlight on the inequality, marginalization, and biases in our technological systems, showing how they are not just minor bugs to be patched, but part and parcel of ideas that assume technology can fix—and control—society. The essays in Your Computer Is on Fire (MIT Press, 2021) interrogate how our human and computational infrastructures overlap, showing why technologies that centralize power tend to weaken democracy. These practices are often kept out of sight until it is too late to question the costs of how they shape society. From energy-hungry server farms to racist and sexist algorithms, the digital is always IRL, with everything that happens algorithmically or online influencing our offline lives as well. Each essay proposes paths for action to understand and solve technological problems that are often ignored or misunderstood. Mathew Jordan is a university instructor, funk musician, and clear writing enthusiast. He studies the history of science and technology, driven by the belief that we must understand the past in order to improve the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

We are now living in the richest age of public memory. From museums and memorials to the vast digital infrastructure of the internet, access to the past is only a click away. Even so, the methods and technologies created by scientists, espionage agencies, and information management coders and programmers have drastically delimited the ways that communities across the globe remember and forget our wealth of retrievable knowledge. In Architects of Memory: Information and Rhetoric in a Networked Archival Age (University of Alabama Press, 2020), Nathan R. Johnson charts turning points where concepts of memory became durable in new computational technologies and modern memory infrastructures took hold. He works through both familiar and esoteric memory technologies—from the card catalog to the book cart to Zatocoding and keyword indexing—as he delineates histories of librarianship and information science and provides a working vocabulary for understanding rhetoric’s role in contemporary memory practices. This volume draws upon the twin concepts of memory infrastructure and mnemonic technê to illuminate the seemingly opaque wall of mundane algorithmic techniques that determine what is worth remembering and what should be forgotten. Each chapter highlights a conflict in the development of twentieth-century librarianship and its rapidly evolving competitor, the discipline of information science. As these two disciplines progressed, they contributed practical techniques and technologies for making sense of explosive scientific advancement in the wake of World War II. Taming postwar science became part and parcel of practices and information technologies that undergird uncountable modern communication systems, including search engines, algorithms, and databases for nearly every national clearinghouse of the twenty-first century. Nathan R. Johnson is assistant professor of Rhetoric at the University of South Florida. His work has appeared in the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, Poroi, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology and enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture. Connect with your host, Lee Pierce (they & she) on social and Gmail @rhetoriclee Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India (Institute of Networked Cultures, 2020) maps the historical and emergent dynamics of big data, computing, and society in India. Data infrastructures are now more global than ever before. In much of the world, new sociotechnical possibilities of big data and artificial intelligence are unfolding under the long shadows cast by infra/structural inequalities, colonialism, modernization, and national sovereignty. This book offers critical vantage points for looking at big data and its shadows, as they play out in uneven encounters of machinic and cultural relationalities of data in India’s socio-politically disparate and diverse contexts. This episode features a discussion between Sandeep Mertia (book editor and contributing author), Aakash Solanki (contributing author) and Noopur (host and contributing author). The discussion begins with the contents of the book but moves on to a broader conversation about STS as an interdisciplinary formation in India and the global South. Noopur Raval is a postdoctoral researcher working at the intersection of Information Studies, STS, Media Studies and Anthropology Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Design and Spirituality: A Philosophy of Material Cultures (Routledge, 2021) examines the philosophical context of our current situation and its implications for design. It explores how modernity and our constricted notions of progress have contributed to today’s crisis of values, and argues for a re-establishment and re-affirmation of self-transcending priorities, together with an ethos of moderation and sufficiency. A wide range of topics are covered, including material culture and spiritual teachings; sustainability and the spiritual perspective; traditional and indigenous knowledge; technology and spirituality; notions of meaningful design; and how particular material things can have deeper, symbolic significance. There are also reflections on areas such as the language of design; busyness and its relationship to wisdom; design and social disparity; and traditional sacred practices. While not avoiding issues that are controversial, and sometimes hard-hitting, Design and Spirituality gets to the heart of the key issues affecting us today and presents them in a highly readable and accessible format. The author is a leading thinker in the field and he presents his arguments in a manner that invites the reader to reflect and think about where we are going, why we are going there and what really matters. Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Adjunct Professor at Alfred State College and the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Javier Guerrero's "Narcosubmarines: Outlaw Innovation and Maritime Interdiction in the War on Drugs" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020) is about the encounters of Colombian drug smugglers and the Colombian Navy, both in the open seas and along coastlines. Guerrero specifically examines the technologies involved in the War on Drugs, such as the narcosubmarines and patrol boats, the knowledge required to transport drugs and the knowledge required to stop the illicit flows. The author presents compelling new evidence for advancing an understanding of technological innovation in antagonist contexts, as well as the symbiotic and co-evolutionary character of the process of technological innovation in the War on Drugs. This book will appeal both to practitioners and scholars interested in the War on Drugs and the production of technologies in outlaw contexts. Geert Slabbekoorn works as an analyst in the field of public security. In addition he has published on different aspects of dark web drug trade in Belgium. Find him on twitter, tweeting all things drug related @GeertJS. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Today I talked to Carla Diana about her new book My Robot Gets Me: How Social Design Can Make New Products More Human (Harvard Business Review Press, 2021). Carla Diana is a robot designer responsible for the creative aspects of Diligent Robotics’ new hospital service robot named Moxi. She created and leads the 4D Design masters program at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, wrote the world’s first children’s book on 3D printing, LEO the Maker Prince, and she cohosts the Robopsych Podcast. The author is intrigued by where technology is headed—the “electronic guts” of high-tech offerings--at the same time that she never loses focus on what kind of gut reaction a user will have in interacting with a product. This episode therefore ranges from discussing modalities central to Diana’s work (sound, movement, and lighting) to addressing how important it is for designers and engineers alike to engage in “bodystorming” exercises that align everyone around what the user’s experience will be like. Delight and ease of use are both key criteria in achieving success. If there’s a Frankenstein aspect to helping bring robots “alive,” fortunately Diana is somebody concerned with all the ethical challenges that arise. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

In this interview, I talked with Professor Sonia Livingstone about her book Parenting for a Digital Future: How Hopes and Fears about Technology Shape Children’s Lives (Oxford UP, 2020). The book is co-authored with Alicia Blum-Ross who is the Public Policy Lead for Kids & Families at Google. Professor Livingstone is a professor in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research examines how the changing conditions of mediation are reshaping everyday practices and possibilities for action. She has published 20 books on media audiences, specifically focusing on children and young people’s risks and opportunities, media literacy and rights in the digital environment. Professor Livingstone currently directs the Digital Futures Commission with the 5Rights Foundation and the Global Kids Online project with UNICEF along with various other prestigious affiliations. Najarian R. Peters is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Kansas and a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Her research interests and teaching areas focus on privacy and emerging technology. Email her at: [email protected] or [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

In the first half of the twentieth century, urban elevated highways were much more than utilitarian infrastructure, lifting traffic above the streets; they were statements of civic pride, asserting boldly modern visions for a city’s architecture, economy, and transportation network. Yet three of the most ambitious projects, launched in Chicago, New York, and Boston in the spirit of utopian models by architects such as Le Corbusier and Hugh Ferriss, ultimately fell short of their ideals. Modern Mobility Aloft: Elevated Highways, Architecture, and Urban Change in Pre-interstate America (Temple UP, 2020) is the first study to focus on pre-Interstate urban elevated highways within American architectural and urban history. Amy Finstein traces the idealistic roots of these superstructures, their contrasting realities once built, their impacts on successive development patterns, and the recent challenges they have posed to contemporary urban designers. Filled with more than 100 historic photographs and illustrations of beaux arts and art deco architecture, Modern Mobility Aloft provides a critical understanding of urban landscapes, transportation, and technological change as cities moved into the modern era. Amy Finstein is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the College of the Holy Cross, where she teaches modern architectural and urban history. Nushelle de Silva is a PhD candidate in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work examines museums and exhibitions, and how the dissemination of visual culture is politically mediated by international organizations in the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Completed in 1938, the Trans-Iranian Railway connected Tehran to Iran's two major bodies of water: the Caspian Sea in the north and the Persian Gulf in the south. Iran's first national railway, it produced and disrupted various kinds of movement—voluntary and forced, intended and unintended, on different scales and in different directions—among Iranian diplomats, tribesmen, migrant laborers, technocrats, railway workers, tourists and pilgrims, as well as European imperial officials alike. Iran in Motion: Mobility, Space, and the Trans-Iranian Railway (Stanford UP, 2021) tells the hitherto unexplored stories of these individuals as they experienced new levels of mobility. Drawing on newspapers, industry publications, travelogues, and memoirs, as well as American, British, Danish, and Iranian archival materials, Mikiya Koyagi traces contested imaginations and practices of mobility from the conception of a trans-Iranian railway project during the nineteenth-century global transport revolution to its early years of operation on the eve of Iran's oil nationalization movement in the 1950s. Weaving together various individual experiences, this book considers how the infrastructural megaproject reoriented the flows of people and goods. In so doing, the railway project simultaneously brought the provinces closer to Tehran and pulled them away from it, thereby constantly reshaping local, national, and transnational experiences of space among mobile individuals. This interview is part of an NBN special series on Mobilities and Methods. Mikiya Koyagi is Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Alize Arıcan is an urban anthropologist and incoming Postdoctoral Scholar at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Studies. Her research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

The figure of the human looms large of the history of philosophy, from the ancient Greeks speculating about featherless bipeds to contemporary programmers wondering if they can recreate human intelligence with a series of algorithms. Much philosophical thought in the last few decades has involved much speculation about the human subject, even if it was often hostile to the idea that there is such a thing, rather than an odd effect of linguistic and cultural practices. Other critics have pointed out that the idea of a universal human subject has often been used to legitimate and cover up nefarious political ideas and practices. Still, many thinkers today continue to argue for an ontology that includes a unique place for the human subject. One of these thinkers is my guest today, Zahi Zalloua, here to discuss his new book Being Posthuman: Ontologies of the Future (Bloomsbury, 2020). Written both as an introduction and intervention, it kicks off with a long history of humanism and its critics, which helps set the stage for the four chapters that make up the main book. The first explores cyborgs, and the ways technology is slowly becoming a part of our lives and what that might mean. The second explores animals and our treatment of them, and what our willingness to send them to slaughterhouses and consume them in enormous quantities says about us. The third explores new theoretical frameworks such as Object Oriented Ontology and New Materialism, and the place of the subject in these frameworks. The final chapter looks at race in Afropessimism, and what a true emancipation might look like. In all this, Zalloua combines theoretical frameworks with cultural analysis, giving the book a sense of accessibility and relevance to our current moment (as well as a couple plot-spoilers for Black Mirror and Sorry to Bother You). Those interested in philosophy and critical theory, and particularly the work of Slavoj Žižek will find this to be both an accessible and provocative text. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

The American atomic bomb was born in secrecy. From the moment scientists first conceived of its possibility to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and beyond, there were efforts to control the spread of nuclear information and the newly discovered scientific facts that made such powerful weapons possible. The totalizing scientific secrecy that the atomic bomb appeared to demand was new, unusual, and very nearly unprecedented. It was foreign to American science and American democracy--and potentially incompatible with both. From the beginning, this secrecy was controversial, and it was always contested. The atomic bomb was not merely the application of science to war, but the result of decades of investment in scientific education, infrastructure, and global collaboration. If secrecy became the norm, how would science survive? Drawing on troves of declassified files, including records released by the government for the first time through the author's efforts, Alex Wellerstein's book Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2021) traces the complex evolution of the US nuclear secrecy regime from the first whisper of the atomic bomb through the mounting tensions of the Cold War and into the early twenty-first century. A compelling history of powerful ideas at war, it tells a story that feels distinctly American: rich, sprawling, and built on the conflict between high-minded idealism and ugly, fearful power. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

What are digital inequalities? In The Digital Disconnect: The Social Causes and Consequences of Digital Inequalities (Sage, 2021), Ellen Helsper, a Professor of Digital Inequalities in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics, explores the unequal nature of our now digital world. The book introduces the corresponding fields theoretical framework, as a way of blending a huge range of empirical and theoretical material that provides the basis for a global analysis of digital’s relationship to economic, social, and cultural inequalities. Clear, engaging, and easy to follow, the book poses important questions as to who is valued in the digital world, as well as offering lessons for how we might address the causes and consequences of digital inequalities. The book will be essential reading across social science and humanities, and for anyone interested in understanding and changing the digital world. Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

The word ‘data’ has entered everyday conversation, but do we really understand what it means? How can we begin to grasp the scope and scale of our new data-rich world, and can we truly comprehend what is at stake. In Data Lives: How Data Are Made and Shape Our World (Policy Press, 2021), renowned social scientist Rob Kitchin explores the intricacies of data creation and charts how data-driven technologies have become essential to how society, government and the economy work. Creatively blending scholarly analysis, biography and fiction, he demonstrates how data are shaped by social and political forces, and the extent to which they influence our daily lives. He reveals our data world to be one of potential danger, but also of hope. Noopur Raval is a postdoctoral researcher working at the intersection of Information Studies, STS, Media Studies and Anthropology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

The “smart” city of today looks little like what experts of yesteryear expected them to. In this book, Aaron Shapiro, Ph.D. takes readers on a behind the scenes tour of the smart city and shows the revolution in urban technology that is currently taking place in large metropolitan areas around the United States. Technology has fundamentally transformed urban life. Throughout Design, Control, Predict: Logistical Governance in the Smart City (U Minnesota Press, 2020), Shapiro develops a new lens called logistical governance in his effort to interpret and understand urban technologies. This lens was used to critique urban future based on extraction and rationalization. Through ethnographic research, journalistic interviews, and his own hands-on experience, Shapiro helps readers peer through cracks of the façade that smart cities are bearing. He investigates the true price New Yorkers pay for “free,” ad-funded WiFi, finding that it is ultimately serving the ends of commercial media. Shapiro also builds on his experience as a bike courier delivering food for a startup company and examines how promises of “flexible employment” in the gig economy paves the way for strict managerial control. And he turns his discussion toward the current debates about police violence and new patrol technologies, asking whether algorithms are the answer to reforming the ongoing crises of criminal justice in large urban cities. Through these gripping accounts of new technology in urban areas, Shapiro and Design, Control, Predict make vital contributions to conversations about data privacy and algorithmic governance. Shapiro provides a ground level account of a timely and important piece of research in Design, Control, Predict. This piece can be used when comprehending urbanism today and when identifying strategies to advance the critique and resistance to a dystopian future that is often viewed as inevitable. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant“, was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, and collective representation as it is presented in everyday social interactions. He is currently studying the social interactions that people engage in at two annual festivals that take place during the summer months along the banks of the Mississippi River. You can learn more about him on his website, Google Scholar, follow him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or email 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/technology

Social media has become the front-and-center arena for feminist activism. Responding to and enacting the political potential of pain inflicted in acts of sexual harassment, violence, and abuse, Asian American and Asian Canadian feminist icons such as rupi kaur, Margaret Cho, and Mia Matsumiya have turned to social media to share their stories with the world. But how does such activism reconcile with the platforms on which it is being cultivated, when its radical messaging is at total odds with the neoliberal logic governing social media? Pain Generation: Social Media, Feminist Activism, and the Neoliberal Selfie (NYU Press, 2021) troubles this phenomenon by articulating a "neoliberal self(ie) gaze" through which these feminist activists see and storify the self on social media as "good" neoliberal subjects who are appealing, inspiring, and entertaining. This book offers a fresh perspective on feminist activism by demonstrating how the problematic neoliberal logic governing digital spaces like Instagram and Twitter limits the possibilities of how one might use social media for feminist activism. Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

How has social media shaped contemporary society? In The Social Media Age (Sage, 2021), Zoetanya Sujon, a Senior Lecturer and Programme Director in Communications and Media at London College of Communication, analyses social media, from pre-history through to our more contemporary critical turn. The book considers a wide range of issues and perspectives, from platforms and power, through data and dating, to selfies and surveillance. Packed with a vast range of case study material, including reflections on #BlackLivesMatter, social credit systems in China, and influencer culture on YouTube, the book is essential reading across the arts and humanities, as well as for anyone interested in our current, social media, world. Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Where racism and sexism meet—an understanding of anti-Black misogyny. When Moya Bailey first coined the term misogynoir, she defined it as the ways anti-Black and misogynistic representation shape broader ideas about Black women, particularly in visual culture and digital spaces. She had no idea that the term would go viral, touching a cultural nerve and quickly entering into the lexicon. Misogynoir now has its own Wikipedia page and hashtag, and has been featured on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and CNN’s Cuomo Prime Time. In Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (NYU Press, 2021), Bailey delves into her groundbreaking concept, highlighting Black women’s digital resistance to anti-Black misogyny on YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr, and other platforms. At a time when Black women are depicted as more ugly, deficient, hypersexual, and unhealthy than their non-Black counterparts, Bailey explores how Black women have bravely used social-media platforms to confront misogynoir in a number of courageous—and, most importantly, effective—ways. Focusing on queer and trans Black women, she shows us the importance of carving out digital spaces, where communities are built around queer Black webshows and hashtags like #GirlsLikeUs. Bailey shows how Black women actively reimagine the world by engaging in powerful forms of digital resistance at a time when anti-Black misogyny is thriving on social media. A groundbreaking work, Misogynoir Transformed highlights Black women’s remarkable efforts to disrupt mainstream narratives, subvert negative stereotypes, and reclaim their lives. Dr. Moya Bailey she/her/hers is Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Northeastern University and is currently an MLK Visiting Professor at MIT. Connect with Moya on Instagram @transformisogynoir and on Twitter @moyazb Dr. Lee Pierce (they & she) is Assistant Professor of Rhetorical Communication at State University of New York at Geneseo and host of the podcast RhetoricLee Speaking. Connect with Lee on Twitter, Instagram, and Gmail @rhetoriclee Also mentioned in this episode is Zakiyyam Iman Jackson's interview with New Books Network about Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Tetyana Lokot's new book Beyond the Protest Square: Digital Media and Augmented Dissent (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021) examines how citizens use digital social media to engage in public discontent and offers a critical examination of the hybrid reality of protest where bodies, spaces and technologies resonate. It argues that the augmented reality of protest goes beyond the bodies, the tents, and the cobblestones in the protest square, incorporating live streams, different time zones, encrypted conversations, and simultaneous translation of protest updates into different languages. Based on more than 60 interviews with protest participants and ethnographic analysis of online content in Ukraine and Russia, it examines how citizens in countries with limited media freedom and corrupt authorities perceive the affordances of digital media for protest and how these enable or limit protest action. The book provides a nuanced contribution to debates about the role of digital media in contentious politics and protest events, both in Eastern Europe and beyond. Tanya (Tetyana) Lokot is Associate Professor in Digital Media and Society at the School of Communications, Dublin City University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Providing one of the first comprehensive, cross-cultural examinations of the dynamic market for sexual services, this book presents an evidence-based look at the multiple factors related to purchasing patterns and demand among clients who have used the internet. The data is drawn from two large surveys of sex workers' clients in the US and UK. The book presents descriptive baseline data on client engagement with online platforms, demographics and patterns of frequency in different markets, information on smaller niche markets and client reactions to exploitation, safety and changes in the law. Teela Sanders, Barbara G. Brents and Chris Wakefield's book Paying for Sex in a Digital Age: US and UK Perspectives (Routledge, 2020) makes clear that a variety of situational as well as individual factors affect the willingness and ability to purchase sexual services. The view that emerges shatters the stereotypes and generalistions on which much policy is based and demonstrates the complexities surrounding who pays for sex and the contours of sexual consumption in consumer culture. Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Hello Everyone, and welcome to New Books in Gender and Sexuality, a channel on the New Books Network. I’m your host, Jana Byars, and I’m here today with Pallavi Guha, assistant professor in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Towson, MD, to talk to her about her new book, Hear #MeToo in India: News, Social Media, and Anti-Rape and Sexual Harassment Activism, out this year, 2021 with Rutgers University Press. This book examines the role media platforms play in anti-rape and sexual harassment activism in India. Including 75 interviews with feminist activists and journalists working across India, it proposes a framework of agenda-building and establishes a theoretical framework to examine media coverage of issues in the digitally emerging Global South. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

As Twitter enters its own adolescence, both the users and the creators of this famous social media platform find themselves engaging with a tool that certainly could not have been imagined at its inception. In their engaging book Twitter: A Biography (NYU Press, 2020), Jean Burgess and Nancy K. Baym (@nancybaym) tell the fascinating and surprising story of how this platform developed from a quirky SMS tool for publicly sharing intimate details of personal life to a major source of late-breaking news, political activism, and even governmental communication. This story explores how many of Twitter's most ubiquitous and iconic conventions were not systematically rolled out from a centralized corporate strategy, but so often driven by users who continued to innovate within the limitations of the platform they had to democratically create the platform they desired. Yet this story highlights the tensions along the way as Twitter has adapted to new and unforeseen challenges, business models, and social consequences as the experiments of social media have become increasingly powerful, influential, and contested. This book is a must read for anyone interested in the wild and changing landscape of internet communication and communities. Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

What is the impact of surveillance capitalism on our right to free speech? The Internet once promised to be a place of extraordinary freedom beyond the control of money or politics, but today corporations and platforms exercise more control over our ability to access information and share knowledge to a greater extent than any state. From the online calls to arms in the thick of the Arab Spring to the contemporary front line of misinformation, Jillian York charts the war over our digital rights. She looks at both how the big corporations have become unaccountable censors, and the devastating impact it has had on those who have been censored. In Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism (Verso Book, 2021), leading campaigner Jillian York, looks at how our rights have become increasingly undermined by the major corporations desire to harvest our personal data and turn it into profit. She also looks at how governments have used the same technology to monitor citizens and threatened our ability to communicate. As a result our daily lives, and private thoughts, are being policed in an unprecedented manner. Who decides the difference between political debate and hate speech? How does this impact on our identity, our ability to create communities and to protest? Who regulates the censors? In response to this threat to our democracy, York proposes a user-powered movement against the platforms that demands change and a new form of ownership over our own data. Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice with a focus on film and television studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Why do we keep trying to solve poverty with technology? What makes us feel that we need to learn to code--or else? In The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope (MIT Press, 2021), Daniel Greene argues that the problem of poverty became a problem of technology in order to manage the contradictions of a changing economy. Greene shows how the digital divide emerged as a policy problem and why simple technological solutions to complex social issues continue to appeal to politicians and professionals who should (and often do) know better. Patrick Sheehan is a PhD student in Sociology at UT Austin studying work and careers in the digital economy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

In his new book Taking Nazi Technology: Allied Exploitation of German Science After the Second World War (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), Douglas O’Reagan describes how the Western Allies gathered teams of experts to scour defeated Germany, seeking industrial secrets and the technical personnel who could explain them. Swarms of investigators invaded Germany's factories and research institutions, seizing or copying all kinds of documents, from patent applications to factory production data to science journals. They questioned, hired, and sometimes even kidnapped hundreds of scientists, engineers, and other technical personnel. They studied technologies from aeronautics to audiotapes, toy making to machine tools, chemicals to carpentry equipment. They took over academic libraries, jealously competed over chemists, and schemed to deny the fruits of German invention to any other land—including that of other Allied nations. Drawing on declassified records, O'Reagan looks at which techniques worked for these very different nations, as well as which failed—and why. Most importantly, he shows why securing this technology, how the Allies did it, and when still matters today. He also argues that these programs did far more than spread German industrial science: they forced businessmen and policymakers around the world to rethink how science and technology fit into diplomacy, business, and society itself. Douglas M. O'Reagan is a historian of technology, industry, and national security. He earned his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust. He can be reached at [email protected] or on twitter @craig_sorvillo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Digitization is reshaping creative industries. Old gatekeepers in music, publishing, television, movies, and other industries no longer play such an important role, and digital piracy makes it easy for consumers to avoid paying companies, artists, and writers for what they produce. On the other hand, independents can now cheaply produce and distribute creative works both to niche and mass market audiences. In Digital Renaissance: What Data and Economics Tell Us about the Future of Popular Culture (Princeton UP, 2020), Economist Joel Waldfogel uses data about the quantity, quality, and mass appeal of these works to make the case that this has on balance made us all better off, resulting in a digital renaissance. In this interview, we discuss the findings in his book and how he arrives at them. I also get his perspective on some developments since his book came out, like the rise of Spotify, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and the impact of the pandemic on digitization. He also unwittingly gives me the opportunity to tell everyone with an Amazon device in the house to say “Alexa, Beethoven’s pathetic!” and enjoy the result. If you want to buy the NFT for Waldfogel’s famously Scroogey paper “The Deadweight Loss of Christmas,” he is open to bids and promises to donate the proceeds to charity, unlike Scrooge. You can also follow him on Twitter. Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new digital economy-focused Master's program in Applied Economics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

The COVID19 pandemic has profoundly changed the landscape of K-12 education in our society. Last March, many states closed their brick-and-mortar schools and shifted to remote education. The massive shift is historic and unprecedented. Until now, while we see the light at the end of the tunnel in our battle against the coronavirus, millions and millions of students are still learning at home via online platforms. It is also because of this shift that digital learning all of a sudden has drawn attention from not only educators but also the general public from families to policy makers. Over the past months we have seen concerted efforts to invest in digital learning and improve the required infrastructure. In spite of this unexpected yet much welcomed attention from the society at large, digital teaching and learning a field has existed for a long time. Experts in the field have been documenting and exploring the best practice of digital teaching and learning. Today I am going to talk with three researchers who have been working in this field for a long time, Carolyn Heinrich from Vanderbilt University, Jennifer Darling-Aduana from Georgia State University and Annalee G. Good from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Last year, they published their new book with Harvard Education Press, titled Equity and Quality in Digital Learning: Realizing the Promise in K-12 Education (2020). It systematically studies the implementation and best practice of using digital tools to reduce inequities in educational opportunities and improve student outcomes. Although the book was out right before the start of the pandemic, the lessons, best practice and insights they highlighted in their book have so much to offer for educators, policy makers and families to navigate a teaching-and-learning landscape during and after this pandemic. Carolyn J. Heinrich is the Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Public Policy and Education and Chair of the Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations, and an affiliated Professor of Economics at Vanderbilt University. Jennifer Darling-Aduana is an Assistant Professor of Learning Technologies in the Department of Learning Sciences, College of Education and Human Development, at Georgia State University. Annalee G. Good is co-director of the Wisconsin Evaluation Collaborative and Director of the Clinical Program at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Pengfei Zhao is a critical researcher and qualitative research methodologist based at the University of Florida. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Jürgen Melzer’s Wings for the Rising Sun: A Transnational History of Japanese Aviation (Harvard UP, 2020) traces the history of Japanese aviation from its origins with hot-air balloons in the 1870s until the end of the Pacific War in 1945. Melzer’s narrative centers around three themes: transnational technology transfer and Japan’s efforts to attain technological independence, domestic efforts to mobilize public enthusiasm for aviation development (what Melzer calls “air-mindedness”), and the complicated interplay of aviation with military and diplomatic history. The first chapters take us to the end of World War I, which was a turning point for Japanese aviation. Until that time, Japan had been most interested in French technologies, but the settlement of the Great War at Versailles provided an opportunity to take advantage of German aviation advancements. Parts 2 and 3 contrast the development of aviation in the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy, exposing crucial differences not only between the two services but within each one. Part 4 begins with Japan’s turn to American civil aviation technologies in the wake of the 1931 Manchurian Incident, and the subsequent impact of Japanese aggression and US retaliatory sanctions leading up to Pearl Harbor. The final chapter covers the fevered development of rocket- and jet-propelled aircraft during the war, and therefore in the context of resource shortages and a fast-ticking clock. Melzer, a former Lufthansa pilot, has written a book that will appeal to readers interested in STS, military history, international relations, and Western history, in addition to Japanese history aficionados. Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese and East Asian history in the Graduate School of Humanities, Nagoya University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Economist, data journalist, and best-selling author Seth Stephens-Davidowitz uses data from the internet to gain new insights into the human psyche. In his new book Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are (HarperCollins, 2017), Seth has used Google searches to measure racism, self-induced abortion, depression, child abuse, hateful mobs, the science of humor, sexual preference, anxiety, son preference, and sexual insecurity, among many other topics. In this interview he explains how web searches are a kind of digital truth serum that reveals our hidden desires, insecurities and biases. He also explores other ways economists have used the explosion of new data created by the digitization of the economy to shed new light on old questions. Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he created and leads a new digital economy-focused Master's program in Applied Economics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

In an era of increasing social isolation, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are among the most important tools we have to understand each other. We use social media as a mirror to decipher our place in society but, as Christopher A. Bail explains, it functions more like a prism that distorts our identities, empowers status-seeking extremists, and renders moderates all but invisible. Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing (Princeton University Press, 2021) challenges common myths about echo chambers, foreign misinformation campaigns, and radicalizing algorithms, revealing that the solution to political tribalism lies deep inside ourselves. Drawing on innovative online experiments and in-depth interviews with social media users from across the political spectrum, this book explains why stepping outside of our echo chambers can make us more polarized, not less. Bail takes you inside the minds of online extremists through vivid narratives that trace their lives on the platforms and off—detailing how they dominate public discourse at the expense of the moderate majority. Wherever you stand on the spectrum of user behavior and political opinion, he offers fresh solutions to counter political tribalism from the bottom up and the top down. He introduces new apps and bots to help readers avoid misperceptions and engage in better conversations with the other side. Finally, he explores what the virtual public square might look like if we could hit “reset” and redesign social media from scratch through a first-of-its-kind experiment on a new social media platform built for scientific research. Providing data-driven recommendations for strengthening our social media connections, Breaking the Social Media Prism shows how to combat online polarization without deleting our accounts. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached 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/technology

In this episode, I interview David Wills, professor of French Studies at Brown University, about his book, Prosthesis, recently republished for its 25th anniversary by University of Minnesota Press. A landmark work in posthuman thought that analyzes and explores the human body as a technology, the book promotes the idea that the human body is open to supplementation by artificial addenda that operate both internally or externally and engage it in an unceasing arbitration with the environment. Questioning the opposition between animate and inanimate along with the logic of the automatic prioritization of living flesh, Prosthesis undertakes these assumptions by studying thematics of artificiality through the writings of Freud, Derrida, William Gibson, Peter Greenaway, and others. Britt Edelen is a Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. He focuses on modernism and the relationship(s) between language, philosophy, and literature. You can find him on Twitter or send him an email. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Twenty-first century media has increasingly turned to provocative sexual content to generate buzz and stand out within a glut of programming. New distribution technologies enable and amplify these provocations, and encourage the branding of media creators as "provocauteurs" known for challenging sexual conventions and representational norms. While such strategies may at times be no more than a profitable lure, the most probing and powerful instances of sexual provocation serve to illuminate, question, and transform our understanding of sex and sexuality. In Provocauteurs and Provocations: Screening Sex in 21st Century Media (Indiana UP, 2021), award-winning author Maria San Filippo looks at the provocative in films, television series, web series and videos, entertainment industry publicity materials, and social media discourses and explores its potential to create alternative, even radical ways of screening sex. Throughout this edgy volume, San Filippo reassesses troubling texts and divisive figures, examining controversial strategies--from "real sex" scenes to scandalous marketing campaigns to full-frontal nudity--to reveal the critical role that sexual provocation plays as an authorial signature and promotional strategy within the contemporary media landscape. A trailer for the books is available on YouTube. Both of San Filippo's IUP books are 30% off (through May) using code SANFILIPPO at iupress.org Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Technology is breaking politics - what can be done about it? Artificially intelligent "bot" accounts attack politicians and public figures on social media. Conspiracy theorists publish junk news sites to promote their outlandish beliefs. Campaigners create fake dating profiles to attract young voters. We live in a world of technologies that misdirect our attention, poison our political conversations, and jeopardize our democracies. With massive amounts of social media and public polling data, and in-depth interviews with political consultants, bot writers, and journalists, Philip N. Howard offers ways to take these "lie machines" apart. Lie Machines: How to Save Democracy from Troll Armies, Deceitful Robots, Junk News Operations, and Political Operatives (Yale UP, 2020) is full of riveting behind the scenes stories from the world's biggest and most damagingly successful misinformation initiatives--including those used in Brexit and U.S. elections. Howard not only shows how these campaigns evolved from older propaganda operations but also exposes their new powers, gives us insight into their effectiveness, and shows us how to shut them down. As dangerous as things are now, they will only get worse; the enormous flood of data coming from the so-called Internet of Things, along with the growing sophistication of artificial intelligence, will make disinformation easier to generate and disseminate and much harder to spot and remove. Howard tackles the tough task of suggesting the changes that are needed to create a radically redesigned social media ecosystem that would reinforce, rather than erode, democracy. Medha Prasanna is an MA candidate at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University. Her current research focuses on International Organizations and Human Rights Law. You can learn more about her here or email her [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Are humans defining technology, or is technology defining humans? In The Coevolution: The Entwined Futures of Humans and Machines (MIT Press, 2020), Edward Ashford Lee considers the case that we are less in control of the trajectory of technology than we think. It shapes us as much as we shape it, and it may be more defensible to think of technology as the result of a Darwinian coevolution than the result of top-down intelligent design. Richard Dawkins famously said that a chicken is an egg's way of making another egg. Is a human a computer's way of making another computer? To understand this question requires a deep dive into how evolution works, how humans are different from computers, and how the way technology develops resembles the emergence of a new life form on our planet. Lee presents the case for considering digital beings to be living, then offers counterarguments. What we humans do with our minds is more than computation, and what digital systems do--be teleported at the speed of light, backed up, and restored--may never be possible for humans. To believe that we are simply computations, he argues, is a "dataist" faith and scientifically indefensible. Digital beings depend on humans--and humans depend on digital beings. More likely than a planetary wipe-out of humanity is an ongoing, symbiotic coevolution of culture and technology. John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

As the push for a Universal Healthcare system in the United States becomes more and more popular among the American people, we’re beginning to have more public conversations about access to and affordability of medical care. While many of us may not consider our health insurance until we need it, for those with chronic conditions, the American medical system can be a nightmare of insurance claims bureaucracy and that prevents patients from getting the care they need at a cost they can afford. Worse, the rising prices of drugs and treatments developed in this for-profit system mean that some patients receive more medical care than they want or need, sometimes at the expense of their quality of life. When a young Katherine E. Standefer was suddenly diagnosed with Long QT Syndrome—the same congenital heart condition as her younger sister—she was faced with what felt like an impossible choice: implant a cardiac defibrillator and be forever tied to the American Medical System, or take a chance with death. In her stunning debut, Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life (Little, Brown, Spark, 2020) Standefer explores this system as both a patient and a consumer, visiting factories in California as well as mining communities in Rwanda and Madagascar where the metals in her defibrillator were sourced to learn more about the true human cost of the device that was meant to save her life. Throughout, Standefer wonders whether her life is worth this price, and asks us to reimagine approaches to care—both in medical and environmental. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Contemporary media leads us more than ever to an ‘acting at a distance,’ an acting entangled with the materiality of communication and the mediality of transmission. Action at a Distance (Meson Press, 2020) this crucial phenomenon thereby introducing urgent questions of human interaction, the binding and breaking of time and space, and the entanglement of the material and the immaterial. Three vivid inquiries deal with histories and theories of mediality and materiality: John Durham Peters looks at episodes of simultaneity and synchronization. Christina Vagt discusses the agency of computer models against the backdrop of aesthetic theories by Henri Bergson and Hans Blumenberg, and Florian Sprenger discusses early electrical transmissions through copper wire and the temporality of instantaneity. Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor and Program Coordinator of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice often with a focus on film and television studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

As common as it is today to speak of the relative “height” of musical pitches or of the sense of “vocal space” as it opened up by particular recording techniques, we did not always understand sound to be spatial. How did it become so? In Stereophonica: Sound and Space in Science, Technology, and the Arts (MIT Press, 2021), Gascia Ouzounian (Associate Professor of Music, Oxford University; Fellow and Tutor, Lady Margaret Hall) explores the answer, drawing on episodes drawn from the history of stereo technologies in the nineteenth century through to visual representations of and in sonic environments today. Ouzounian takes the reader from early innovations in the laboratory study of stereophony to the mobilization of the human hearing sense during World War I. Her account covers spectacular demonstrations of new sound-reproducing technologies in the inter-war period, the applications of new psychoacoustic theories of spatial hearing in both peacetime and in war, and right up to the 21st century, as the relation between sound and space are interrogated in contemporary sound installation art and radical interventions in the urban soundscapes of modern-day Beirut, Lebanon. This entry into sound studies and the history of technology deals with an array of historical, instrumental, and artistic cases in the long history of spatial sound. The reward of following its broad purview is a rich web of connections that disclose sound and listening as a long-fruitful site not only of aesthetics but also of the ethics of space and place, thereby opening up further study in the intersection between sound studies and sonic urbanism. Eamonn Bell (@_eamonnbell) is a postdoctoral Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin in the Department of Music. His current research project examines the story of the compact disc from a viewpoint between musicology and media studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Today on New Books in History, Dr. Evan Friss, associate professor of history at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia in the US to talk about The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s (University of Chicago Press, 2015). This book was originally released in 2015 by the University of Chicago press and we are chatting on the occasion of its paperback release in January. Cycling has experienced a renaissance in the United States, as cities around the country promote the bicycle as an alternative means of transportation. In the process, debates about the nature of bicycles—where they belong, how they should be ridden, how cities should or should not accommodate them—have played out in the media, on city streets, and in city halls. Very few people recognize, however, that these questions are more than a century old. The Cycling City is a sharp history of the bicycle’s rise and fall in the late nineteenth century. In the 1890s, American cities were home to more cyclists, more cycling infrastructure, more bicycle friendly legislation, and a richer cycling culture than anywhere else in the world. Evan Friss unearths the hidden history of the cycling city, demonstrating that diverse groups of cyclists managed to remap cities with new roads, paths, and laws, challenge social conventions, and even dream up a new urban ideal inspired by the bicycle. When cities were chaotic and filthy, bicycle advocates imagined an improved landscape in which pollution was negligible, transportation was silent and rapid, leisure spaces were democratic, and the divisions between city and country were blurred. Friss argues that when the utopian vision of a cycling city faded by the turn of the century, its death paved the way for today’s car-centric cities—and ended the prospect of a true American cycling city ever being built. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology