New Books in Technology

Paola Bertucci's Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France (Yale University Press, 2018) is an innovative new look at the role of artisans in the French Enlightenment. As savants attempted to appropriate leadership of the mechanical arts while deriding artisans as mere laborers, some of these refashioned themselves as artistes, capable of blending craft knowledge with intellectual esprit. Through the little studied and understood Société des Arts, these advertised their service and utility to the state and French economic and imperia expansion. As they fought for official appointments and academic recognition, they help solidify key the Enlightenment concept of technological progress. Through the eyes and experiences of artistes, the Enlightenment appears much less the product of intellectual breakthroughs, and instead, a reflection of the political economic strategies of artisans as they defined their role within the French empire. Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the body politic.” There are significant implications of these ideas for how we live and work at the contemporary university, and we discussed some of those in our conversation. This is a great book to read and to teach with! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Television started as a dream of nineteenth-century science fiction. It took its place in the twentieth-century home, and became a fixture of family life and a transformative cultural force. Today, televisions are both less visible and more present than ever, thanks to screens on our walls and in our pockets. Chris Horrocks traces the cultural history of the television set in The Joy of Sets: A Short History of the Television (Reaktion Press, 2017). Horrocks is a filmmaker and professor in the School of Critical Studies and Creative Industries at Kingston University in London. His previous books include Cultures of Colour: Visual, Material, Textual (Berghahn, 2012), and Marshall McLuhan and Virtuality (Icon, 2000). 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 the hidden structures of the television industry? In The Talent Industry: Television, Cultural Intermediaries and New Digital Pathways (Palgrave, 2018), Raymond Boyle, a professor of communications at the University of Glasgow‘s Centre for Cultural Policy Research, explores this question by focusing on the idea of talent. The book offers a rich theoretical and empirical engagement with the contemporary television landscape, giving detailed analysis of the history of talent development, as well as the impact of digital and new platforms. The shifting landscape of talent, television, and the infrastructure of cultural intermediaries is illustrated with key case studies, ultimately showing how the winners and losers of the talent industry map onto existing inequalities. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary media. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

What if guns “are not merely carriers of action, but also actors themselves?” That’s the question that animates and unites Jonathan Obert‘s and Andrew Poe‘s, and Austin Sarat‘s unique collection of essays, The Lives of Guns (Oxford University Press, 2018). In it, contributors discuss the political, social and personal “lives” of guns from a variety of perspectives. Join us to hear editors Obert and Poe help us consider new ways of thinking about American narratives of ballistic weapons. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians(New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford University Press, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Many people place the beginning of the American space program at 7:28pm, October 4, 1957 – the moment the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik I, into orbit. This event prompted the United States to open up its own crash program to put first a satellite, then later, human beings, into space. The primary motivating factor for all this, was the fear of missiles being the primary delivery system for nuclear warheads at the height of the Cold War. Our guest in this episode –Nicholas Michael Sambaluk – makes the case for another perspective on the Eisenhower Administration’s decision to engage in space exploration. In his book The Other Space Race: Eisenhower and the Quest for Aerospace Security (Naval Institute Press, 2015), Sambaluk describes the checkered history of the Dynamic Soarer Space Glider Bomber – a.k.a. “Dyna-Soar,” a heat-resistant single seat-space shuttle that was intended to guarantee American aerospace superiority. Though ultimately canceled, the Dyna-Soar program’s legacy continues to this day in the form of the SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance Aircraft, the Space Shuttle, and future orbiting space vehicles. Sambaluk is an associate professor of strategy at the Air University, at Maxwell Air Force Base, in Montgomery, Alabama. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Physical journals, scrapbooks, and photo albums all offer their owners the opportunity to chronicle both mundane and extravagant events. But unlike social media posting, this analog memorializing of life happenings is not encumbered with the negative theorizing about why people choose to record experiences. In her new book, The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life (MIT Press, 2018), Cornell University associate professor Lee Humphreys argues that selfies and other social media life logging, like traditional journaling, is media accounting, which offers us a deeper understanding of ourselves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Science fiction is, at its core, about tomorrow—exploring through stories what the universe may look like one or 10 or a million years in the future. Twelve Tomorrows (MIT Press, 2018) uses short stories to fit nearly a dozen possible “tomorrows” into a single book. Edited by journalist Wade Roush, the collection features stories by Elizabeth Bear, SL Huang, Clifford V. Johnson, J. M. Ledgard, Liu Cixin, Ken Liu, Paul McAuley, Nnedi Okorafor, Malka Older, Sarah Pinsker, and Alastair Reynolds. The book is the latest in a series of identically titled books launched in 2011 by MIT Technology Review. The series explores the future implications of emerging technologies through the lens of fiction. It’s the first time Roush, who hosts the podcast Soonish and specializes in writing about science and technology, has edited fiction. “The mission of Twelve Tomorrows is to highlight stories that are totally plausible from an engineering point of view,” Roush says. In “The Heart of the Matter,” Nnedi Okorafur explores how suspicion of new technology can have real life consequences. In this case, plotters against the reformist president of Nigeria try to muster support for a coup by manipulating fears about the president’s new artificial heart, claiming that the organ—which was grown in a Chinese laboratory from plant cells—is powered by witchcraft. In “The Woman Who Destroyed Us,” SL Huang describes the plight of a mother who wants to exact revenge on a doctor who used deep brain stimulation to treat her son’s behavioral and mental health issues. The changes in her son are so dramatic that the mother feels she’s lost her child, and yet the son is happy with the result, feeling that the treatment has revealed his true self. If there’s one message Roush hopes readers take from the collection, it’s that people are in the driver’s seat when it comes to building and using new technologies. He hopes the book reminds people “that we do have the power to adopt or shun technology, that we can decide how to bring it into our lives, to what extent we want to use it or not use it. We can even influence the way innovation happens. We can tell scientists and engineers, ‘You know what? This isn’t good enough’ or ‘We’re worried about this. We want you to build in more safeguards.’… We have that power.” Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Our world today is full of algorithms and metrics designed to help us keep up, to keep track, to keep going. New devices, such as the smartwatch, now make it possible to quantify and standardize every conceivable human activity, from keeping track of personal bests at the gym to getting a good night’s sleep—all from the comfort of our homes. But what do these measurements actually tell us about ourselves? What happens when the data sets for these functions are subjective? And how do we know whether we’re measuring ourselves accurately? In her debut collection of essays, nonfiction writer Rachel Z. Arndt explores the answers to these questions, interrogating the methods through which we measure our lives in the modern world. Through a series of 19 researched personal essays, Arndt speaks from her own experiences managing her narcolepsy, participating in judo tournaments, analyzing the rituals of online dating and more in order to answer the question of what can be measured—or, more accurately, what cannot. Today on the New Books Network, join us as we sit down with Rachel Z. Arndt to hear more about Beyond Measure available now from Sarabande Books (2018). Zoë Bossiere is a doctoral student at Ohio University, where she studies creative nonfiction and teaches writing classes. For more NBn interviews, follow her on Twitter @zoebossiere or head to zoebossiere.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 his new book, The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity (Simon & Schuster, 2018), futurist, technologist, and CEO of Gigaom, Byron Reese makes the case that technology has reshaped humanity just three times in history: 100,000 years ago, we harnessed fire, which led to language; 10,000 years ago, we developed agriculture, which led to cities and warfare; and 5,000 years ago, we invented the wheel and writing, which lead to the nation state. He tells us that we are now on the doorstep of a fourth change brought about by two technologies: AI and robotics. His book provides an essential background on how we got to this point, and how—rather than what—we should think about the topics we’ll soon all be facing, such as machine consciousness, automation, changes in employment, creative computers, radical life extension, artificial life, AI ethics, the future of warfare, superintelligence, and the implications of extreme prosperity. By asking questions like “Are you a machine?” and “Could a computer feel anything?”, Reese cultivates discussion at the cutting edge in robotics and AI, and provides a framework by which we can all understand, discuss, and act on the issues of the Fourth Age and how they’ll transform humanity. Byron Reese is the CEO and publisher of the industry-leading technology research company Gigaom, and the founder of several high-tech companies. He has spent the better part of his life exploring the interplay of technology with human history. Reese has patents, obtained and pending, in disciplines as varied as crowdsourcing, content creation, and psychographics. The websites he has launched, which cover the intersection of technology, business, science, and history, have together received over a billion visitors and he is author of the acclaimed book, Infinite Progress: How Technology and the Internet Will End Ignorance, Disease, Hunger, Poverty, and War. He joins me today to talk about his new book, The Fourth Age. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018), by P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking, outlines the history of social media platforms and their use in popular culture and modern conflict. The authors make comparisons to previous technological advancements (such as telegraph and radio) and connect the use of social media to a Clausewitzian view of war. The use of social media by insurgents, criminal organizations, and nation-states raises questions about whether the medium is the message or if new communication channels are propaganda in another form. Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Ben Epstein’s new book, The Only Constant is Change: Technology, Political Communication, and Innovation over Time (Oxford University Press, 2018), traces communication changes and innovations in the United States from the time of the Founding to the present, while also exploring how and where innovative use of communication becomes viable for political actors. Epstein connects a number of threads within the book, including a qualitative approach to communications studies that makes use of the American Political Development, or APD, framework as the structure to explore the disruptions in technology that allow for new forms of political communication operations to come forward and for political actors to choose to make use of these innovative forms for communication. Making central claims about how technological and political forces disrupt political communication activity and how these disruptions lead to new political communication orders, Epstein also examines who makes the most use of new information and communication technology, and how and where a new political communication order becomes embedded within our daily lives. This is a clearly structured book—detailing the periods of technological revolution and then the responses to those revolutionary periods as the new form of technology becomes normalized within society and also within the political communication arena. There are also some important comparative case studies to help readers understand who may make the most out of new communication approaches, and whether these approaches may, or may not, make that much of a difference. This podcast was hosted by Lilly Goren, Professor of Political Science and Global Studies at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. You can follow her on Twitter @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Though usually a background concern, the aging U.S. electric grid has lately been on the minds of both legislators and consumers. Congress wants to ensure the technological security of this important infrastructure. Consumers want to find alternative ways of powering their homes and businesses. Whatever the deliberation, the grid is topic of great concern in this era of both innovation in power and technological terrorism. But to grasp the current significance of the grid, it is important to understand its history. In her book, The Grid: Biography of an American Technology (MIT Press, 2017), Julie A. Cohn, a research historian at the Center for Public History at the University of Houston, offers an examination of the development of historical context of the grid’s development. In so doing she details the characteristics that make the grid a uniquely American technological creation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

When you imagine the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, what colors do you see? Whatever comes to mind, Laura Kalba’s, Color in the Age of Impressionism: Commerce, Technology, and Art (Penn State University Press, 2018) will change the way you think about the contents, forms, and significance of the palette of this critical moment in the history of modernity. Examining the impact of emergent color technologies on French visual culture and landscapes, Color in the Age of Impressionism includes, but moves beyond, a discussion of the works and colors of Impressionist artists to consider color theory, dye manufacture, flower cultivation and gardening culture, fireworks, chromolithographic reproduction and collecting, autochromes and neo-Impressionism. Along the way, this is a history of aesthetics, art, fashion, technical innovation, and the modern markets of hue, tone, contrast, harmony, and shade during the “color revolution” of the decades Kalba explores. Approaching the history of color in the period with the archival passion and conceptual tools of the historian of visual culture, the book pushes past the discussion and prescription of taste to delve deeper into the social, economic, technological, political, and cultural history of color in a France in the throes of the emergence of a consumer and capitalist society divided by class and other differences. A “bottom-up” history of color, Color in the Age of Impressionism takes seriously the question: How did ordinary French men and women understand realism, abstraction, and fantasy during the decades of the emergence of a modernity that included a spectrum of visuality, imagination, and techniques of representation? A winner of The College Art Association’s 2018 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, the study will be of great interest to anyone fascinated by the histories of art, looking, spectacle, culture, and everyday life in France in the decades before and after the fin-de-siècle. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: [email protected]. *The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of “Creatures,” a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as “hazy”). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict (Princeton University Press, 2018), Eli Berman, Joseph H. Felter, and Jacob N. Shapiro, takes a data-based approach to examine how actions can affect violence in asymmetric conflicts. Using data sets from Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Philippines, the authors evaluate several variables, including the role of civilians, mobile communications, and foreign aid projects. The book is data-rich and accessible, with findings presented at a tactical level and a policy level. Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch. 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 Flight of a Butterfly or the Path of a Bullet? Using Technology to Transform Teaching and Learning (Harvard Education Press, 2018), Larry Cuban looks at the uses and effects of digital technologies in K–12 classrooms, exploring if and how technology has transformed teaching and learning. In particular, he examines forty-one classrooms across six districts in Silicon Valley that have devoted special attention and resources to integrating digital technologies into their education practices. Ultimately, Cuban asks if the use of digital technologies has resulted in transformed teaching and learning in these classrooms. His unexpected findings address not only edtech and its uses, but also the complex interrelations of policy and practice, and the many—often unintended—consequences of reforms and initiatives in the education world. Larry Cuban, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of Education at Stanford University. He blogs about education at larrycuban.wordpress.com. Hoover Harris, editor of Degree Or Not Degree?, holds a PhD in English and writes and speaks about trends in higher education. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @degreenot. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

In Middle Eastern history, the printing press has been both over- and under-assigned significance as an agent of social change. Hala Auji’s Printing Arab Modernity: Book Culture and the American Press in Nineteenth-Century Beirut (Brill, 2016) is not only a history of the American Protestant mission’s Arabic press in Beirut, which printed books for Ottoman readers during the 19th century, but a window into the world of Arabic printing at large. Auji uses art history to chart the transition between manuscripts and printed books, using a deep appreciation for Islamic art and book-production to highlight rupture and continuity. Text and non-textual elements are used to tell a story that was not local simply to Beirut, but had connections to the entire region and the development of printing in Arabic-language script at large. Part book-history, part art history, part intellectual history, Printing Arab Modernity ebbs between lithography and typography to tell an essential narrative of modern Middle Eastern history. Hala Auji is an assistant professor of art history in the Department of Fine Arts and Art History at the American University of Beirut (AUB). She holds a PhD in art history from Binghamton University, State University of New York, an MA in Art Criticism & Theory from Art Center College of Design, and a BFA in graphic design from the American University of Beirut. Her research interests include: Arabic book and print culture, 19th-century Islamic art and architecture and the| history of modern science in the Islamic world, amongst many more. She can also be found at https://www.halaauji.net/ Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

The use of our data and the privacy, or lack thereof, that we have when we go online has become a topic of increasing importance as technology becomes ubiquitous and more sophisticated. Governments, advocacy groups and individual citizens are demanding that action be taken to protect their valuable data. But what does this sporadic noise amount to? B.J. Mendelson in his book Privacy: And How to Get It Back (Curious Reads, 2017) argues that a complacent citizenry and the overly-intimate relationship that corporations have with government has led to massive breaches of people’s privacy. Mendelson humorously explains the way people’s data is used and abused as he tracks the long history of government surveillance leading to an explanation of, what he believes, could be the solution to the abuse of people’s privacy. 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 was joined by Seamus Grimes from Ireland where he is Emeritus Professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway. With Yutao Sun (Dalian University of Technology), he just published a very interesting and timely book China and Global Value Chains: Globalization and the Information and Communications Technology Sector (Routledge, 2018). President Trump has raised the intriguing question of bringing the manufacturing of companies like Apple back from China to the U.S. This book, however, argues that in this age of the knowledge-based economy and increased globalization, that value creation and distribution based on knowledge and innovation activities are at the core of economic development. The double-edged sword of globalization has transformed China’s economic development in the past few decades. Although China has benefitted from globalization and is now the second largest economy in the world, having become a global manufacturing power and the biggest exporter of high-tech products, it continues to be highly dependent on foreign sources of capital and technology. The book explores the core of the Chinese economy from the perspective of the global value chain, combining analysis of inward investment, international trade, science and technology and innovation and economic development. Specifically, it investigates China’s evolving role with some innovative Chinese companies emerging in the global market and China’s ongoing efforts to become an innovation-driven economy. This is a very interesting book on the complexity of the global industrial systems that are behind the production of the electronic goods that we use daily. Beside China and this specific sector, it is a timely warning for those that argue in favour of raising barriers or regulating otherwise the current flow of goods and components worldwide. Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Critical Management Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Understanding Cyber Conflict: 14 Analogies (Georgetown University Press, 2017), edited by George Perkovich and Ariel E. Levite, uses analogies to conventional warfare and previous technological innovations to explain the complexities of cyber capabilities and threats. The essays examine cyber weapons, cyber warfare, and cyber defense using case studies that include the attacks on Pearl Harbor and the use of drones. This book is a worthwhile thought exercise to better understand how cyber conflict fits into existing frameworks of international relations and how cyber capabilities may affect existing norms of war. Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Sewing, knitting, quilting, the crafts related to fabric making, are usually not what we think about when we consider our digital communications devices. Yet, many of the activities that we find ourselves doing with our devices touching the screen, scrolling, swiping, etc. and some of the language that we use to describe our actions, draw from textile culture. In his book The Fabric of Interface: Mobile Media, Design, and Gender (MIT Press, 2017), Stephen Montiero, at Concordia University, explores the connection between the fabric arts and computing. In it he investigates the relationship between gender and the construction of media technologies. A particular focus of his is an examination of how, as in former years sewing was dismissed as women’s work, social aspects of digital technologies are gendered and dismissed as inconsequential. Montiero also details the eraser of the contributions of many women to the evolution of the technology that is now ubiquitous. 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 book Playback: A Genealogy of 1980s British Videogames (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), Alex Wade examines the culture of bedroom coding, arcades, and format wars in 1980s Britain. Wade interviews gamers, developers and journalists to better understand the cultural habitus of early gaming. Wade expertly explores the bedroom culture of early coders, examining the ways in which games were copied and distributed among players. He situates gaming in the underground subcultures of arcades, connecting early arcade cultures to present-day gambling and gaming. Wade analyzes the ways that 1980s gaming gave rise to today’s gaming industry. Through his in-depth research into 1980s British gaming culture, Wade argues that video games give insight into social, political, and cultural landscapes in ways that deserve exploration and recognition. Wade’s work on gaming and gaming culture is essential reading in games studies and media and his focus on sociology of gaming makes for an appeal to a wide audience. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. She is the author of Writing a Riot: Riot Grrrl Zines and Feminist Rhetorics (Peter Lang, 2018). 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/technology

My father has this personality quirk that drives me crazy. Whenever and wherever he travels, no matter how far, he refuses to reset his watch to the local time. For him, it’s always whatever time it is in Cincinnati, Ohio, even if all the clocks around him flash the fact that it isn’t, even if he’s taking my mother, for example, on their once-in-a-lifetime dream vacation to Hawaii and the sun is setting in perfect postcard colors. “No wonder I’m sleepy,” he’ll say, glancing at his watch. “It’s two in the morning.” I don’t know quite why it drives me so crazy. Maybe it’s his small refusal to accept where he is at that moment or maybe its his small insistence that, at any moment, he’s always home. I just know that, with a wristwatch and a strong will, my father has decided to ignore the laws of time. It turns out that he’s not so different from most of us who fly frequently from one time zone to another. In his new book, Jet Lag (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), Chris Lee illuminates what happens to us when, thousands of feet in the air, trapped in an uncomfortable seat in coach or luxuriously sprawled out in first-class, we race ahead of the clock or fall behind it. Suddenly the sun shines when it shouldn’t or the night comes to soon, and were out of synch, not only with time but, it can seem, with the world around us, even with ourselves. We’re jet-lagged, and, as Lee cleverly shows, were experiencing much more than an inconvenience. We’re experiencing something like modernity itself, where time, technology, and our global condition are not only made evident but also, as we stagger off our flights, exhausting. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

For most people the field of architecture is not what they think about when discussing artificial intelligence as we describe it today. Yet, architects are a part of the historic foundations of what we call the Internet and now AI. In her new book, Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape (MIT, 2017), Carnegie Mellon associate professor Molly Wright Steenson, considers four of these designers: Christopher Alexander, Richard Saul Wurman, Cedric Price, and Nicholas Negroponte, to examine how they included elements of interactivity in their projects. In so doing she illuminates how their work influences today’s technology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Our guest today was Dr. Jennifer Hart who talked to us about her recently published book Ghana on the Go: African Mobility in the Age of Motor Transportation (Indiana University Press, 2016). In this book, Dr. Hart traces the history of automotive transportation in Ghana from the introduction of the first motor vehicles during the early colonial period through the beginnings of the twenty-first century. Ghana on the Go focuses on the emergence and growth of commercial transportation which became the most prevalent way for Ghanaians to experience automotive mobility. Dr. Hart centers her narrative in the personal stories of drivers and passengers to examine how automotive mobility allowed for social and economic mobility building from an existing entrepreneurial culture. She threads these stories with a larger history of political contestation, economic development and state regulation to examine the long-term impact of automotive technology in the evolution of Ghanaian state, society and culture. Dr. Jennifer Hart is an Associate Professor in the History Department at Wayne State University. Her research interests include African history and Urban History. Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is Associate Professor of History at Montclair State University. She specializes in modern intellectual history of Africa, historiography, World history and Philosophy of History. She is the co-author of African Histories: New Sources and New Techniques for Studying African Pasts (Pearson, 2011). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

For millennia, religions have concocted numerous manifestations of heaven and the afterlife, and though no one has ever returned from such a place to report what it is really like—or that it even exists—today science and technology are being used to try to make it happen in our lifetime. In the book we are looking at today, Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia (Henry Holt, 2018), Dr. Michael Shermer sets out to discover what drives humans’ belief in life after death, focusing on recent scientific attempts to achieve immortality along with utopian attempts to create heaven on earth. From radical life extension, to cryonic suspension to mind uploading, Shermer considers how realistic these attempts are from a proper skeptical perspective and concludes with an uplifting tribute to purpose and progress and a word on how we can live well in the here-and-now, whether or not there is a hereafter. Dr. Michael Shermer is the Publisher of Skeptic magazine, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, and a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University where he teaches Skepticism 101. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Universite Laval in Quebec City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

With all of its entailed engagements with epistemology, emergence, and self-organization, cybernetics began (and arguably still is) the science of communication and control in the animal and the machine as it was coined in the subtitle of Norbert Wiener’s field defining book of 1948. While the reflexive turn of second-order cybernetics in the 1970s led the field down new paths (and, unfortunately, to the margins of mainstream academia) in the West, Soviet thinkers continued to develop the control scientific implications of the field in a manner that remained central to the scientific enterprise of that nation. In his densely packed book, Cybernetics: Past to Future (Springer Verlag, 2016), Dmitry Novikov provides a detailed and erudite analysis of the fields development as a kind of meta-science or philosophy of the varied strands of control theory across technological, biological, and social systems. As the current Director of the Institute of Control Sciences of the Russian Academy of Science, Dr. Novikov is eminently qualified to guide readers on a journey through the promises, challenges, disappointments, achievements and future prospects of the science of control and communication that will also introduce a global audience to the work of many eminent Russian thinkers in the field whose work has not been as accessible outside Russia as is deserved. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

As a historian I find myself constantly asking the question “Is that really new, or is it rather something that looks new but isn’t?” If you read the headlines, particularly those concerning the on going “Digital Revolution,” you would certainly get the impression that a Brave New World is emerging, one nothing like anything that we’ve seen before. And, in a way, this is true: we—meaning humans—have never lived in an environment with smartphones, social media, and the firehose of “information” that is the Internet. We’re always on and always connected in a way we have never been before. But, as Andrew Keen points out in his smart new book How To Fix The Future (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2018), there is also a sense in which we have been here before, namely, in the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and 19th century. Then, too, technology and new forms of organization upended the way almost everyone in the industrializing world lived. (For more, see Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, and Emile Durkheim, unless you like poets, in which case you should just read the British Romantics.) Some made dire predictions, others said heaven was around the corner. There was lots of suffering and, well, lots of progress. What we did, Keen points out, is essentially tame the Industrial Revolution such that it served humanity rather than humanity serving it. He says we can do the same with the Digital Revolution, and he tells us how. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Popular culture provides many visions of the future. From The Jetsons to Futurama, Black Mirror to Minority Report, Western culture has predicted a future predicated on innovations in technology. In his new book for the MIT Essential Knowledge Series, The Future (MIT Press, 2017), Nick Montfort examines the writings of previous futurist writers, thinkers, and designers to provide an understanding of how the future can be constructed. In so doing, Montfort argues that the future is something we can shape instead of only predict. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

We take electricity for granted. But the material grids and wires that bring light to homes and connect places are also objects of moral concern, political freedoms and national advancement, suggests Leo Coleman in his new book A Moral Technology: Electrification as Political Ritual in New Delhi (Cornell University Press 2017). The book is structured around three historical and ethnographic case studies—the pomp and show at Viceroy Curzon’s 1903 Imperial Durbar that ultimately left no trace on Delhi’s physical landscape; Constituent Assembly debates on nationwide electrification legislation; and anti-privatization consumer activism pursued by New Delhi’s neighborhood associations in the mid 2000s. Coleman argues that technological infrastructures are never a purely technical matter and always already entangled in political, legal and moral processes. Electrification in each historical moment—colonial enclave, fledgling nation and global city—generates meaningful, moral reflection on what constitutes the public sphere, self-determination and collective wellbeing. Leo Coleman is an associate professor of anthropology at Hunter College, City University of New York. Madhuri Karak is a Ph.D. candidate in cultural anthropology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her dissertation titled “Part-time Insurgents, Civil War and Extractive Capital in an Adivasi Frontier” explores processes of state-making in the bauxite-rich mountains of southern Odisha, India. She tweets @madhurikarak and more of her work can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Tom Mullaney’s new book The Chinese Typewriter: A History (MIT Press, 2017) provides a fascinating first look at the development of modern Chinese information technology. Spanning 150 years from the origins of telegraphy in the early 1800s to the advent of computing in the 1950s – the book explores the at times fraught relationship between Chinese writing and global modernity. It covers some of the earliest and varied attempts to make the Chinese script fit for Western communication systems, taking the reader on a journey through Chinese telegraphy, Morse code, typewriters and early computing. In addition, Mullaney includes reference to the many failed attempts, ideas and approaches in the history of Chinese information technology through a series of lively and insightful stories and people. Perhaps most interestingly, Mullaney covers how various inbuilt linguistic inequalities in turn eventually led to the evolution of innovative strategies and technologies, including input method and predictive text. Ricarda Brosch is a museum assistant (trainee) at the Asian Art Museum Berlin (Museum fur Asiatische Kunst Berlin – Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz), which is due to reopen as part of the Humboldt Forum in 2019. Her research focuses on Ming and Qing Chinese art & material culture, transcultural interchanges, especially with Timurid and Safavid Iran, as well as provenance research & digital humanities. You can find out more about her work by following her on Twitter @RicardaBeatrix or getting in touch via [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

It’s no secret that we continue to live in the midst of digital revolution that continues to unfold in a rapidly accelerating fashion. Digital connectivity and the Internet of Things make possible not only Smart Homes, but Smart Cities. As with all technological revolutions, the road ahead is equally dotted with possibilities and pitfalls. Liss C. Werner and her colleagues brought together a collection of thinkers and practitioners in the realms of architecture, design, and urban planning to wrestle with questions around ways we might utilize today’s digital design tools to enable more responsive, resilient, and ultimately, inclusive and democratic forms of urban design and governance without tipping the balance over to a technocratic project that might imprison us within its algorithmic logics. All of the contributors to this discussion share the hope that the insights of second-order cybernetics might provide valuable guidance as we attempt to find that particular “sweet-spot” of human/machine interaction. Their insights are gathered together in Cybernetics: State of the Art edited by our guest, Liss C. Werner, and available free online from the Technical University of Berlin. As editor, Werner has skillfully crafted a dialectic arc that allows the productive tensions between digital utopianism and skepticism enabling a provocative investigation of the revolution that is happening whether we like it or not, and might help us find the means to steer its emergence in ways that are most beneficial for all of us and our environment. 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 a form of material culture and is a human activity. The way in which humans view technology is a social construction in which people use social processes of interpretation and negotiation. The mundane rituals that humans carry out when interacting with technology are loaded with emotional overtones. The interaction with technology in most cases become habit. The dependence and isolation that result from technology use is invisible and seems natural to membership groups that use it. Chelsea Schelly, the author of Dwelling in Resistance: Living with Alternative Technologies in America (Rutgers University Press, 2017) and my guest for this episode, studied technology and the way in which people of four alternative lifestyles live without such dependency on technology. In our interview, we discuss the way in which people at The Farm, Twin Oaks, Dancing Rabbits, and Earthship Biotecture lived their daily lives by sharing some technology and living without most of it. Chelsea Schelly, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Michigan Technological University in Houghton. Dr. Schelly is also the author of Crafting Collectivity: American Rainbow Gatherings and Alternative Forms of Community. She is currently developing a project to further research the economy of these four communities. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He earned his doctoral degree in Public Policy and Public Administration from Walden University. His most recent paper, to be presented at the upcoming American Society for Environmental History conference, is titled Down Lovers Lane: A Brief History of Necking in Cars. You can learn more about Dr. Johnston’s work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

When discussing Internet history, many within the United States believe the creation myth of an Internet born in Silicon Valley. But aspects of the Internet that we use for shopping, financial transactions, and social interactions, among other things, have roots in technological advances from other countries. In particular, 15 years before most Americans were online, the French government backed a communications technology, the Minitel, that revolutionized social, political, and financial interactions. In Minitel: Welcome to the Internet (MIT Press, 2017), Julien Mailland and Kevin Driscoll discuss the creation and spread of the Minitel and the particular influence it had on France, and ultimately what we call the Internet. In so doing the authors offer lessons for current regulatory debates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

How can Lacan help us to understand the subversive potential of video games? In The Playstation Dreamworld (Polity, 2017), Alfie Bown, Assistant Professor of Literature at HSMC, Hong Kong, explores this and many other questions of the modern condition. The book offers an accessible overview of key psychoanalytic theories to understand the video game, in particular the video game experience and its impact on the social world. The book uses a plethora of gaming examples, drawing out the ambivalences and potentials in even the most seemingly un-revolutionary games. These range from the transformation of space and urban experience in Pokemon Go, through the more corporate or reactionary experiences of Uncharted, through to the subversive elements of Papers Please. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding how we live, through video games, now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Zek Valkyrie teaches at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. His new book, Game Worlds Get Real: How Who We Are Online Became Who We Are Offline (Praeger, 2017), takes readers into the world of electronic games and the complex social relationships that they create. With the mainstream reader in mind, it serves as a primer for anyone interested in the how and why of gaming, as well as a solid introduction to social science concepts generally. The book does not presume apologetics for video games—to be sure, the author takes a direct approach to discussing the myriad social problems inherent in the medium. Along with the many positives to collaborative and competitive online play, major topics include sexism, masculinity, various gamer stigmas, identity formation, and consumption, among others. In this conversation we touch of all of these, as well as the books origins, how the author was able to include student work in the final publication, and his award-winning teaching methods. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Big Data: How the Information Revolution Is Transforming Our Lives (Icon Books, 2017), by Brian Clegg, is a relatively short book about a subject that has emerged only recently, but is rapidly becoming a significant force in the evolution of society. Most of us have heard the term “big data,” but many of us erroneously assume that its just a lot of little data. It’s considerably more than that, and Big Data, which is an easy and fun read, serves as a terrific introduction to a topic which has an ever-increasing impact on many aspects of our lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Since its invention, the Internet has become a fundamental part of our lives. Since the invention of social media, communicative technologies have changed our lives and influenced journalism and politics in ways that were unimaginable just ten years ago. In her book, Micro-blogging Memories: Weibo and Collective Remembering in Contemporary China (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Eileen Le Han explores how the social media site Weibo has influenced Chinese culture and politics. By analysing the relationship between three key tensions: control-resistance, past-present, and global-local, Le Han provides a unique and in-depth account on how social media is used in an increasingly globalising China. By focusing on specific events and how they were reported on, and more significantly, how they are remembered, Le Han explores the contentious topics of state-sponsored censorship, increasing nationalism and the collectivisation of memory. The first five years of Weibo were a turning point in Chinese society, a time in which the anxieties and uncertainties over remembering, were confronted by journalists, media professionals, pundits and ordinary citizens. Five years on how is Weibo fairing? And what does the future hold for Chinese journalism? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Simone Muller’s Wiring the World: The Social and Cultural Creation of Global Telegraph Networks (Columbia University Press, 2016) is a superb account of the laying of submarine telegraph cables in the nineteenth century and the battles over them in the subsequent decades. Her book shows how expanding telegraph networks were instrumental in processes of capitalism, nation-building, and globalization. To track these grand developments, however, Muller reconstructs the network of people who built, managed, and fought over telegraph networks. She calls this eclectic collection of financiers, engineers, entrepreneurs, and politicians “actors of globalization.” Muller’s book is an historical kaleidoscope that shows the multi-faceted meaning of telegraphy. Her actors imbued telegraphy with hopes of world peace, of Weltcommunication (a predecessor of the global village idea), of a global electric union, and of bolstering the civilizing mission. Even if submarine telegraphy never achieved these aspirations, her book demonstrates just how culturally and socially significant this technology and these networks were to the pre-WWI world. Her book should be of interest to historians of capitalism, technology, international relations, Europe and the United States, along with anyone curious about the longer duree of globalization. Simone Muller is a principal investigator at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Dexter Fergie will be pursuing his PhD in US and Global history at Northwestern University in September 2017. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

What better way to explore the history of media regulation than to go on a journey with the former chief economist of the FCC? Prior to introduction of the Federal Radio Commission in 1927, the radio spectrum was in chaos. Broadcasters were attempting to drown out their rivals with powerful signals and the detrimental effect on the public interest was profound. Or was it? In The Political Spectrum: The Tumultuous Liberation of Wireless Technology, from Herbert Hoover to the Smartphone (Yale University Press, 2017), distinguished legal and economic scholar Thomas Hazlett challenges the notion that U.S. government intervention was vital to protect and save the industry. Hazlett argues that, for nearly a century, disruptive technologies, competition and alternative viewpoints have been quashed, by special interest groups claiming to know better. Hazlett blends his discussion on legislation with the rise of new technologies in a way that in accessible to everyone, even if you have no prior knowledge of media policy and the current landscape. This entertaining and fascinating read argues that, if you really want to achieve what is best for the public, you need to open the market to more competition. 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 role of the deejay in shaping hip-hop? Did deejays shape the technology that is used to create the music or were they simply consumers of mixers, faders, and microphones? What is the relationship between deejays and the manufacturers that produced the technology that made hip-hop possible? Andre Sirois explores these questions in his book, Hip-Hop DJs and the Evolution of Technology: Cultural Exchange, Innovation, and Democratization (which can be downloaded for free here). Sirois is both a scholar and a deejay, and his book brings academic discourse into dialogue with working deejays. Hip-Hop DJs and the Evolution of Technology (Peter Lang, 2016) draws on extensive interviews with the deejays that have shaped hip-hop and the technology manufacturers who made the products behind the deejays. The podcast covers the history of deejays, examining the three legends that are considered the founders of hip-hop: DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash. He looks at how they transformed the role of the deejay through their digging in the crates, the development of deejaying techniques, and how they developed a collaborative ethos among deejays even as they sought to develop their own reputations. Then, Sirois explores other deejays, such as DJ Trix, DJ Craze, the Scratch Hamsters, and the Invisibl Skratch Piklz, who worked with manufacturers, including Vestax and Rane, to produce signature mixers and other equipment. (You can view Sirois’s collection of vintage mixers at djpedia). The podcast also examines the complicated ways that deejays and manufacturers worked together even though few deejays received significant economic benefit from these collaborations. Dr. Andre Sirois, also known as DJ food stamp, is an instructor at the University of Oregon, where he teaches courses on filmmaking and popular culture in the media. He has over 17 years experience as a hip-hop, scratch, club, and radio DJ. His scratches have been featured on numerous artists songs, including the gold-selling single by Spose, “I’m Awesome.” He is one of the founders of DJistory/DJpedia, a non-profit organization and archive dedicated to preserving and telling histories of DJ technology and culture. Richard Schur, Drury University professor of English and Director of the Honors Program, is the host for this podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

For the aristocracy in Britain and Ireland, country house living was dependent upon the labors of men and women who performed innumerable chores involving cooking, cleaning, and the basic operation of the household. In the 18th century, however, the Industrial Revolution began to change this by introducing new devices and systems that simplified a wide range of duties. In Technology in the Country House (Historic England Publishing, 2016; distributed in the U.S. by University of Chicago Press) Marilyn Palmer and Ian West detail the extensive range of innovations adopted by country house owners from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries and their impact on the operations of their homes and estates. As West explains in this podcast, though many of these innovations were labor-saving devices, often they required not fewer servants, but ones trained in the new tasks of how to operate and maintain them. Their introduction was often undertaken by owners out of a personal interest in the innovations of the age, or who adopted them because of their fashionability–motives which, as West explains, provide useful examples of how technology is introduced into society generally both then and today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Sharrona Pearl‘s new book is an absolute pleasure to read. Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other (The University of Chicago Press, 2017) looks closely at facial allotransplantations (FAT), commonly known as face transplants, in order to offer a careful and fascinating study of the stakes for changing the face, and the changing stakes for the face. Troubling the indexical relationship between the face and character and reminding us that “[t]he self has always been a set of choices,” Pearl explores face transplantation as it relates to cosmetic surgery and whole-organ transplants, the cinema of the 1960s, television shows, and more. She carefully and sensitively takes us into the debates among surgeons, bioethicists, and journalists that circled the first partial face transplant of Isabelle Dinoire in 2005, and offers a way toward a philosophical approach that brings together Levinas with the kind of (Deleuzian) subjectivity that allows for individuality through constant change and understands the self to be constantly in a process of becoming. The final chapter of the book also situates the analysis within larger contexts of online subjectivities and work with facial and bodily manipulation by artists and performers. It’s sparklingly written and well worth a read! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

The title of James Poyner’s book, Trump Tweets: His Social Media Phenomenon (Wilkinson Publishing, 2017), tells you everything you need to know about the world you about to enter. In temperament, and style, Trump was unlike any presidential candidate who came before him. The media and the public were enthralled with his antics. However, what stood out for many was Trumps thoroughly unique communication style. This book gives an in-depth look at how Trump used Twitter to attack, criticise, publicise and expand the reach of brand Trump. Poyner uses several key events to move the book forward and tell the story of how Trump used Twitter, from the start of his presidential campaign right up until Inauguration day. Exploring not only Trumps tweets but the publics reaction to them, Poyner is able to capture unique moments in history and examine how they impacted the race to the White House. The term Twitter-storm was coined long before Trump threw his hat into the presidential race but no other figure, since the social media platforms inception, has been able to cause a storm quite like Trump. Poyner leads the reader down the rabbit hole and through a world of tweets, trolling, tantrums and ultimately victory. Trump Tweets is available now in Australia and will be available in the U.S. on June 1. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Policymakers and the public clamored for maps throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, maps were a necessity for war, navigation, and countless other activities. Yet by the 1960s and 1970s, interest in maps waned while electronic coordinate systems emerged. But this was not solely a shift in technology, as William Rankin writes in After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2016). The shift from maps to coordinate systems, and then eventually to GPS produced novel geographical subjectivities, navigational experiences and geopolitical arrangements. It was a shift in the meaning of territory itself. By day, William Rankin is an assistant professor of history at Yale; by night, he is an award-winning cartographer, whose work you can find here. Rankin has also set up a website to accompany the book, at which readers can see the books images, data, and bibliography. Dexter Fergie will be pursuing his PhD in US and Global history at Northwestern University in September 2017. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Sophia Roosth‘s wonderful new book follows researchers clustered around MIT beginning in 2003 who named themselves synthetic biologists. A historically informed anthropological analysis based on many years of ethnographic work, Synthetic: How Life Got Made (University of Chicago Press, 2017) offers a fascinating account of the changing relationship between making and understanding in the life sciences, and of the metamorphoses of life itself as an analytic object. The chapters of the book consider traditional ethnographic conventions as they manifest in the case of synthetic biology and reflect the forms of life being built by the synthetic biologists: religion, kinship, economy and property, labor, household, origin tales. Interludes between the chapters function as keyword entries, each probing earlier articulations of what it meant to be synthetic in different contexts, from the synthetic fabrics industry to Soviet synthetic dance to music, chemistry, and much more. It is a beautifully written and totally absorbing study. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Nowadays, it might seem perplexing for the founder of a seed company to express the intention to “shock Mother Nature,” or at least in bad taste. Yet, this was precisely the goal of agricultural innovators like David Burpee, of the Burpee Seed Company, who sought to use radiation and chemical mutagens to accelerate the generation of new plant varieties, a process otherwise requiring painstaking, slow, and resource-intensive artificial selection. Helen Anne Curry‘s Evolution Made to Order: Plant Breeding and Technological Innovation in Twentieth-Century America (University of Chicago Press, 2016) is a fascinating history of biotechnology that documents the interplay between genetic research and agricultural production; genetic engineering avant la lettre, one is tempted to say, although botanist A. F. Blakeslee, who figures prominently in the narrative, made a failed attempt to promote the designation “genetics engineer” to describe his work. Through the lens of three different technologies–x-rays, the chemical colchicine, and atomic radiation–Curry shows how chromosomes and genetic mutations became sites of speculation for industrial agriculture and of experimentation for amateur plant breeders. She deftly restores the experimental station, the marketplace, and the garden to their proper place as sites of knowledge production, showing that landscape and lab were perhaps never so separable as our modern conceit might make them appear. This is part one of a series of new work on twentieth-century biotechnology–look out for further interviews featuring some great new work published by the University of Chicago Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

While the title of Matt Pearl‘s book, The Solo Video Journalist: Doing it All and Doing It Well in TV Multimedia Journalism (Focal Press, 2016), hints at a solitary existence, he shares experiences of many journalists who have inspired his work and emphasizes the community built around multimedia journalism. He has worked in television news for more than a decade and shares what he’s learned in a clear and logical way while still telling a story. The book gives a hands-on approach that walks the reader through planning a segment, dressing the part, conducting interviews and editing the content. For quite a long period of time, those in news media were part of a stable industry that hadn’t seen much change. The past few decades have been the opposite of stable. The expectations of those in journalistic roles are more fluid today. The definition of a multimedia journalist is a moving target of sorts, and Pearl has experienced adapting to those shifts and changes in the field. The book not only provides useful insights for college students, but also for veteran journalists who wants to expand their career horizons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Joshua Cohen is a faculty member of Apple University, and is Distinguished Senior Fellow at the School of Law, the Department of Philosophy, and the Department of Political Science at Berkeley. He is the author of several influential academic articles, many of which are collected in Philosophy, Politics, Democracy(Harvard 2009), and The Arc of the Moral Universe and Other Essays (Harvard, 2011). Since 1991, Cohen has edited the Boston Review. The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. 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 Happiness Effect: How Social Media is Driving a Generation to Appear Perfect at Any Cost (Oxford University Press, 2017), Donna Freitas investigates the darker side of social media use and explains how pressure to appear happy and successful online can actually make people less happy in the real world. Using the stories of college students she interviewed as a framework, Freitas builds a dynamic argument and offers concrete tools for how teachers, parents, and society as a whole can help young people take control of their smartphones and of their own happiness. Donna Freitas is a Nonresident Research Associate at the University of Notre Dames Center for the Study of Religion and Society, and when she is not traveling for research she teaches in the Honors Colleges at Hofstra University. She is the author of Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America’s College Campuses (Oxford University Press, 2008), as well as several novels for young adults. A regular contributor to Publisher’s Weekly, she has also written for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Susan Raab is president of Raab Associates, an internationally recognized agency that specializes in marketing literature, products and initiatives that help improve the lives of young people. Clients have included National Geographic, Scholastic, the International Board on Books for Young People, and bestselling authors and illustrators. Susan is marketing advisor for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). She’s also a journalist reporting on publishing, education and human rights. Her work as a broadcast correspondent has been hosted by the University of Connecticut, and by the University of Florida’s Recess Radio, a program syndicated to 500 public radio stations. Her many interviews, including with Art Spiegelman, Jon Scieszka, Norton Juster, Laurie Halse Anderson and many others talking about art and literature can be heard here. Follow Susan at: https://twitter.com/sraab18 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology