New Books In Communications

How are algorithms shaping our experience of the internet? In Making it Personal: Algorithmic Personalization, Identity, and Everyday Life (Oxford University Press), Tanya Kant, a lecturer in Media And Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex interrogates the rise of algorithmic personalization, in the context of an internet dominated by platform providers and corporate interests. Using detailed empirical case studies, along with a rich and deep theoretical framework, the book shows the negative impact of algorithmic personalization, the nuances and ambivalences in user behaviours, and their modes of resistance. As we increasingly live our lives online, the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in understanding how algorithms regulate our lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re hearing an awful lot about the fraught relationship between science and media. In his book, News from Mars: Mass Media and the Forging of a New Astronomy, 1860-1910 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), historian of science Joshua Nall shows us that a blurry boundary between science and journalism was a key feature—not a bug—of the emergence of modern astronomy. Focusing on objects and media, such as newspapers, encyclopedias, cigarette cards, and globes, Nall offers a history of how astronomers’ cultivation of a mass public shaped their discipline as it managed controversies over the possibility of canals on Mars, and even interplanetary communication. This book is strongly recommended for historians of science and communication, as well as those with an eye for material culture. Joshua Nall is curator of modern sciences at the Whipple Museum of the History of Science in the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Mike

What are best-practices for alleviating stress in the workplace? Today I talked to Cary Cooper about his new book The Apology Impulse: How the Business World Ruined Sorry and Why We Can’t Stop Saying It (Kogan Page, 2020). Cooper explains why managers should say “Sorry, I Wasn’t Feeling." Cooper is the author/editor of over 250 books, and the president of the British Academy of Management. An advisor to the World Health Organization and the EU, he’s received both a knighthood and the CBE award from the Queen of England for “extraordinary contributions” to society. Topics covered in this episode include: The difference between operational and cultural failures, and why CEOs find it easier to apologize for the latter by pretending the problem has to do with the former. The percentage of workers who feel bullied by a boss at work on a constant basis, and Cooper’s estimation of the percentage of bosses who won’t be able to benefit from EQ-training and, therefore, should be given roles that don’t involve managin

In this episode, I speak with Dr. Trena Paulus of Eastern Tennessee State University and Dr. Alyssa Wise of New York University on their new book, Looking for Insight, Transformation, and Learning in Online Talk (Routledge, 2019). The book offers a comprehensive discussion of conducting research on online talk, which includes but is not limited to synchronous and asynchronous interactions on social media, discussion forums, and other forms of digital communication platforms. It walks readers through the different stages and procedures of conducting online research, addresses the major challenges that researchers often encounter in doing this type of work, and presents a new research framework for conceiving online research. The book has a strong emphasis on supporting researchers to unpack their implicit assumptions and make informed decisions. It also pays close attention to the unique ethical challenges in doing research online. In an era of physical distancing, many social and educational research activiti

The Blackface minstrel show is typically thought of a form tied to the 19th century. While the style was indeed developed during the Antebellum period, its history stretches well into 20th- and even 21st-century America. Far from being the endpoint posited by much of the existing literature on the topic, the Jazz age of the 1920s actually saw a flourishing of Minstrel activity, as new forms of media allowed the circulation of Blackface images in ever greater profusion. This circulation, these images, and the performances that lay behind them make up the focus of Dr. Kevin James Byrne’s Minstrel Traditions: Mediated Blackface in the Jazz Age (Routledge, 2020). Minstrel Traditions examines the technologically-mediated interactions that developed between live performances and their circulating images during this fraught period. It does so through a set of case studies: the last musical of Bert Williams, the live career of (now-former) pancake brand/performer Aunt Jemima, amateur minstrel shows and the companies

Mexico today is one of the most dangerous places in the world to report the news, and Mexicans have taken to the street to defend freedom of expression. As Benjamin T. Smith demonstrates in his history of the press and civil society, The Mexican Press and Civil Society, 1940-1976: Stories from the Newsroom, Stories from the Street (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) the cycle of violent repression and protest over journalism is nothing new. He traces it back to the growth in newspaper production and reading publics between 1940 and 1976, when a national thirst for tabloids, crime sheets, and magazines reached far beyond the middle class. As Mexicans began to view local and national events through the prism of journalism, everyday politics changed radically. Even while lauding the liberty of the press, the state developed an arsenal of methods to control what was printed, including sophisticated spin and misdirection techniques, covert financial payments, and campaigns of threats, imprisonment, beatings

The United States takes pride in its democratic model and the idea that citizens deliberate in a process to form political opinions. However, in recent years, division and partisanship have increased while deliberation and the actual discussion of competing ideas have decreased. More and more, citizens are siloed, interacting only with those with whom they agree, and there is more negative animus directed at the opposition. In his new book, A Change is Gonna Come: How to Have Effective Political Conversations in a Divided America (Oxford University Press, 2020), Political Scientist Brian F. Harrison critiques many of the current methods of communicating and explores the growing divide within political discourse. He demonstrates how, in our contemporary environment, political debate includes more name-calling and far less of a desire to understand political opponents. But hope is not lost. Looking at recent history, Harrison argues that conversations about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights success

When we talk about technology we always talk about the future—which makes it hard to figure out how to get there. In Future Histories: What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine, and the Paris Commune Can Teach Us about Digital Technology (Verso), Lizzie O’Shea argues that we need to stop looking forward and start looking backwards. Weaving together histories of computing and social movements with modern theories of the mind, society, and self, O’Shea constructs a “usable past” that help us determine our digital future. What, she asks, can the Paris Commune tell us about earlier experiments in sharing resources—like the Internet—in common? Can debates over digital access be guided by Tom Paine’s theories of democratic economic redistribution? And how is Elon Musk not a visionary but a throwback to Victorian-era utopians? In engaging, sparkling prose, O’Shea shows us how very human our understanding of technology is, and what potential exists for struggle, for liberation, for art and poetry in our digital present. Future Hi

If gun violence kills so many Americans, why don’t we see more effective solutions? How much does the way we frame an issue impact how we feel about it? How often are hot button issues deeply polarized due to the biased or intentionally manipulated ways they are presented to the public? In Warped Narratives: Distortion in the Framing of Gun Policy (University of Michigan Press, 2020), Melissa K. Merry (Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Louisville) applies these questions to gun policy highlighting the ways both sides warp the gun policy narrative to fit and further their separate agendas. Noticing the way gun control advocates highlight white victims’ of mass shootings, while gun rights advocates stress self-defense rights, Merry concludes this type of framing serves to further polarize the public leaving policy makers less able to form coalitions and agree to compromise. In this way, warping has consequences for both policy and politics. Employing a social science lens and employing thr

In Terrorizing Gender: Transgender Visibility and the Surveillance Practices of the U.S. Security State, Mia Fischer traces how media and state actors collude in the violent disciplining of trans women, exposing the traps of visibility by illustrating that dominant representations of trans people as deceptive, deviant, and threatening are integral to justifying, normalizing, and reinforcing the state-sanctioned violence enacted against them. Bringing together transgender, queer, critical race, legal, surveillance, and media studies, Fisher analyzes the cases of Chelsea Manning, CeCe McDonald, and Monica Jones and shows how the heightened visibility of transgender people has actually occasioned a conservative backlash characterized by the increased surveillance of trans people by the security state. Terrorizing Gender concludes that the current moment of trans visibility constitutes a contingent cultural and national belonging, given the gendered and racialized violence that the state continues to enact again

dSoon after atomic bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, MGM set out to make a movie studio chief Louis B. Mayer called “the most important story” he would ever film: a big budget dramatization of the Manhattan Project and the invention and use of the revolutionary new weapon. Greg Mitchell’s The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood—and America—Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (The New Press, 2020) chronicles the first efforts of American media and culture to process the Atomic Age. A movie that began as a cautionary tale inspired by atomic scientists aiming to warn the world against a nuclear arms race would be drained of all impact due to revisions and retakes ordered by President Truman and the military. Greg Mitchell blogs at http://gregmitchellwriter.blogspot.com and is on Twitter at @GregMitch. Joel Tscherne can be followed on Twitter at @JoelTscherne. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Television informs our perceptions and expectations of leaders and offers a guide to understanding how we, as organizational actors, should communicate, act, and relate. Join NBN host Lee Pierce (s/t) and editor/contributor Dr. Creshema Murray as they discuss Leadership Through the Lens: Interrogating Production, Presentation, and Power (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017) an edited collection of television case studies about how the pervasive medium impacts our expectations of leadership, organizational life, and pedagogy. Looking at a variety of case studies, including classroom research in television media, The Americans, Black women in cable television news, workgroups, Total Divas, and electronic church leaders (to name just a few) this intriguing edited collection considers leadership and television through three predominant themes: production of knowledge, presentation of identity, and power of opportunity Recorded just after the murder of George Floyd, the interview focuses particularly on the complexities

Is there a link between the colonization of Palestinian lands and the enclosing of Palestinian minds? The Palestinian Idea: Film, Media, and the Radical Imagination (Temple University Press, 2019) argues that it is precisely through film and media that hope can occasionally emerge amidst hopelessness, emancipation amidst oppression, freedom amidst apartheid. Greg Burris employs the work of Edward W. Said, Jacques Rancière, and Cedric J. Robinson in order to locate Palestinian utopia in the heart of the Zionist present. He analyzes the films of prominent directors Annemarie Jacir (Salt of This Sea, When I Saw You) and Hany Abu-Assad (Paradise Now) to investigate the emergence and formation of Palestinian identity. Looking at Mais Darwazah’s documentary My Love Awaits Me By the Sea, Burris considers the counterhistories that make up the Palestinian experience— stories and memories that have otherwise been obscured or denied. He also examines Palestinian (in)visibility in the global media landscape, and how issu

Ahmed El-Shamsy’s Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition (Princeton University Press, 2020) is an astonishing scholarly feat that presents a detailed, sophisticated, and thoroughly enjoyable intellectual and social history of the modern publishing industry on what we today consider canonical books of Islamic thought. “Painstakingly researched” would be a description too mild for the depth and breadth of sources and analysis that El-Shamsy mobilizes in this book. Over the course of its 8 delightfully written chapters, readers meet some known and many less known book collectors, editors, Muslim reformers, early Salafis, and European Orientalists whose thought, outlook, normative agendas, and wide-ranging efforts produced a distinct corpus of classical Islamic texts. The canonization of what counted as “classical” was itself a markedly modern move and gesture, El-Shamsy argues. Populated with fascinating narratives of manuscript hunting, editorial

With the burst of new technologies in the 1870s, many inventors and visionaries believed that the transmission of moving images was just around the corner. As Doron Galili details in his book Seeing by Electricity: The Emergence of Television, 1878-1939 (Duke University Press, 2020), the half-century of speculations that followed did much to shape the development of broadcast television well before it emerged in the 1930s. Galili notes that much of this occurred within the context of contemporary technologies such as the cinema and the telephone, both of which pointed to the inherent possibilities of such an invention yet embodied very different ideas about image and communications. Seeking to conceptualize moving image technology, people often used the eye as a metaphor or model for how it might operate or the role that it would serve. Though the emergence of the cinema industry in the United States did much to shape the context in which television would develop in the United States, Galili shows how differi

College courses in Ethics tend to focus on theories of the moral rightness or wrongness of actions. This emphasis sometimes obscures the fact that morality is a social project: part of what makes a decent and stable society possible is that we uphold standards of conduct. We call out bad behavior, blame wrongdoers, and praise those who do the right things. We apologize and forgive in public ways. In short, we hold one another responsible.  Again, this is all necessary. However, we are all familiar with the ways in which the acts associated with upholding morality can go wrong. For instance, blame can be excessive, apologies can be patronizing, and so on. Another way in which things can go wrong is when people wield morality opportunistically – for self-aggrandizement, or to elevate themselves in the eyes of others. In Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk (Oxford University Press, 2020), Brandon Warmke and Justin Tosi call this broad type of moral breakdown grandstanding. Their book examines the diff

During his nearly four decades as a newspaper editor and politician, Horace Greeley embraced a range of controversial causes. In his book Horace Greeley: Print, Politics, and the Failure of American Nationhood (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019), James M. Lundberg finds within his seemingly contradictory positions a consistent belief in the power of print to forge American nationalism. This Lundberg traces to his upbringing in a Protestant American culture which valued greatly the power of reading. Upon arriving in New York City in 1831 Greeley embarked on a career as a journalist and editor, and was a key figure in the shift away from relatively expensive periodicals to the mass-produced daily newspapers. His New-York Tribune gave Greeley a prominent platform from which he advocated for his nationalist vision, and he was a visible participant in the increasingly divisive political debates of the 1840s and 1850s. As an opponent of both slavery and secession, Greeley championed both a vigorous prosecution of the war and,

On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews editors Donovan Conley and Justin Eckstein about their new book Cookery: Food Rhetorics and Social Production (University of Alabama Press, 2020), which explores the rhetoric of contemporary food production and consumption with a focus on social boundaries. Cookery explores how food mediates both rhetorical influence and material life through the overlapping concepts of invention and production. The essays in this volume probe the many ways that food informs contemporary social life through its mediation of bodies—human and extra-human alike. Each chapter explores food’s persuasive nature through a unique prism that includes intoxication, dirt, “food porn,” strange foods, and political “invisibility.” Each case offers new insights about the relations between rhetorical influence and embodied practice through food. As a whole, Cookery articulates new ways of viewing food’s powers of persuasion, as well as the inherent role of persuasion

The Caribbean has figuratively and literally been entangled in processes of global integration earlier than other parts of the Americas. In Isles of Noise: Sonic Media in the Caribbean (UNC Press, 2016), Alejandra Bronfman offers a refreshing perspective to this well-trodden story. In this book, she traces the emergence and growth of telecommunications technologies in Haiti, Jamaica, and Cuba during the first half of the twentieth century. Bronfman examines the ways these new communication technologies often undermined rather than served as tools of domination for imperial forces—American or British. Most importantly, this book has us reconsider the role of sound and, specifically, radio broadcasting as central to political mobilization in ridding the region from empire. Alejandra Bronfman is Chair and Associate Professor, Latin American, Caribbean & U.S. Latino Studies, University of Albany. Sharika Crawford is an associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy.  Learn more about your ad ch

New mothers face a barrage of confounding decisions during the life-cycle of early motherhood which includes... Should they change their diet or mindset to conceive? Exercise while pregnant? Should they opt for a home birth or head for a hospital? Whatever they “choose,” they will be sure to find plenty of medical expertise from health practitioners to social media “influencers” telling them that they’re making a series of mistakes. As intersectional feminists with two small children each, Bethany L. Johnson and Margaret M. Quinlan draw from their own experiences as well as stories from a range of caretakers throughout. You’re Doing it Wrong! Mothering, Media and Medical Expertise (Rutgers University Press, 2019) investigates the storied history of mothering advice in the media, from the newspapers, magazines, doctors’ records and personal papers of the nineteenth-century to today’s websites, Facebook groups, and Instagram feeds. Johnson and Quinlan find surprising parallels between today’s mothering experts