New Books In Communications

Various emerging technologies, from social robotics to social media, appeal to our desire for social interactions, while avoiding some of the risks and costs of face-to-face human interaction. But can they offer us real friendship? In this book, Alexis Elder outlines a theory of friendship drawing on Aristotle and contemporary work on social ontology, and then uses it to evaluate the real value of social robotics and emerging social technologies. In Friendship, Robots, and Social Media: False Friends and Second Selves (Routledge, 2017), Alexis Elder develops a robust and rigorous ontology of friendship: what it is, how it functions, what harms it, and how it relates to familiar ethical and philosophical questions about character, value, and well-being. In Part II she applies this ontology to emerging trends in social robotics and human-robot interaction, including robotic companions for lonely seniors, therapeutic robots used to teach social skills to children on the autism spectrum, and companionate robots c

With today's furious political and cultural divisions, it's easy to shake our heads in exasperation at those who disagree with us. In this episode with Australian writer and philosopher, Eleanor Gordon-Smith, we take a journey to the limits of human reason. Her compelling new book, Stop Being Reasonable: How We Really Change Our Minds (PublicAffairs, 2019) features six high-stakes personal stories of successful persuasion that illustrate what most of us get wrong about rationality. "Hearing the story of how somebody changes their mind is hearing the story of how they change their life," Eleanor tells us. "Why, when we know that changing our minds is as tangled and difficult and messy as we are, do we stay so wedded to the thought that rational debate is the way to go about it?" The book and our podcast begin with Eleanor interviewing men who catcalled her in the street and made obscene gestures. Did she convince these guys to change their behavior? Find out what happened... Richard Davies and Jim Meigs are th

Why and how is fiction important to women? In Why Women Read Fiction: The Stories of Our Lives (Oxford University Press, 2020), Helen Taylor, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Exeter, explores this question to give a detailed and engaging picture of fiction in women’s lives. The book presents women’s narratives about fiction, interpretations of key texts, and perspectives on writers and the publishing industry. As the book makes clear, reading is not just another hobby for women, as it occupies a crucial role in women’s lives. Full of examples and women’s stories of how reading matters, discussions of gender and genre, the role of women as authors, along with analysis of book clubs and literary festivals, the book is essential reading across the humanities, social sciences, and for anyone interested in reading! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The old mantra “if it bleeds it leads” is alive and well in today’s media landscape. In fact, social media and up-to-the-second news have made it easier than ever to ingest a constant stream of information about the world. In her book, You Are What You Read: Why Changing Your Media Diet Can Change The World (Unbound, 2019), Jodie Jackson argues that this type of news consumption leads to feelings of anger and helplessness. The book, and this conversation, outline how solutions journalism provides an alternative that focuses on what working and aims to inspire readers instead of angering them. Jackson is not a journalist by training and became interested in the media after feeling overwhelmed by the news herself. She earned a master’s degree in psychology and now works with news organizations around the world to advocate for a solutions-oriented approach. Jodie talk about how a news consumer might go about changing their habits, and how solutions journalism does not equal fluffy or overly positive news coverag

Keri Holt is the author of Reading These United States: Federal Literacy in the Early Republic, 1776-1830, published by the University of Georgia Press in 2019. Reading These United States explores how Americans read, saw, and understood the federal structure of the country in its early years. Drawing on a wide array of sources, from almanacs to textbooks, magazines to novels, and much more, Holt illustrates how Americans imagined their country not necessarily as one homogeneous nation, but as a union of states. Forging national character through local differences, Holt’s work sheds new light on the ways in which U.S. nationalism was created, inversely, by drawing lines between and separating Americans from themselves. Keri Holt is Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Utah State University. Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ebony Elizabeth Thomas has written a beautiful, captivating, and thoughtful book about the idea of our imaginations, especially our cultural imaginations, and the images and concepts that we all consume, especially as young readers and audience members. The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games (NYU Press, 2019) dives into the question of, as Thomas explains, “why magical stories are written for some people and not for others.” Thomas explores the narratives of magical and fantastical stories, especially ones that currently dominate our Anglo-American cultural landscape, and discerns a kind of “imagination gap” in so many of these literary and visual artifacts. The Dark Fantastic provides a framework to consider this imagination gap, by braiding together scholarship from across a variety of disciplines to think about this space within literature and visual popular culture. Thomas theorizes a tool to examine many of these narratives, the cycle through which to contextua

Narges Bajoghli’s gripping new book Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic (Stanford UP, 2019) presents a riveting ethnography of pro-regime media networks in Iran, and sketches an intimate portrait of the actors, projects, and infrastructures invested in preserving and packaging the memory of the Islamic revolution 40 years later. Written with sparkling clarity, Iran Reframed provides its readers an unprecedented tour of the multiple sites, discourses, and social imaginaries that inform and define efforts of former members of the Revolutionary Guard and the Basij paramilitary organizations to forge narratives of nationalism that might connect with and affect the new generation across ideological divides. The biggest strength of this book is the layered complexity with which it presents its actors, and their conflictual aspirations and anxieties surrounding the encounter of media, memory, and revolutionary politics. This stunningly brilliant book will compel its readers to reconceptualize,

Stephen Dyson has provided a fascinating and engaging analysis of political science, the discipline, and political television in his new book, Imagining Politics: Interpretations in Political Science and Political Television (University of Michigan Press, 2019). By examining particular popular culture narratives, in this case, nine popular and engaging television series, Dyson is not only analyzing the tropes and themes of these series, but he is braiding them together with broader disciplinary frameworks and concepts from political science. Thus, this book presents dual interpretative perspectives—from political science and from televisual narratives. Dyson’s larger point is that politics itself is a form of narrative that political scientists attempt to explain and make sense of through our own narrative constructions by way of conceptual theories of interpretation. In so doing, Imagining Politics is weaving together fictional and non-fictional narratives to compel the reader to consider how we frame and th

What happens when the digital world meets Sufism? This is the question raised in the exciting new book Cyber Sufis: Virtual Expressions of the American Muslim Experience (OneWorld Academic, 2019) by Robert Rozehnal, a professor of Islamic Studies and South Asian Religions and the founding director of the Center for Global Islamic Studies at Lehigh University. This exhilarating new book explores how the Inayati Order, the oldest Sufi community in the west, under the current leadership of Zia Inayat Khan, utilizes cyber tools in their pedagogical practices, ritual performances, and social engagement. By investigating this one particular American Sufi community’s presence in the digital world (such as on Facebook, webpages, and etc.), Rozehnal highlights how “cyber Sufis” create complex identities both on- and offline, all the while evading any easy categorizations of Sufism, Islam, and new age spirituality. Some of the noted digital transformations unfolding within the Inayati Order are in many ways, not novel,

Advertising is everywhere. By some estimates, the average American is exposed to over 3,000 advertisements each day. Whether we realize it or not, "adcreep"―modern marketing's march to create a world where advertising can be expected anywhere and anytime―has come, transforming not just our purchasing decisions, but our relationships, our sense of self, and the way we navigate all spaces, public and private. In Adcreep: The Case Against Modern Marketing (Stanford Law Books, 2017), Mark Bartholomew journeys through the curious and sometimes troubling world of modern advertising. Bartholomew exposes an array of marketing techniques that might seem like the stuff of science fiction: neuromarketing, biometric scans, automated online spies, and facial recognition technology, all enlisted to study and stimulate consumer desire. This marriage of advertising and technology has consequences. Businesses wield rich and portable records of consumer preference, delivering advertising tailored to your own idiosyncratic thou

On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric and Communication at the State University of New York at Geneseo--interviews Heather Suzanne Woods (she/hers), Asst. Prof. of Communication at Kansas State and Leslie A. Hahner (she/hers), Assoc. Prof. in Communication at Baylor University, on their fascinating new book Make America Meme Again: The Rhetoric of the Alt-Right (Peter Lang, 2019). Make America Meme Again explores memes as a communication phenomenon with cultural effects with a specific focus on how memes circulated toward the end of the Trump campaign to secure support for a white, misogynistic, nationalist agenda. To quote the book, “the most significant tactics of the Alt-right is its use of memes to both lure mainstream devotees and direct larger public discussions. Memes are the nodal points in the ecosystem of this far right collective. The rise of Alt-right digital media, then, is of serious concern in that discourses emerging from this stance play

Stanley Fish is a well-known scholar regarding the First Amendment and free speech. In his latest book, The First: How to Think About Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-truth, and Donald Trump (One Signal, 2019), Professor Fish discusses the popular and legal meanings of the First Amendment’s speech and religion clauses. He argues that speech is not an apolitical concept, but is in fact often invoked for political purposes. Although he favors a robust zone of free speech, he is careful to note what speech law does and should protect versus what it does not, or should not, protect. He makes distinctions between freedom of inquiry in an academic setting and the claims of absolutists regarding free speech on campuses. He is also concerned with what he considers the “poor fit” of the modern interpretation of the religion clauses (Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses) with the Constitution’s concerns with individual liberty. In addition to the Constitution, Professor Fish discusses th

International and transnational historiography has given us vivid glimpses of the development and impact of cybernetics on a national scale in such countries as the Soviet Union, Chile and, of course, in the US and Great Britain where the field initially began to coalesce. Now, Xiao Liu’s Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) makes a massive contribution to the field by opening up a fascinating new vista for scholars of cybernetics, film studies, literature, media studies, science and technology studies, and beyond. Liu’s meticulously researched and crisply written book takes us from the heady days of China’s “qi gong craze” and notions of the human body as a transparent medium through which “information waves” could pass, through investment and research into “a theory of metasynthetic wisdom” that could lead to a “global human-machine intelligent system,” the evolution of “expert systems” to provide knowledge and guidance in the absence of hu

In her book Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic (Stanford University Press, 2019), Narges Bajoghli takes an inside look at what it means to be pro-regime in Iran, and the debates around the future of the Islamic Republic. Now entering its fifth decade in power, the Iranian regime faces the paradox of any successful revolution: how to transmit the commitments of its political project to the next generation. New media ventures supported by the Islamic Republic attempt to win the hearts and minds of younger Iranians. Yet, this new generation—whether dissidents or fundamentalists—are increasingly skeptical of these efforts. Iran Reframed offers unprecedented access to those who wield power in Iran as they debate and define the future of the Republic. Over ten years, Narges Bajoghli met with men in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, Ansar Hezbollah, and Basij paramilitary organizations to investigate how the media producers developed strategies to court Iranian youth. Readers come to know these men—

Disease is a social issue and not just a medical one. This is the central tenet underlying The Kiss of Death: Contagion, Contamination, and Folklore (Utah State University Press 2019) by Andrea Kitta, Associate Professor in the English department at East Carolina University, examines the discourses and metaphors of contagion and contamination in vernacular beliefs and practices across a number of media and forms. Using ethnographic, media, and narrative analysis, chapters discuss the changing representations of vampires and zombies in popular culture, the online discussions of Slenderman in relation to adolescent experiences of bullying, the misogyny embedded in legends about kisses that kill, and the racialized nature of patient-zero narratives that surrounding the spread of things like ebola, and the ways in which the HPV vaccine to homophobia. Issues like tellability and the stigmatized vernacular loom large throughout. Although folklorists will already recognize the social importance of vernacular narrati

There are a lot of calls these days to “revive civility” in politics. While there are plenty of examples of uncivil behavior, there’s far less agreement about what civility should look like in 2019. Timothy Shaffer joins us this week to talk about work being done to create a new definition of civility and a playbook to put that definition into practice. Shaffer is an assistant professor in communication studies at Kansas State University, assistant director of the Institute for Civic Discourse and Democracy, and principal research specialist at the National Institute for Civil Discourse. He is the editor of a new book called A Crisis of Civility? Political Discourse and its Discontents (Routledge, 2019). Democracy Works is created by the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State and recorded at WPSU Penn State, central Pennsylvania’s NPR station. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Consumer Management in the Internet Age: How Customers Became Managers in the Modern Workplace (Lexington Books, 2019), Joshua Sperber analyzes online consumer management, a practice in which customers monitor, report on, and—sometimes unwittingly—discipline workers through writing and posting online reviews. Sperber uses case studies of the websites Yelp and Rate My Professors (RMP), to explore how online reviewing, a popular contemporary hobby, tells us much about the collapse of the barriers separating work and leisure as well as our need for collective purpose and community wherever we can find it. This book explores the economic implications of online reviews, as reviews provide both valuable free content for websites and surveillance of, respectively, restaurant servers and college instructors. Rebekah Buchanan is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative–both analog and digitalin peoples lives. She is interested in how personal narrativ

From efficient instructions on how to kill civilians to horrifying videos of beheadings, no terrorist organization has more comprehensively weaponized social media than ISIS. Its strategic, multi-platformed campaign is so effective that it has ensured global news coverage and inspired hundreds of young people around the world to abandon their lives and their countries to join a foreign war. Michael Krona and Rosemary Pennington's new book The Media World of ISIS (Indiana University Press, 2019) explores the characteristics, mission, and tactics of the organization's use of media and propaganda. Contributors consider how ISIS's media strategies imitate activist tactics, legitimize its self-declared caliphate, and exploit narratives of suffering and imprisonment as propaganda to inspire followers. Using a variety of methods, contributors explore the appeal of ISIS to Westerners, the worldview made apparent in its doctrine, and suggestions for counteracting the organization's approaches. Its highly developed, ta

Taking a fresh look at the first two centuries of French colonialism in the Americas, Eloquence Embodied: Nonverbal Communication among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas (University of North Carolina Press and the Omohundro Institute, 2019), answers the long-standing question of how, and how well, Indigenous Americans and the Europeans who arrived on their shores communicated with each other. French explorers and colonists in the sixteenth century noticed that Indigenous peoples from Brazil to Canada used signs to communicate. The French, in response, quickly embraced the nonverbal as a means to overcome cultural and language barriers. Céline Carayon's close examination of their accounts enables her to recover these sophisticated Native practices of embodied expressions. In a colonial world where communication and trust were essential but complicated by a multitude of languages, intimate and sensory expressions ensured that French colonists and Indigenous peoples understood each other well. Unders

In her book, Putin Kitsch in America (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019), Alison Rowley examines the outsized influence that Vladimir Putin, both the man and the myth, have had on US political discourse in the last decade. Starting with the 2008 election, Rowley demonstrates how Putin’s frontier masculinity--best illustrated by the ubiquitous shirtless picture--has served as an important foil for US political figures, particularly Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Rowley examines various kitsch mediums, from seemingly innocuous coloring books and finger puppets, to more risque Putin bikinis and thongs, to the x-rated Trump-Putin slash fiction. Importantly, Rowley’s head-first plunge into Putin kitsch would not have been possible without the internet and on-demand printing and publishing services. Her book therefore also offers thoughtful commentary on what it means to be a political in the digital age, and offers Putin kitsch as an optimistic counterpoint to the quite dire predictions about democracy’s relat