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antisocial media siva vaidhyanathan: Antisocial Media Siva Vaidhyanathan, 2018-05-15 A fully updated paperback edition that includes coverage of the key developments of the past two years, including the political controversies that swirled around Facebook with increasing intensity in the Trump era. If you wanted to build a machine that would distribute propaganda to millions of people, distract them from important issues, energize hatred and bigotry, erode social trust, undermine respectable journalism, foster doubts about science, and engage in massive surveillance all at once, you would make something a lot like Facebook. Of course, none of that was part of the plan. In this fully updated paperback edition of Antisocial Media, including a new chapter on the increasing recognition of--and reaction against--Facebook's power in the last couple of years, Siva Vaidhyanathan explains how Facebook devolved from an innocent social site hacked together by Harvard students into a force that, while it may make personal life just a little more pleasurable, makes democracy a lot more challenging. It's an account of the hubris of good intentions, a missionary spirit, and an ideology that sees computer code as the universal solvent for all human problems. And it's an indictment of how social media has fostered the deterioration of democratic culture around the world, from facilitating Russian meddling in support of Trump's election to the exploitation of the platform by murderous authoritarians in Burma and the Philippines. Both authoritative and trenchant, Antisocial Media shows how Facebook's mission went so wrong. |
antisocial media siva vaidhyanathan: Antisocial Media Siva Vaidhyanathan, 2018 The pleasure machine -- The surveillance machine -- The attention machine -- The benevolence machine -- The protest machine -- The politics machine -- The disinformation machine |
antisocial media siva vaidhyanathan: Antisocial Media Siva Vaidhyanathan, 2018 The pleasure machine -- The surveillance machine -- The attention machine -- The benevolence machine -- The protest machine -- The politics machine -- The disinformation machine |
antisocial media siva vaidhyanathan: Twitter Jean Burgess, Nancy K. Baym, 2020-04-28 The sometimes surprising, often humorous story of the forces that came together to shape the central role Twitter now plays in contemporary politics and culture Is Twitter a place for sociability and conversation, a platform for public broadcasting, or a network for discussion? Digital platforms have become influential in every sphere of communication, from the intimate and everyday to the public, professional, and political. Since the scrappy startup days of social media in the mid-2000s, not only has the worldwide importance of platforms grown exponentially, but also their cultures have shifted dramatically, in a variety of directions. These changes have brought new opportunities for progressive communities to thrive online, as well as widespread problems with commercial exploitation, disinformation, and hate speech. Twitter’s growth over the past decade, like that of much social media, has far surpassed its creators’ vision. Twitter charts this trajectory in the format of a platform biography: a new, streamlined approach to understanding how platforms change over time. Through the often surprising, fast-moving story of Twitter, it illuminates the multiple forces—from politics and business to digital ideologies—that came together to shape the evolution of this revolutionary platform. Jean Burgess and Nancy K. Baym build a rich narrative of how Twitter has evolved as a technology, a company, and a culture, from its origins as a personal messaging service to its transformation into one of the most globally influential social media platforms, where history and culture is not only recorded but written in real time. |
antisocial media siva vaidhyanathan: Social Media and the Public Interest Philip M. Napoli, 2019-08-27 Facebook, a platform created by undergraduates in a Harvard dorm room, has transformed the ways millions of people consume news, understand the world, and participate in the political process. Despite taking on many of journalism’s traditional roles, Facebook and other platforms, such as Twitter and Google, have presented themselves as tech companies—and therefore not subject to the same regulations and ethical codes as conventional media organizations. Challenging such superficial distinctions, Philip M. Napoli offers a timely and persuasive case for understanding and governing social media as news media, with a fundamental obligation to serve the public interest. Social Media and the Public Interest explores how and why social media platforms became so central to news consumption and distribution as they met many of the challenges of finding information—and audiences—online. Napoli illustrates the implications of a system in which coders and engineers drive out journalists and editors as the gatekeepers who determine media content. He argues that a social media–driven news ecosystem represents a case of market failure in what he calls the algorithmic marketplace of ideas. To respond, we need to rethink fundamental elements of media governance based on a revitalized concept of the public interest. A compelling examination of the intersection of social media and journalism, Social Media and the Public Interest offers valuable insights for the democratic governance of today’s most influential shapers of news. |
antisocial media siva vaidhyanathan: Intellectual Property Siva Vaidhyanathan, 2017 The author provides a comprehensive and engaging introduction to copyright, patents, trademarks, and other forms of knowledge that are subject to global law and regulation. |
antisocial media siva vaidhyanathan: An Internet for the People Jessa Lingel, 2020-02-04 How craigslist champions openness, democracy, and other vanishing principles of the early web Begun by Craig Newmark as an e-mail to some friends about cool events happening around San Francisco, craigslist is now the leading classifieds service on the planet. It is also a throwback to the early internet. The website has barely seen an upgrade since it launched in 1996. There are no banner ads. The company doesn't profit off your data. An Internet for the People explores how people use craigslist to buy and sell, find work, and find love—and reveals why craigslist is becoming a lonely outpost in an increasingly corporatized web. Drawing on interviews with craigslist insiders and ordinary users, Jessa Lingel looks at the site's history and values, showing how it has mostly stayed the same while the web around it has become more commercial and far less open. She examines craigslist's legal history, describing the company's courtroom battles over issues of freedom of expression and data privacy, and explains the importance of locality in the social relationships fostered by the site. More than an online garage sale, job board, or dating site, craigslist holds vital lessons for the rest of the web. It is a website that values user privacy over profits, ease of use over slick design, and an ethos of the early web that might just hold the key to a more open, transparent, and democratic internet. |
antisocial media siva vaidhyanathan: Left to Our Own Devices Julia Ticona, 2022 An examination of the ways that digital technologies play an increasingly important role in the lives of precarious workers, far beyond the gig economy apps like Uber and Lyft.Over the past three decades, digital technologies like smartphones and laptops have transformed the way we work in the US. At the same time, workers at both ends of the income ladder have experienced rising levels of job insecurity and anxiety about their economic futures. In Left to Our Own Devices, Julia Ticona explores the ways that workers use their digital technologies to navigate insecure and flexible labor markets. Through 100 interviews with high and low-wage precarious workers across the US, she explores the surprisingly similar digital hustles they use to find work and maintain a sense of dignity and identity. Ticona then reveals how the digital hustle ultimately reproduces inequalities between workers at either end of polarized labor markets. A moving and accessible look at the intimate consequences of contemporary capitalism, Left to Our Own Devices will be of interest to sociologists, communication and media studies scholars, as well as a general audience of readers interested in digital technologies, inequality, and the future of work in the US. |
antisocial media siva vaidhyanathan: Behind the Screen Sarah T. Roberts, 2019-06-25 An eye-opening look at the invisible workers who protect us from seeing humanity’s worst on today’s commercial internet Social media on the internet can be a nightmarish place. A primary shield against hateful language, violent videos, and online cruelty uploaded by users is not an algorithm. It is people. Mostly invisible by design, more than 100,000 commercial content moderators evaluate posts on mainstream social media platforms: enforcing internal policies, training artificial intelligence systems, and actively screening and removing offensive material—sometimes thousands of items per day. Sarah T. Roberts, an award-winning social media scholar, offers the first extensive ethnographic study of the commercial content moderation industry. Based on interviews with workers from Silicon Valley to the Philippines, at boutique firms and at major social media companies, she contextualizes this hidden industry and examines the emotional toll it takes on its workers. This revealing investigation of the people “behind the screen” offers insights into not only the reality of our commercial internet but the future of globalized labor in the digital age. |
antisocial media siva vaidhyanathan: Monopolized David Dayen, 2020-06-09 From the airlines we fly to the food we eat, how a tiny group of corporations have come to dominate every aspect of our lives—by one of our most intrepid and accomplished journalists If you're looking for a book . . . that will get your heart pumping and your blood boiling and that will remind you why we're in these fights—add this one to your list. —Senator Elizabeth Warren on David Dayen's Chain of Title Over the last forty years our choices have narrowed, our opportunities have shrunk, and our lives have become governed by a handful of very large and very powerful corporations. Today, practically everything we buy, everywhere we shop, and every service we secure comes from a heavily concentrated market. This is a world where four major banks control most of our money, four airlines shuttle most of us around the country, and four major cell phone providers connect most of our communications. If you are sick you can go to one of three main pharmacies to fill your prescription, and if you end up in a hospital almost every accessory to heal you comes from one of a handful of large medical suppliers. Dayen, the editor of the American Prospect and author of the acclaimed Chain of Title, provides a riveting account of what it means to live in this new age of monopoly and how we might resist this corporate hegemony. Through vignettes and vivid case studies Dayen shows how these monopolies have transformed us, inverted us, and truly changed our lives, at the same time providing readers with the raw material to make monopoly a consequential issue in American life and revive a long-dormant antitrust movement. |
antisocial media siva vaidhyanathan: Creativity and Limitation in Political Communities Ignas Kalpokas, 2018 Providing not only a novel theoretical framework explaining the workings of democratic politics this book also offers a non-traditional reading of Spinoza and Schmitt. Going beyond the analysis of Spinoza and Schmitt, the author aims for a new theory of political action. |
antisocial media siva vaidhyanathan: The Gentrification of the Internet Jessa Lingel, 2023-02-07 How we lost control of the internet—and how to win it back. The internet has become a battleground. Although it was unlikely to live up to the hype and hopes of the 1990s, only the most skeptical cynics could have predicted the World Wide Web as we know it today: commercial, isolating, and full of, even fueled by, bias. This was not inevitable. The Gentrification of the Internet argues that much like our cities, the internet has become gentrified, dominated by the interests of business and capital rather than the interests of the people who use it. Jessa Lingel uses the politics and debates of gentrification to diagnose the massive, systemic problems blighting our contemporary internet: erosions of privacy and individual ownership, small businesses wiped out by wealthy corporations, the ubiquitous paywall. But there are still steps we can take to reclaim the heady possibilities of the early internet. Lingel outlines actions that internet activists and everyday users can take to defend and secure more protections for the individual and to carve out more spaces of freedom for the people—not businesses—online. |
antisocial media siva vaidhyanathan: The Costs Of Connection Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias, 2022-11-25 Just about any social need is now met with an opportunity to 'connect' through digital means. But this convenience is not free-it is purchased with vast amounts of personal data transferred through shadowy backchannels to corporations using it to generate profit. The Costs of Connection uncovers this process, this 'data colonialism', and its designs for controlling our lives-our ways of knowing, our means of production, our political participation. Data colonialism is, in essence, an emerging order for the appropriation of human life so that data can be continuously extracted from it for profit. Colonialism might seem like a thing of the past, but this book shows that the historic appropriation of land, bodies and natural resources is mirrored today in pervasive datafication. Apps, platforms and smart objects capture and translate our lives into data, and then extract information that is fed into capitalist enterprises and sold back to us. The authors argue that this development foreshadows the creation of a new social order emerging globally - and it must be challenged. Confronting the alarming degree of surveillance already tolerated, they offer a stirring call to decolonize the internet and emancipate our desire for connection. |
antisocial media siva vaidhyanathan: News Literacy and Democracy Seth Ashley, 2019-10-14 News Literacy and Democracy invites readers to go beyond surface-level fact checking and to examine the structures, institutions, practices, and routines that comprise news media systems. This introductory text underscores the importance of news literacy to democratic life and advances an argument that critical contexts regarding news media structures and institutions should be central to news literacy education. Under the larger umbrella of media literacy, a critical approach to news literacy seeks to examine the mediated construction of the social world and the processes and influences that allow some news messages to spread while others get left out. Drawing on research from a range of disciplines, including media studies, political economy, and social psychology, this book aims to inform and empower the citizens who rely on news media so they may more fully participate in democratic and civic life. The book is an essential read for undergraduate students of journalism and news literacy and will be of interest to scholars teaching and studying media literacy, political economy, media sociology, and political psychology. |
antisocial media siva vaidhyanathan: The Identity Trade Nora A. Draper, 2021-11-02 The successes and failures of an industry that claims to protect and promote our online identities What does privacy mean in the digital era? As technology increasingly blurs the boundary between public and private, questions about who controls our data become harder and harder to answer. Our every web view, click, and online purchase can be sold to anyone to store and use as they wish. At the same time, our online reputation has become an important part of our identity—a form of cultural currency. The Identity Trade examines the relationship between online visibility and privacy, and the politics of identity and self-presentation in the digital age. In doing so, Nora Draper looks at the revealing two-decade history of efforts by the consumer privacy industry to give individuals control over their digital image through the sale of privacy protection and reputation management as a service. Through in-depth interviews with industry experts, as well as analysis of media coverage, promotional materials, and government policies, Draper examines how companies have turned the protection and promotion of digital information into a business. Along the way, she also provides insight into how these companies have responded to and shaped the ways we think about image and reputation in the digital age. Tracking the successes and failures of companies claiming to control our digital ephemera, Draper takes us inside an industry that has commodified strategies of information control. This book is a discerning overview of the debate around who controls our data, who buys and sells it, and the consequences of treating privacy as a consumer good. |
antisocial media siva vaidhyanathan: News for the Rich, White, and Blue Nikki Usher, 2021-06-08 In News for the Rich, White, and Blue, Nikki Usher recasts the challenges facing journalism in terms of place, power, and inequality. Drawing on more than a decade of field research, she illuminates how journalists decide what becomes news and how news organizations strategize about the future. |
antisocial media siva vaidhyanathan: Access Rules Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Thomas Ramge, 2022-04-26 The power of information -- Data alchemy -- Schumpeter's nightmare -- Data capitalism -- Might and machines -- Access rules -- Open data reloaded -- The end of data colonialism. |
antisocial media siva vaidhyanathan: Media and Citizenship Anthea Garman, Herman Wasserman, 2017 How central are the media to the functioning of democracy? Is democracy primarily about citizens using their vote? Does the expression of their voice necessarily empower citizens? Media and Citizenship challenges some assumptions about the relationship between the media and democracy in highly unequal societies like South Africa. In a post-apartheid society where an enfranchised majority is still unable to fundamentally practice their citizenship and experiences marginalization on a daily basis, notions like listening and belonging may be more useful ways of thinking about the role of the media. In this context, protest is taken seriously as a form of political expression and the media's role is foregrounded as actively seeking out the voices of those on the margins of society. Through a range of case studies, the contributors show how listening, both as a political concept and as a form of practice, has transformative and even radical potential for both emerging and established democracies. |
antisocial media siva vaidhyanathan: The Discursive Power of Memes in Digital Culture Bradley E. Wiggins, 2019-02-25 Shared, posted, tweeted, commented upon, and discussed online as well as off-line, internet memes represent a new genre of online communication, and an understanding of their production, dissemination, and implications in the real world enables an improved ability to navigate digital culture. This book explores cases of cultural, economic, and political critique levied by the purposeful production and consumption of internet memes. Often images, animated GIFs, or videos are remixed in such a way to incorporate intertextual references, quite frequently to popular culture, alongside a joke or critique of some aspect of the human experience. Ideology, semiotics, and intertextuality coalesce in the book’s argument that internet memes represent a new form of meaning-making, and the rapidity by which they are produced and spread underscores their importance. |
antisocial media siva vaidhyanathan: The Anarchist in the Library Siva Vaidhyanathan, 2005-05-11 From Napster to Total Information Awareness to flash mobs, the debate over information technology in our lives has revolved around a single question: How closely do we want cyberspace to resemble the real world? Siva Vaidhyanathan enters this debate with a seminal insight: While we've been busy debating how to make cyberspace imitate the world, the world has been busy imitating cyberspace. More and more of our social, political, and religious activities are modeling themselves after the World Wide Web.Vaidhyanathan tells us the key information structure of our time, and the key import from cyberspace into the world, is the peer-to-peer network. Peer-to-peer networks have always existed -- but with the rise of electronic communication, they are suddenly coming into their own. And they are drawing the outlines of a battle for information that will determine much of the culture and politics of our century, affecting everything from society to terrorism, from religion to the latest social fads. The Anarchist in the Library is a radically original look at how this battle defines one of the major fault lines of twenty-first-century civilization. |
antisocial media siva vaidhyanathan: An Ugly Truth Sheera Frenkel, Cecilia Kang, 2022-07-05 A riveting New York Times–bestselling exposé of Facebook’s fall from grace. Facebook has been under constant fire for the past five years, roiled by controversies and crises. As the tech giant was connecting the world, it was also mishandling users’ data, spreading fake news, and amplifying dangerous, polarizing hate speech—while relentlessly pursuing growth. The company, many said, had simply lost its way. But the truth is far more complex. Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, held up as archetypes of uniquely twenty-first-century executives, attempted to deflect attention from the crises. And while consumers and lawmakers focused their outrage on privacy breaches and misinformation, Facebook solidified its role as the world’s most voracious data-mining machine, posting record profits and shoring up its dominance via aggressive lobbying efforts. Drawing on their unrivaled sources, award–winning New York Times reporters Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia King unravel the tech behemoth’s complex politics, alliances, and rivalries to expose the fatal cracks in its architecture. They reveal how its missteps were not an anomaly but an inevitability—this is how Facebook was built to perform. WINNER OF THE SABEW BEST IN BUSINESS AWARD A Book of the Year: Fortune, Foreign Affairs, The Times (London), Cosmopolitan, TechCrunch, WIRED |
antisocial media siva vaidhyanathan: Recommendation Engines Michael Schrage, 2020-09-01 How companies like Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify know what you might also like: the history, technology, business, and societal impact of online recommendation engines. Increasingly, our technologies are giving us better, faster, smarter, and more personal advice than our own families and best friends. Amazon already knows what kind of books and household goods you like and is more than eager to recommend more; YouTube and TikTok always have another video lined up to show you; Netflix has crunched the numbers of your viewing habits to suggest whole genres that you would enjoy. In this volume in the MIT Press's Essential Knowledge series, innovation expert Michael Schrage explains the origins, technologies, business applications, and increasing societal impact of recommendation engines, the systems that allow companies worldwide to know what products, services, and experiences you might also like. |
antisocial media siva vaidhyanathan: The Media Education Manifesto David Buckingham, 2019-08-05 In the age of social media, fake news and data-driven capitalism, the need for critical understanding is more urgent than ever. Half-baked ideas about ‘media literacy’ will lead us nowhere: we need a comprehensive and coherent educational approach. We all need to think critically about how media work, how they represent the world, and how they are produced and used. In this manifesto, leading scholar David Buckingham makes a passionate case for media education. He outlines its key aims and principles, and explores how it can and should be updated to take account of the changing media environment. Concise, authoritative and forcefully argued, The Media Education Manifesto is essential reading for anyone involved in media and education, from scholars and practitioners to students and their parents. |
antisocial media siva vaidhyanathan: Trick Mirror Jia Tolentino, 2019-08-06 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “From The New Yorker’s beloved cultural critic comes a bold, unflinching collection of essays about self-deception, examining everything from scammer culture to reality television.”—Esquire Book Club Pick for Now Read This, from PBS NewsHour and The New York Times • “A whip-smart, challenging book.”—Zadie Smith • “Jia Tolentino could be the Joan Didion of our time.”—Vulture FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE’S JOHN LEONARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST BOOK • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY AND HARVARD CRIMSON AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • Time • Chicago Tribune • The Washington Post • NPR • Variety • Esquire • Vox • Elle • Glamour • GQ • Good Housekeeping • The Paris Review • Paste • Town & Country • BookPage • Kirkus Reviews • BookRiot • Shelf Awareness Jia Tolentino is a peerless voice of her generation, tackling the conflicts, contradictions, and sea changes that define us and our time. Now, in this dazzling collection of nine entirely original essays, written with a rare combination of give and sharpness, wit and fearlessness, she delves into the forces that warp our vision, demonstrating an unparalleled stylistic potency and critical dexterity. Trick Mirror is an enlightening, unforgettable trip through the river of self-delusion that surges just beneath the surface of our lives. This is a book about the incentives that shape us, and about how hard it is to see ourselves clearly through a culture that revolves around the self. In each essay, Tolentino writes about a cultural prism: the rise of the nightmare social internet; the advent of scamming as the definitive millennial ethos; the literary heroine’s journey from brave to blank to bitter; the punitive dream of optimization, which insists that everything, including our bodies, should become more efficient and beautiful until we die. Gleaming with Tolentino’s sense of humor and capacity to elucidate the impossibly complex in an instant, and marked by her desire to treat the reader with profound honesty, Trick Mirror is an instant classic of the worst decade yet. FINALIST FOR THE PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD FOR THE ART OF THE ESSAY |
antisocial media siva vaidhyanathan: Things Worth Keeping Christine Harold, 2020-06-09 A timely examination of the attachments we form to objects and how they might be used to reduce waste Rampant consumerism has inundated our planet with pollution and waste. Yet attempts to create environmentally friendly forms of consumption are often co-opted by corporations looking to sell us more stuff. In Things Worth Keeping, Christine Harold investigates the attachments we form to the objects we buy, keep, and discard, and explores how these attachments might be marshaled to create less wasteful practices and balance our consumerist and ecological impulses. Although all economies produce waste, no system generates as much or has become so adept at hiding its excesses as today’s mode of global capitalism. This book suggests that managing the material excesses of our lives as consumers requires us to build on, rather than reject, our desire for and attraction to objects. Increasing environmental awareness on its own will be ineffective at reversing ecological devastation, Harold argues, unless it is coupled with a more thorough understanding of how and why we love the things that imbue our lives with pleasure, meaning, and utility. From Marie Kondo’s method for decluttering that asks whether the things in our lives “spark joy” to the advent of emotionally durable design, which seeks to reduce consumption and waste by increasing the meaningfulness of the relationship between user and product, Harold explores how consumer psychology and empathetic design can transform our perception of consumer products from disposable to interconnected. An urgent call for rethinking consumerism, Things Worth Keeping shows that by recognizing our responsibility for the things we produce, we can become better stewards of the planet. |
antisocial media siva vaidhyanathan: Uberland Alex Rosenblat, 2018-10-23 Silicon Valley technology is transforming the way we work, and Uber is leading the charge. An American startup that promised to deliver entrepreneurship for the masses through its technology, Uber instead built a new template for employment using algorithms and Internet platforms. Upending our understanding of work in the digital age, Uberland paints a future where any of us might be managed by a faceless boss. The neutral language of technology masks the powerful influence algorithms have across the New Economy. Uberland chronicles the stories of drivers in more than twenty-five cities in the United States and Canada over four years, shedding light on their working conditions and providing a window into how they feel behind the wheel. The book also explores Uber’s outsized influence around the world: the billion-dollar company is now influencing everything from debates about sexual harassment and transportation regulations to racial equality campaigns and labor rights initiatives. Based on award-winning technology ethnographer Alex Rosenblat’s firsthand experience of riding over 5,000 miles with Uber drivers, daily visits to online forums, and face-to-face discussions with senior Uber employees, Uberland goes beyond the headlines to reveal the complicated politics of popular technologies that are manipulating both workers and consumers. |
antisocial media siva vaidhyanathan: The Internet Trap Matthew Hindman, 2020-11-10 Why there is no such thing as a free audience in today's attention economy The internet was supposed to fragment audiences and make media monopolies impossible. Instead, behemoths like Google and Facebook now dominate the time we spend online—and grab all the profits. This provocative and timely book sheds light on the stunning rise of the digital giants and the online struggles of nearly everyone else, and reveals what small players can do to survive in a game that is rigged against them. Challenging some of the most enduring myths of digital life, Matthew Hindman explains why net neutrality alone is no guarantee of an open internet, and demonstrates what it really takes to grow a digital audience in today's competitive online economy. |
antisocial media siva vaidhyanathan: Living into Focus Arthur Boers, 2012-01-01 In today's high-speed culture, there's a prevailing sense that we are busier than ever before and that the pace of life is too rushed. Most of us can relate to the feeling of having too much to do and not enough time for the people and things we value most. We feel fragmented, overwhelmed by busyness and the tyranny of gadgets. Veteran pastor and teacher Arthur Boers offers a critical look at the isolating effects of modern life that have eroded the centralizing, focusing activities that people used to do together. He suggests ways to make our lives healthier and more rewarding by presenting specific individual and communal practices that help us focus on what really matters. These practices--such as shared meals, gardening, hospitality, walking, prayer, and reading aloud--bring our lives into focus and build community. The book includes questions for discernment and application and a foreword by Eugene H. Peterson. |
antisocial media siva vaidhyanathan: Zucked Roger McNamee, 2019-02-05 One of the Financial Times' Best Business Books of 2019 The New York Times bestseller about a noted tech venture capitalist, early mentor to Mark Zuckerberg, and Facebook investor, who wakes up to the serious damage Facebook is doing to our society—and sets out to try to stop it. If you had told Roger McNamee even three years ago that he would soon be devoting himself to stopping Facebook from destroying our democracy, he would have howled with laughter. He had mentored many tech leaders in his illustrious career as an investor, but few things had made him prouder, or been better for his fund's bottom line, than his early service to Mark Zuckerberg. Still a large shareholder in Facebook, he had every good reason to stay on the bright side. Until he simply couldn't. Zucked is McNamee's intimate reckoning with the catastrophic failure of the head of one of the world's most powerful companies to face up to the damage he is doing. It's a story that begins with a series of rude awakenings. First there is the author's dawning realization that the platform is being manipulated by some very bad actors. Then there is the even more unsettling realization that Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg are unable or unwilling to share his concerns, polite as they may be to his face. And then comes the election of Donald Trump, and the emergence of one horrific piece of news after another about the malign ends to which the Facebook platform has been put. To McNamee's shock, even still Facebook's leaders duck and dissemble, viewing the matter as a public relations problem. Now thoroughly alienated, McNamee digs into the issue, and fortuitously meets up with some fellow travelers who share his concern, and help him sharpen its focus. Soon he and a dream team of Silicon Valley technologists are charging into the fray, to raise consciousness about the existential threat of Facebook, and the persuasion architecture of the attention economy more broadly—to our public health and to our political order. Zucked is both an enthralling personal narrative and a masterful explication of the forces that have conspired to place us all on the horns of this dilemma. This is the story of a company and its leadership, but it's also a larger tale of a business sector unmoored from normal constraints, just at a moment of political and cultural crisis, the worst possible time to be given new tools for summoning the darker angels of our nature and whipping them into a frenzy. Like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, Roger McNamee happened to be in the right place to witness a crime, and it took him some time to make sense of what he was seeing and what we ought to do about it. The result of that effort is a wise, hard-hitting, and urgently necessary account that crystallizes the issue definitively for the rest of us. |
antisocial media siva vaidhyanathan: Motel of the Mysteries David Macaulay, 1979-10-11 It is the year 4022; all of the ancient country of Usa has been buried under many feet of detritus from a catastrophe that occurred back in 1985. Imagine, then, the excitement that Howard Carson, an amateur archeologist at best, experienced when in crossing the perimeter of an abandoned excavation site he felt the ground give way beneath him and found himself at the bottom of a shaft, which, judging from the DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from an archaic doorknob, was clearly the entrance to a still-sealed burial chamber. Carson's incredible discoveries, including the remains of two bodies, one of then on a ceremonial bed facing an altar that appeared to be a means of communicating with the Gods and the other lying in a porcelain sarcophagus in the Inner Chamber, permitted him to piece together the whole fabric of that extraordinary civilization. |
antisocial media siva vaidhyanathan: Digital Technology and Democratic Theory Lucy Bernholz, Hélène Landemore, Rob Reich, 2020 One of the most far-reaching transformations in our era is the wave of digital technologies rolling over-and upending-nearly every aspect of life. Work and leisure, family and friendship, community and citizenship-all transformed by now-ubiquitous digital tools and platforms. Digital Technology and Democratic Theory explores a particularly unsettling and rapidly evolving facet of our new digital lives: transformations that affect our lives as citizens and participants in democratic governments. To understand these transformations, scholars from multiple disciplines (computer science, philosophy, political science, economics, history, and media and communications/journalism) wrestle with the question of how digital technologies shape, reshape, and affect fundamental questions about democracy and democratic theory. The contributors consider what democratic theory-broadly defined as normative theorizing about the values and institutional design of democracy-can bring to the practice of digital technologies. From the connectivity and transmission of information that has inspired positive change through movements such as the Arab Spring and #MeToo to the nefarious spread of distrust and outright disruption in democratic processes, this volume broaches the most pressing technological changes and issues facing not just individual states, but democracy as a philosophy and institution-- |
antisocial media siva vaidhyanathan: OurSpace Christine Harold, 2007-05-17 When reporters asked about the Bush administration’s timing in making their case for the Iraq war, then Chief of Staff Andrew Card responded that “from an marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” While surprising only in its candor, this statement signified the extent to which consumer culture has pervaded every aspect of life. For those troubled by the long reach of the marketplace, resistance can seem futile. However, a new generation of progressive activists has begun to combat the media supremacy of multinational corporations by using the very tools and techniques employed by their adversaries. In OurSpace, Christine Harold examines the deployment and limitations of “culture jamming” by activists. These techniques defy repressive corporate culture through parodies, hoaxes, and pranks. Among the examples of sabotage she analyzes are the magazine Adbusters’ spoofs of familiar ads and the Yes Men’s impersonations of company spokespersons. While these strategies are appealing, Harold argues that they are severely limited in their ability to challenge capitalism. Indeed, many of these tactics have already been appropriated by corporate marketers to create an aura of authenticity and to sell even more products. For Harold, it is a different type of opposition that offers a genuine alternative to corporate consumerism. Exploring the revolutionary Creative Commons movement, copyleft, and open source technology, she advocates a more inclusive approach to intellectual property that invites innovation and wider participation in the creative process. From switching the digital voice boxes of Barbie dolls and G.I. Joe action figures to inserting the silhouetted image of Abu Ghraib’s iconic hooded and wired victim into Apple’s iPod ads, high-profile instances of anticorporate activism over the past decade have challenged, but not toppled, corporate media domination. OurSpace makes the case for a provocative new approach by co-opting the logic of capitalism itself. Christine Harold is assistant professor of speech communication at the University of Georgia. |
antisocial media siva vaidhyanathan: Hashtag Elizabeth Losh, 2019-09-19 Best Books of 2019-Scholarly Kitchen Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Hashtags can silence as well as shout. They originate in the quiet of the archive and the breathless suspense of the control room, and find voice in the roar of rallies in the streets. The #hashtag is a composite creation, with two separate but related design histories: one involving the crosshatch symbol and one about the choice of letters after it. Celebration and criticism of hashtag activism rarely address the hashtag as an object or try to locate its place in the history of writing for machines. Although hashtags tend to be associated with Silicon Valley invention myths or celebrity power users, the story of the hashtag is much longer and more surprising, speaking to how we think about naming, identity, and being human in a non-human world. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic. |
antisocial media siva vaidhyanathan: Temp Louis Hyman, 2019-08-20 Winner of the William G. Bowen Prize Named a Triumph of 2018 by New York Times Book Critics Shortlisted for the 800-CEO-READ Business Book Award The untold history of the surprising origins of the gig economy--how deliberate decisions made by consultants and CEOs in the 50s and 60s upended the stability of the workplace and the lives of millions of working men and women in postwar America. Over the last fifty years, job security has cratered as the institutions that insulated us from volatility have been swept aside by a fervent belief in the market. Now every working person in America today asks the same question: how secure is my job? In Temp, Louis Hyman explains how we got to this precarious position and traces the real origins of the gig economy: it was created not by accident, but by choice through a series of deliberate decisions by consultants and CEOs--long before the digital revolution. Uber is not the cause of insecurity and inequality in our country, and neither is the rest of the gig economy. The answer to our growing problems goes deeper than apps, further back than outsourcing and downsizing, and contests the most essential assumptions we have about how our businesses should work. As we make choices about the future, we need to understand our past. |
antisocial media siva vaidhyanathan: Copyrights and Copywrongs Siva Vaidhyanathan, 2003-04 In this text, the author tracks the history of American copyright law through the 20th century, from Mark Twain's exhortations for 'thick' copyright protection, to recent lawsuits regarding sampling in rap music and the 'digital moment', exemplified by the rise of Napster and MP3 technology. |
antisocial media siva vaidhyanathan: Fulfillment Alec MacGillis, 2022-01-18 A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice “A grounded and expansive examination of the American economic divide . . . It takes a skillful journalist to weave data and anecdotes together so effectively.” —Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times An award-winning journalist investigates Amazon’s impact on the wealth and poverty of towns and cities across the United States. In 1937, the famed writer and activist Upton Sinclair published a novel bearing the subtitle A Story of Ford-America. He blasted the callousness of a company worth “a billion dollars” that underpaid its workers while forcing them to engage in repetitive and sometimes dangerous assembly-line labor. Eight decades later, the market capitalization of Amazon.com has exceeded $1.5 trillion, while the value of the Ford Motor Company hovers around $30 billion. We have entered the age of one-click America—and as the coronavirus makes Americans more dependent on online shopping, Amazon’s sway will only intensify. Alec MacGillis’s Fulfillment is not another exposé of our most conspicuously dominant company. Rather, it is a literary investigation of the America that falls within that company’s growing shadow. As MacGillis shows, Amazon’s sprawling network of delivery hubs, data centers, and corporate campuses epitomizes a land where winner and loser cities and regions are drifting steadily apart, the civic fabric is unraveling, and work has become increasingly rudimentary and isolated. In Seattle, high-paid workers in new office towers displace a historic Black neighborhood. In Ohio, cardboard makers supplant auto manufacturers, and in suburban Virginia, homeowners try to protect their town from the environmental impact of a new data center. When a warehouse replaces a fabled steel plant on the outskirts of Baltimore, a new model of work becomes visible. Fulfillment also shows how Amazon has become a force in Washington, D.C., ushering readers through a revolving door for lobbyists and government contractors and into CEO Jeff Bezos’s Kalorama mansion. With empathy and breadth, MacGillis demonstrates the hidden human costs of the other inequality—not the growing gap between rich and poor, but the gap between the country’s winning and losing regions. The result is an intimate account of contemporary capitalism: its drive to innovate, its dark, pitiless magic, its remaking of America with every click. |
antisocial media siva vaidhyanathan: What Would Google Do? Jeff Jarvis, 2011-09-20 In a book that’s one part prophecy, one part thought experiment, one part manifesto, and one part survival manual, internet impresario and blogging pioneer Jeff Jarvis reverse-engineers Google, the fastest-growing company in history, to discover forty clear and straightforward rules to manage and live by. At the same time, he illuminates the new worldview of the internet generation: how it challenges and destroys—but also opens up—vast new opportunities. His findings are counterintuitive, imaginative, practical, and above all visionary, giving readers a glimpse of how everyone and everything—from corporations to governments, nations to individuals—must evolve in the Google era. What Would Google Do? is an astonishing, mind-opening book that, in the end, is not about Google. It’s about you. |
antisocial media siva vaidhyanathan: Break the Internet Olivia Yallop, 2022-05-03 Traditional media is over. The internet reigns. And in the attention economy, influencers are royalty. But who are they... and how do you become one? Break the Internet takes a deep dive into the influencer industry, tracing its evolution from blogging and legacy social media such as Tumblr to today's world in which YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok dominate. Surveying the new media landscape that the rise of online celebrity has created, it is an insider account of a trend which is set to dominate our future--the economy of influence will be valued at $15bn globally by 2022. Olivia Yallop enrols in an influencer bootcamp, goes undercover at fan meetups, and shadows online celebrities to understand how digital personas are built, uncovering what it is really like to live a branded life and trade in a social stock market. From mumfluencers and activists to governments and investors, everyone wants to build their online influence. But how do you stay authentic in a system designed to commodify identity? Break the Internet examines both the dangers and the transformative potential of digital culture. |
antisocial media siva vaidhyanathan: The Next Billion Users Payal Arora, 2019-02-25 Why do citizens of states with strict surveillance care so little about their digital privacy? Why do Brazilians eschew geo-tagging on social media? What drives young Indians to friend “foreign” strangers on Facebook and give “missed calls” to people? Payal Arora answers these questions and many more about the internet’s next billion users. |
antisocial media siva vaidhyanathan: Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations Nicholas Carr, 2016-09-06 A freewheeling, sharp-shooting indictment of a tech-besotted culture. With razor wit, Nicholas Carr cuts through Silicon Valley’s unsettlingly cheery vision of the technological future to ask a hard question: Have we been seduced by a lie? Gathering a decade’s worth of posts from his blog, Rough Type, as well as his seminal essays, Utopia Is Creepy is “Carr’s best hits for those who missed the last decade of his stream of thoughtful commentary about our love affair with technology and its effect on our relationships” (Richard Cytowic, New York Journal of Books). Carr draws on artists ranging from Walt Whitman to the Clash, while weaving in the latest findings from science and sociology. Carr’s favorite targets are those zealots who believe so fervently in computers and data that they abandon common sense. Cheap digital tools do not make us all the next Fellini or Dylan. Social networks, diverting as they may be, are not vehicles for self-enlightenment. And “likes” and retweets are not going to elevate political discourse. Utopia Is Creepy compels us to question the technological momentum that has trapped us in its flow. “Resistance is never futile,” argues Carr, and this book delivers the proof. |
Antisocial personality disorder - Symptoms and causes
Feb 24, 2023 · Antisocial personality disorder, sometimes called sociopathy, is a mental health condition in which a person consistently shows no regard for right and wrong and ignores the rights and feelings of others.
Antisocial personality disorder - Wikipedia
Antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) is a personality disorder defined by a chronic pattern of behavior that disregards the rights and well-being of others. People with ASPD often exhibit behavior that conflicts with social norms, leading to issues with interpersonal relationships, employment, and legal matters.
Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD) - Cleveland Clinic
Antisocial personality disorder is a mental health condition that causes harmful behaviors without remorse. A person might show disrespect toward others and be manipulative, aggressive or reckless. Treatment options are available to help manage unhealthy thoughts and behaviors. What is …
What is Antisocial Personality Disorder? - SAMHSA
Apr 24, 2023 · Antisocial personality disorder, sometimes called sociopathy, is a mental health condition in which a person has a long-term pattern of manipulating, exploiting, or violating the rights of others. This behavior is …
Antisocial Personality Disorder - Harvard Health
Mar 13, 2019 · What is antisocial personality disorder? Antisocial personality disorder, like other personality disorders, is a longstanding pattern of behavior and experience that impairs functioning and causes distress.
Antisocial personality disorder - Symptoms and causes
Feb 24, 2023 · Antisocial personality disorder, sometimes called sociopathy, is a mental health condition in which a person consistently shows no regard for right and wrong and ignores the …
Antisocial personality disorder - Wikipedia
Antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) is a personality disorder defined by a chronic pattern of behavior that disregards the rights and well-being of others. People with ASPD often exhibit …
Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD) - Cleveland Clinic
Antisocial personality disorder is a mental health condition that causes harmful behaviors without remorse. A person might show disrespect toward others and be manipulative, aggressive or …
What is Antisocial Personality Disorder? - SAMHSA
Apr 24, 2023 · Antisocial personality disorder, sometimes called sociopathy, is a mental health condition in which a person has a long-term pattern of manipulating, exploiting, or violating the …
Antisocial Personality Disorder - Harvard Health
Mar 13, 2019 · What is antisocial personality disorder? Antisocial personality disorder, like other personality disorders, is a longstanding pattern of behavior and experience that impairs …
Antisocial Personality Disorder: Symptoms, Causes, Diagnosis ...
Mar 13, 2024 · People with antisocial personality disorder can be witty, charming, and fun to be around -- but they also lie and exploit others. WebMD looks at the causes, diagnosis, …
What is Antisocial Personality Disorder? - Healthline
May 30, 2019 · People with antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) have a mental health condition that causes patterns of manipulation and violation of others around them. This condition …
Antisocial Personality Disorder: Causes, Symptoms, and More
Aug 9, 2023 · Antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) is a deeply ingrained pattern of behavior characterized by a disregard for the welfare of others. The actions of a person with ASPD tend …
Antisocial personality disorder (sociopathy): Symptoms and ...
Dec 22, 2023 · What is antisocial personality disorder? A person with antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) displays a pattern of disregard for the rights of others and social norms. …
Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD) Symptoms and Treatment
Jun 20, 2024 · Antisocial personality disorder is a mental health condition that is characterized by manipulative behaviors, recklessness, exploitation of others, aggression, and a lack of …