Media, Science & Technology

The New York Times Staff. Edited by Alexander Star
The New York Times Company; January 2011
Paperback
9781443408578

Virginia Eubanks
MIT Press; March 2011
Hardcover; 232 pages
9780262014984

• Robert W McChesney & Victor Pickard
• Paperback; 400 pages
• The New Press; 2011
• 9781595585486

• Peter Lunenfeld
• Hardcover; 144 pages
• MIT Press; 2011
• 9780262015479

• Joshua, Foer
• Penguin, 2011
• Hardcover, 320 pages
• 9781594202292

• Siva Vaidhyanathan
• University of california Press, 2011
• Hardcover, 280 pages
• 9780520258822

• Eds.
  
  $49.95

• McGuigan, Jim
• Pluto Press; 2009
• Paperback; 282 pages
• 9780745326788

Thomas Frank coined the term 'the conquest of cool'. This book shows how this conquest is at the heart of the dynamics of contemporary capitalism.Jim McGuigan argues that 'cool capitalism' incorporates disaffection into capitalism itself, absorbing rebellion and thereby neutralising opposition to the present system of culture and society.McGuigan explores a huge variety of cultural examples, from the sleek images of mainstream advertising, to the fringes of artistic production, offering a vigourous critique of our understanding of subversion, resistance and counter-culturalism.Has capitalism really colonised our planet? McGuigan shows that there is still some space left for rebellion against the seductive power of the free market economy.

• Njogu, Kimani
• Indiana University Press; 2009
• Paperback: 333 pages
• 9780253222015

What is the role of the media in Africa? How do they work? How do they interact with global media? How do they reflect and express local culture? Incorporating both African and international perspectives, Media and Identity in Africa demonstrates how media outlets are used to perpetuate, question, or modify the unequal power relations between Africa and the rest of the world. Discussions about the construction of old and new social entities which are defined by class, gender, ethnicity, political and economic differences, wealth, poverty, cultural behavior, language, and religion dominate these new assessments of communications media in Africa. This volume addresses the tensions between the global and the local that have inspired creative control and use of traditional and modern forms of media. Kimani Njogu is Director of Twaweza Communications and former Associate Professor of African Languages at Kenyatta University, Kenya. John Middleton (1921–2009) was Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Religious Studies at Yale University.

• Thomas Waugh, Michael Brendan Baker & Ezra Winton
• McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010
• Paperback, 574 pages
• 9780773536630

Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada is a 600-page collection of historic and contemporary articles and essays about Challenge for Change/Société Nouvelle (CFC/SN), one of the NFB's most famous and controversial initiatives. The activist documentary program, which ran from 1967 to 1980, produced almost 250 films and videos in both French and English. It generated a particularly influential and original part of the National Film Board of Canada's acclaimed body of work, and its filmmakers were among the first to exploit portable video. CFC/SN challenged audiences, subjects and filmmakers to confront a wide spectrum of issues, from poverty to sexism to marginalization, with the intention of developing community and political awareness, as well as empowering Canadians. Pioneering participatory, social change-oriented media, the program had a national and international impact on documentary filmmaking, yet this book is the first comprehensive history and analysis of the venture. The volume's contributors examine dozens of films produced by the program, delving into their themes, aesthetics and politics, and they evaluate CFC/SN's place in Canadian, Québécois and world cinema.

• Robert Armstrnog
• UTP, 2010
• Paperback, 284 pages
• 9781442610354

Where do Canadian content requirements come from? What do international trade agreements mean for existing broadcasting policy and business practices? How are new media changing the face of broadcasting in Canada? Broadcasting Policy in Canada traces the development of Canada's broadcasting legislation and analyses the roles and responsibilities of the key players in the broadcasting system, particularly those of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). Robert Armstrong expresses with remarkable clarity the complicated changes to issues such as Canadian content, media regulation, and tax measures to provide a comprehensive overview of policies that have created the Canadian broadcasting system as it exists today. He also discusses related issues such as new media and the Internet, copyright, social concerns, and cultural diversity in a global media environment. Broadcasting Policy in Canada will serve as a valuable resource for students, policymakers, and industry players of all kinds who are affected by the CRTC's policies and decisions.   Robert Armstrong is president of Communications Médias Inc. in Montreal and teaches part-time in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University.

• Cary Nelson
• New York University Press; 2010
• Hardcover; 288 pages
• 9780814758595

The modern university is sustained by academic freedom; it guarantees higher education’s independence, its quality, and its success in educating students. The need to uphold those values would seem obvious. Yet the university is presently under siege from all corners; workers are being exploited with paltry salaries for full-time work, politics and profit rather than intellectual freedom govern decision-making, and professors are being monitored for the topics they teach. No University Is an Island offers a comprehensive account of the social, political, and cultural forces undermining academic freedom. At once witty and devastating, it confronts these threats with exceptional frankness, then offers a prescription for higher education’s renewal. In an insider’s account of how the primary organization for faculty members nationwide has fought the culture wars, Cary Nelson, the current President of the American Association of University Professors, unveils struggles over governance and unionization and the increasing corporatization of higher education. Peppered throughout with previously unreported, and sometimes incendiary, higher education anecdotes, Nelson is at his flame-throwing best.

• Lucas Hilderbrand
• Duke UP, 2009
• Paperback, 320 pages
• 9780822343769

"Inherent Vice" does more than anything else I've read to bring together aesthetic analysis and intellectual property studies. It offers a beautifully conceived historical study of the 'medium specificity' of videotape and an eloquent defense of video in a world populated by film aesthetes and digital utopians. I learned a lot from this book and it helped me to think in new ways about analog media." --Jonathan Sterne, author of "The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction

• Steven Pinker
• Harper Perennial, 2007
• Paperback, 526 pages
• 9780061336461

In this classic, the world's expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution. The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistics Society of America. This edition includes an update on advances in the science of language since The Language Instinct was first published.

• Richard Hoggart
• Penguin Modern Classics, 2009
• Paperback, 370 pages
• 9780141191584

Hoggart gives a fascinating insight into the close-knit values of Northern England's vanishing working-class communities, and weaves this together with his views on the arrival of a new, homogenous "mass" U.S.-influenced culture. His headline grabbing bestseller (1957) opened up a whole new area of cultural study and remains essential reading, both as a historical document, and as a commentary on class, poverty and the media.

• Edward Bernays
• Ig Publishing, 2005
• Paperback, 168 pages
• 9780970312594

A seminal and controversial figure in the history of political thought and public relations, Edward Bernays, pioneered the scientific technique of shaping and manipulating public opinion, which he famously dubbed "engineering of consent." During World War I, he was an integral part of the U.S. Committee on Public Information (CPI), a powerful propaganda apparatus that was mobilized to package, advertise and sell the war to the American people as one that would "Make the World Safe for Democracy." The CPI would become the blueprint in which marketing strategies for future wars would be based upon. Bernays applied the techniques he had learned in the CPI and, incorporating some of the ideas of Walter Lipmann, became an outspoken proponent of propaganda as a tool for democratic and corporate manipulation of the population. His 1928 bombshell Propaganda lays out his eerily prescient vision for using propaganda to regiment the collective mind in a variety of areas, including government, politics, art, science and education. To read this book today is to frightfully comprehend what our contemporary institutions of government and business have become in regards to organized manipulation of the masses. This is the first reprint of Propaganda in over 30 years.

• Tom Standage
• Walker and Company, 2007
• Paperback, 233 pages
• 9780802716040

The Victorian Internet tells the colorful story of the telegraph’s creation and remarkable impact, and of the visionaries, oddballs, and eccentrics who pioneered it, from the eighteenth-century french scientist Jean-Antoine Nollet to Samuel F. B. Morse and Thomas Edison. The electric telegraph nullified distance and shrank the world quicker and further than ever before or since, and its story mirrors and predicts that of the Internet in numerous ways.

• Bill Bryson
• Anchor Canada,2004
• Paperback, 544 pages
• ISBN: 9780385660044

This book is not currently in stock, but is available to order (1-2 weeks). One of the world’s most beloved and bestselling writers takes his ultimate journey -- into the most intriguing and intractable questions that science seeks to answer. A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson trekked the Appalachian Trail -- well, most of it. In In A Sunburned Country, he confronted some of the most lethal wildlife Australia has to offer. Now, in his biggest book, he confronts his greatest challenge: to understand -- and, if possible, answer -- the oldest, biggest questions we have posed about the universe and ourselves. Taking as territory everything from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization, Bryson seeks to understand how we got from there being nothing at all to there being us. To that end, he has attached himself to a host of the world’s most advanced (and often obsessed) archaeologists, anthropologists, and mathematicians, travelling to their offices, laboratories, and field camps. He has read (or tried to read) their books, pestered them with questions, apprenticed himself to their powerful minds. A Short History of Nearly Everything is the record of this quest, and it is a sometimes profound, sometimes funny, and always supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge, as only Bill Bryson can render it. Science has never been more involving or entertaining.

• Jean Burgess & Joshua Green
• Polity Books, 2009
• Paperback, 172 pages
• ISBN: 9780745644790

This book is not currently in stock, but is available to order (1-2 weeks). YouTube is one of the most well-known and widely discussed sites of participatory media in the contemporary online environment, and it is the first genuinely mass-popular platform for user-created video. In this timely and comprehensive introduction to how YouTube is being used and why it matters, Burgess and Green discuss the ways that it relates to wider transformations in culture, society and the economy. The book critically examines the public debates surrounding the site, demonstrating how it is central to struggles for authority and control in the new media environment. Drawing on a range of theoretical sources and empirical research, the authors discuss how YouTube is being used by the media industries, by audiences and amateur producers, and by particular communities of interest, and the ways in which these uses challenge existing ideas about cultural ‘production’ and ‘consumption’. Rich with both concrete examples and featuring specially commissioned chapters by Henry Jenkins and John Hartley, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in the contemporary and future implications of online media. It will be particularly valuable for students and scholars in media, communication and cultural studies.

• Richard Dawkins
• Mariner Books, 2008
• Paperback, 463 pages
• ISBN: 9780618948249

This book is not currently in stock, but is available to order (1-2 weeks).

• Jeff Hawkins with Sandra Blakeslee
• Holt Paperback;July 2005
• Paperback; 272 Pages
• 9780805078534

Hawkins designed the technical innovations that make handheld computers like the Palm Pilot ubiquitous. But he also has a lifelong passion for the mysteries of the brain, and he's convinced that artificial intelligence theorists are misguided in focusing on the limits of computational power rather than on the nature of human thought. He "pops the hood" of the neocortex and carefully articulates a theory of consciousness and intelligence that offers radical options for future researchers. "[T]he ability to make predictions about the future... is the crux of intelligence," he argues. The predictions are based on accumulated memories, and Hawkins suggests that humanoid robotics, the attempt to build robots with humanlike bodies, will create machines that are more expensive and impractical than machines reproducing genuinely human-level processes such as complex-pattern analysis, which can be applied to speech recognition, weather analysis and smart cars. Hawkins presents his ideas, with help from New York Times science writer Blakeslee, in chatty, easy-to-grasp language that still respects the brain's technical complexity. He fully anticipates—even welcomes—the controversy he may provoke within the scientific community and admits that he might be wrong, even as he offers a checklist of potential discoveries that could prove him right. His engaging speculations are sure to win fans of authors like Steven Johnson and Daniel Dennett. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
 

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• David Alan Grier
• Princeton UP; 2005
• Paperback; 424 pages
• 978-0-691-13382-9

This book is not currently in stock, but is available to order (1-2 weeks).

• William McDonough and Michael Braungart
• North Point Press; 2002
• Paperback; 208 pages
• 9780865475878

A manifesto for a radically different philosophy and practice of manufacture and environmentalism. "Reduce, reuse, recycle" urge environmentalists; in other words, do more with less in order to minimize damage. As William McDonough and Michael Braungart argue in their provocative, visionary book, however, this approach perpetuates a one-way, "cradle to grave" manufacturing model that dates to the Industrial Revolution and casts off as much as 90 percent of the materials it uses as waste, much of it toxic. Why not challenge the notion that human industry must inevitably damage the natural world, they ask. In fact, why not take nature itself as our model? A tree produces thousands of blossoms in order to create another tree, yet we do not consider its abundance wasteful but safe, beautiful, and highly effective; hence, "waste equals food" is the first principle the book sets forth. Products might be designed so that, after their useful life, they provide nourishment for something new-either as "biological nutrients" that safely re-enter the environment or as "technical nutrients" that circulate within closed-loop industrial cycles, without being "downcycled" into low-grade uses (as most "recyclables" now are). Elaborating their principles from experience (re)designing everything from carpeting to corporate campuses, the authors make an exciting and viable case for change.

• Malcolm Gladwell
• Back Bay Books; 2005
• Paperback; 320 pages
• 9780316010665

In his landmark bestseller The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell redefined how we understand the world around us. Now, in Blink, he revolutionizes the way we understand the world within. Blink is a book about how we think without thinking, about choices that seem to be made in an instant - in the blink of an eye - that actually aren't as simple as they seem. Why are some people brilliant decision makers, while others are consistently inept? Why do some people follow their instincts and win, while others end up stumbling into error? How do our brains really work - in the office, in the classroom, in the kitchen, and in the bedroom? And why are the best decisions often those that are impossible to explain to others? In Blink we meet the psychologist who has learned to predict whether a marriage will last, based on a few minutes of observing a couple; the tennis coach who knows when a player will double-fault before the racket even makes contact with the ball; the antiquities experts who recognize a fake at a glance. Here, too, are great failures of "blink": the election of Warren Harding; "New Coke"; and the shooting of Amadou Diallo by police. Blink reveals that great decision makers aren't those who process the most information or spend the most time deliberating, but those who have perfected the art of "thin-slicing" - filtering the very few factors that matter from an overwhelming number of variables.