Michael Mandiberg (ed.): The Social Media Reader (2012)

With the rise of web 2.0 and social media platforms taking over vast tracts of territory on the internet, the media landscape has shifted drastically in the past 20 years, transforming previously stable relationships between media creators and consumers. The Social Media Reader is the first collection to address the collective transformation with pieces on social media, peer production, copyright politics, and other aspects of contemporary internet culture from all the major thinkers in the field.

Culling a broad range and incorporating different styles of scholarship from foundational pieces and published articles to unpublished pieces, journalistic accounts, personal narratives from blogs, and whitepapers, The Social Media Reader promises to be an essential text, with contributions from Lawrence Lessig, Henry Jenkins, Clay Shirky, Tim O’Reilly, Chris Anderson, Yochai Benkler, danah boyd, and Fred von Loehmann, to name a few. It covers a wide-ranging topical terrain, much like the internet itself, with particular emphasis on collaboration and sharing, the politics of social media and social networking, Free Culture and copyright politics, and labor and ownership. Theorizing new models of collaboration, identity, commerce, copyright, ownership, and labor, these essays outline possibilities for cultural democracy that arise when the formerly passive audience becomes active cultural creators, while warning of the dystopian potential of new forms of surveillance and control.

Publisher NYU Press, 2012
Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) license
ISBN 0814763022, 9780814763025
289 pages

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Stephen Baker: The Numerati (2008)

An urgent look at how a global math elite is predicting and altering our behavior — at work, at the mall, and in bed.

Every day we produce loads of data about ourselves simply by living in the modern world: we click web pages, flip channels, drive through automatic toll booths, shop with credit cards, and make cell phone calls. Now, in one of the greatest undertakings of the twenty-first century, a savvy group of mathematicians and computer scientists is beginning to sift through this data to dissect us and map out our next steps. Their goal? To manipulate our behavior — what we buy, how we vote — without our even realizing it.

In this tour de force of original reporting and analysis, journalist Stephen Baker provides us with a fascinating guide to the world we’re all entering — and to the people controlling that world. The Numerati have infiltrated every realm of human affairs, profiling us as workers, shoppers, patients, voters, potential terrorists — and lovers. The implications are vast. Our privacy evaporates. Our bosses can monitor and measure our every move (then reward or punish us). Politicians can find the swing voters among us, by plunking us all into new political groupings with names like “Hearth Keepers” and “Crossing Guards.” It can sound scary. But the Numerati can also work on our behalf, diagnosing an illness before we’re aware of the symptoms, or even helping us find our soul mate. Surprising, enlightening, and deeply relevant, The Numerati shows how a powerful new endeavor — the mathematical modeling of humanity — will transform every aspect of our lives.

Publisher Mariner Books, Boston/New York, 2008
ISBN 0618784608, 9780618784608
256 pages

review (Marcus du Sautoy, The Guardian)
review (Rob Walker, The New York Times)
review (Tim Walker, The Independent)

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Journal of Digital Humanities 1 (3): The Difference the Digital Makes (2012)

“So much of the content of digital humanities begins in the analog world: documents that are scanned and indexed; maps that are recast in GIS; quantities that are converted to machine-readable tables. Although we tend to focus on the final product — the digital construction viewed over the web — we remain cognizant of this transition that artifacts of human expression have taken. In this issue of the Journal of Digital Humanities, several scholars take a deeper look at that transition. ” (from the Introduction)

With contributions by Sarah Werner, Craig Mod, Matthew M. Booker, Melissa Terras, Elijah Meeks and Karl Grossner, Simon Burrows and Mark Curran, Andrew J. Torget and Jon Christensen, Stuart Dunn, Sean Takats, Robert Nelson

Vol. 1, No. 3, Summer 2012
Editors: Daniel J. Cohen, Joan Fragaszy Troyano
Associate Editors: Sasha Hoffman, Jeri Wieringa
Publisher Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, October 2012
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License
ISSN 2165-6673

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