Social Media Study

News is to the mind as sugar is to the body. In 2013 Rolf Dobelli stood in front of a room full of journalists and proclaimed that he did not read the news. It caused a riot. Now he finally sets down his philosophy in detail. And he practices what he preaches: he hasn't read the news for a decade. Stop Reading the News is Dobelli's manifesto about the dangers of the most toxic form of information - news. He shows the damage it does to our concentration and well-being and how a misplaced sense of duty can misdirect our behaviour.

Labor Day, 1969: Two recent college graduates move to New York to edit a new magazine called the National Lampoon. Over the next decade, Henry Beard and Doug Kenney, along with a loose amalgamation of fellow satirists such as Michael O’Donoghue and P. J. O’Rourke, popularized a smart, caustic, ironic brand of humor that has become the dominant voice of American comedy. Ranging from sophisticated political satire to broad raunchy jokes, the National Lampoon introduced iconoclasm to the mainstream, selling millions of copies to an audience both large and devoted.

In The Visual Detox, art expert and businesswoman Marine Tanguy explains how the imagery we see shapes our wellbeing. She gives us new tools to think critically about images, combat information overload and participate more in the visual world around us by engaging with the art and content that improves our day-to-day experiences online, at work, in our homes and in public spaces.

The best-selling social media book of the year! Too busy to spend hours trying to learn the fundamentals of social-media marketing? This is the book for you!

In recent decades, we have witnessed an explosion in the number of visual images we encounter, as our lives have become increasingly saturated with screens. From Google Images to Instagram, video games to installation art, this transformation is confusing, liberating and worrying all at once, since observing the new visuality of culture is not the same as understanding it.

This extraordinary book explains the engine that has catapulted the Internet from backwater to ubiquity—and reveals that it is sputtering precisely because of its runaway success. With the unwitting help of its users, the generative Internet is on a path to a lockdown, ending its cycle of innovation—and facilitating unsettling new kinds of control.

A thought-provoking, binge-worthy new collection of essays, stories, and musings from Douglas Coupland, Bit Rot explores the different ways in which 20th-century notions of the future are being shredded, and it is a literary gem of the digital age.

Mab Segrest explores her singular experience as a white lesbian organizing against a virulent Far Right movement in North Carolina in this best-selling political memoir.

In Lurking, Joanne McNeil digs deep and identifies the primary (if sometimes contradictory) concerns of people online: searching, safety, privacy, identity, community, anonymity, and visibility. She charts what it is that brought people online and what keeps us here even as the social equations of digital life - what we’re made to trade, knowingly or otherwise, for the benefits of the internet - have shifted radically beneath us. It is a story we are accustomed to hearing as tales of entrepreneurs and visionaries and dynamic and powerful corporations.

Why Is This Lying Bastard Lying To Me? – a question famously asked by grand inquisitor Jeremy Paxman – is Rob Burley’s deliciously irreverent and gossipy insider’s account of 25 years working at the very top of British political television – and the unique insight he’s gained on the country’s politicians on the way. In this unique book Rob Burley sets out to explore the state of democracy and accountability in an era when voters have come to expect untruthfulness from their leaders.

Melding the long-term history of technology with the latest headlines and findings of computer science and social science, The Efficiency Paradox questions our ingrained assumptions about efficiency, persuasively showing how relying on the algorithms of digital platforms can in fact lead to wasted efforts, missed opportunities, and above all an inability to break out of established patterns. Edward Tenner offers a smarter way of thinking about efficiency, revealing what we and our institutions can learn from the random and unexpected.

Movies do more than tell a good story. They are expressions of raw emotion, naked vulnerability, and unbridled rage. They often function in the same way as prayers, communicating our deepest longings and joys to a God who hears each and every one. In this captivating book, Filmspotting co-host Josh Larsen brings a critic's unique perspective to how movies function as expressions to God of lament, praise, joy, confession, and more.

More than a decade ago, counterterrorism expert Rita Katz began browsing white supremacist and neo-Nazi forums. The hateful rhetoric and constant threats of violence immediately reminded her of jihadist militants. Now, years of attacks committed by extremists radicalized online—including at a synagogue in Pittsburgh and mosques in New Zealand, as well as the Capitol siege—have brought home the danger. From ISIS to QAnon, Saints and Soldiers pinpoints the approaches needed for a new era in which arrests and military campaigns alone cannot stop never-before-seen threats.

This hybrid collection of short crónicas, journalism, and personal essays on systemic violence in contemporary Mexico and along the US-Mexico border draws together literary theory and historical analysis to outline how neoliberalism, corruption, and drug trafficking - culminating in the misnamed “war on drugs” - has shaped Mexico. Working from and against this political context, Cristina Rivera Garza posits that collective grief is an act of resistance against state violence and that writing is a powerful mode of seeking social justice and embodying resilience.

Plastic bags are cheap and easy to use. But what happens when a bag breaks or is no longer needed? In Njau, Gambia, people simply dropped the bags and went on their way. One plastic bag became two. Then 10. Then a hundred. The bags accumulated in ugly heaps alongside roads. Water pooled in them, bringing mosquitoes and disease. Some bags were burned, leaving behind a terrible smell. Some were buried, but they strangled gardens. They killed livestock that tried to eat them. Something had to change.

Instagram está tan ligado a nuestro día a día que su historia no puede disociarse del impacto que tiene sobre nuestras vidas. Desde su creación en el año 2010 de la mano de Kevin Systrom y Mike Krieger como una aplicación simple e intuitiva, lnstagram se ha convertido en una máquina de hacer famosos como nunca antes se había visto -ya sea en el patio de los colegios, en el mundo cultural o en el de la moda- en busca de un reconocimiento digital que obtiene gracias a likes, comentarios, seguidores y espectaculares acuerdos con distintas empresas.

Layering climate science, mythologies, nature writing, and personal experiences, Desert Notebooks offers a vital and necessary chronicle of our past and our present - perfect for fans of Robert Macfarlane and Elizabeth Rush - that’s unflinching, urgent, and yet timeless and profound.

What’s gone wrong with our media? The answer: its owners. From William Randolph Hearst to Elon Musk, from the British press barons to colonial upstarts Conrad Black and Rupert Murdoch, media proprietors have manipulated the news to accumulate wealth and influence as they meddled with democracy. Eric Beecher knows the news business from bottom to top. He has been a journalist, editor and media proprietor, with the rare distinction of having both worked for and been sued (unsuccessfully) by the Murdochs. This book reveals the distorted role of the media moguls of the past two centuries.

Being a student at Americus High School was the worst experience of Greg Wittkamper's life. Greg came from a nearby Christian commune, Koinonia, whose members devoutly and publicly supported racial equality. When he refused to insult and attack his school's first black students in 1964, Greg was mistreated as badly as they were: harassed and bullied and beaten.

Las redes sociales nos han llevado a un nuevo mundo en el que vivimos cercados por las opiniones ajenas. Lo que parecía la conquista total de la libertad de expresión ha hecho que una parte de la ciudadanía se revuelva, incómoda. Grupos de presión organizados en las redes -católicos, feministas, activistas de izquierdas y derechas- han empezado a perseguir lo que consideran «excesos» intolerables mediante el linchamiento digital, las peticiones de boicot y las recogidas de firmas.