Shows / New Books in Technology
New Books in Technology
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/…
Episodes
- New Books in Technology
Matthew L. Jones, “Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage” (U. Chicago Press, 2016)
Matthew L. Jones’s wonderful new book traces a history of failed efforts to make calculating machines, from Blaise Pascal’s work in the 1640s through the…
- New Books in Technology
Dave Karpf, “Analytic Activism: Digital Listening and the New Political Strategy” (Oxford UP, 2016)
For the start of 2017, Dave Karpf is back on the podcast with his new book, Analytic Activism: Digital Listening and the New Political Strategy (Oxford…
- New Books in Technology
Nicholas A. John, “The Age of Sharing” (Polity Press, 2016)
In his new book The Age of Sharing (Polity Press, 2016), the sociologist and media scholar Nicholas A. John documents the history and current meanings of the…
- New Books in Technology
Heather Dowd, “Classroom Management in the Digital Age: Effective Practices for Technology-Rich Learning Spaces” (EdTechTeam, 2016)
In this episode, I speak with Heather Dowd, the author of Classroom Management in the Digital Age: Effective Practices for Technology-Rich Learning Spaces…
- New Books in Technology
Carroll Pursell, “From Playgrounds to PlayStation: The Interaction of Technology and Play” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015)
Carroll Pursell‘s From Playgrounds to PlayStation: The Interaction of Technology and Play (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015) explores how play reflects and…
- New Books in Technology
Alecia Swasy, “How Journalists Use Twitter: The Changing Landscape of U.S. Newsrooms” (Lexington Books, 2016)
With messages limited to 140 characters, Twitter once drew skepticism, even scorn, from journalists who saw little role for the social-media platform in their…
- New Books in Technology
Asif A. Siddiqi, “The Red Rockets’ Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857-1957” (Cambridge UP, 2013)
In The Red Rockets’ Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857-1957 (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Asif Siddiqi approaches the history of the…
- New Books in Technology
Milton Chen, “Education Nation: Six Leading Edges of Innovation in Our Schools” (Jossey Bass, 2012)
It feels like schools are in the midst of unprecedented change — sometimes more in different places and sometimes more in different ways. Many people are…
- New Books in Technology
Marc Raboy, “Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World” (Oxford UP, 2016)
Our modern networked world owes an oftentimes unacknowledged debt to Guglielmo Marconi. As Marc Raboy demonstrates in Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World…
- New Books in Technology
E.R. Truitt, “Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art” (U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2015)
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Clarke’s third law, coined in 1973, expresses the difficulty that people of any era…
- New Books in Technology
Mary Chayko, “Superconnected: The Internet, Digital Media, and Techno-Social Life” (SAGE, 2016)
New technology has made us more connected than ever before. This has its advantages: instantaneous communication, expanded circles of influence, access to more…
- New Books in Technology
George Couros, “The Innovator’s Mindset: Empower Learning, Unleash Talent, and Lead a Culture of Creativity” (Dave Burgess Consulting, 2015)
One of the most commonly used words right now in education is “innovation.” It seems to be part of any response to our collective anxiety over the fact that…
- New Books in Technology
Jean Chalaby, “The Format Age: Television’s Entertainment Revolution” (Polity, 2015)
Television had been transformed by the rise of the format. In The Format Age: Television’s Entertainment Revolution Jean Chalaby, Professor of International…
- New Books in Technology
Daniel Kreiss, “Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy” (Oxford UP, 2016)
Daniel Kreiss is back on the podcast with his new book Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy (Oxford University Press…
- New Books in Technology
James Rodger Fleming, “Inventing Atmospheric Science: Bjerknes, Rossby, Wexler, and the Foundations of Modern Meteorology” (MIT Press, 2016)
This is a book about the future – the historical future as three interconnected generations of atmospheric researchers experienced it and envisioned it in the…
- New Books in Technology
Benjamin Peters, “How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet” (MIT Press, 2016)
Something we might think of as the Soviet internet once existed, according to Benjamin Peters‘ new book, and its failure was neither natural nor inevitable…
- New Books in Technology
Ronald R. Kline, “The Cybernetics Moment: Or, Why We Call Our Age the Information Age” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015)
I like to think (it has to be!) of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters…
- New Books in Technology
Greg Jenner, “A Million Years in a Day: A Curious History of Everyday Life from Stone Age to Phone Age” (St. Martin’s Press, 2016)
Greg Jenner’s A Million Years in a Day: A Curious History of Everyday Life from Stone Age to Phone Age (St. Martins Press, 2016), explores the history of the…
- New Books in Technology
Mark Carrigan, “Social Media for Academics” (Sage, 2016)
How can academics respond to the rise of social media? Or should they respond at all? In Social Media for Academics (Sage, 2016), Mark Carrigan, from the…
- New Books in Technology
Alfie Bown, “Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism” (Zero Books, 2015)
What is enjoyment and what can contemporary critical theory tell us about it? In Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism (Zero Books, 2015), Alfie Bown, a…
- New Books in Technology
Benjamin Castleman, “The 160-Character Solution: How Text Messaging and Other Behavioral Strategies Can Improve Education” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015)
Teenagers live in their phones. As an educator you can try to pull them away or meet them where they are. The 160-Character Solution: How Text Messaging and…
- New Books in Technology
Phillip Penix-Tadsen, “Cultural Code: Video Games and Latin America” (MIT Press, 2016)
Symbols have meanings that change depending upon the cultural context. But how do we discuss symbols, their meanings, and their cultural contexts without an…
- New Books in Technology
David R. Brake, “Sharing our Lives Online: Risks and Exposure in Social Media” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)
With the growth of social media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, we are increasingly heading toward a radically open society. In Sharing our…
- New Books in Technology
Jeffery Pomerantz, “Metadata” (MIT, 2015)
What is the “stuff” that fuels the information society in which we live? In his new book, Metadata (MIT 2015), information scientist Jeffrey Pomerantz asserts…
- New Books in Technology
Finn Brunton, “Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet” (MIT Press, 2013)
Finn Brunton‘s Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet (MIT Press, 2013) is a cultural history of those communications that seek to capture our attention for…
- New Books in Technology
Paul R. Josephson, “Fish Sticks, Sports Bras, and Aluminum Cans: The Politics of Everyday Technologies” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015)
Paul R. Josephson‘s new book explores everyday technologies – fish sticks, sports bras, sugar, bananas, aluminum cans, potatoes, fructose, and more – as…
- New Books in Technology
Barry Brown and Oskar Juhlin, “Enjoying Machines” (MIT 2015)
When we consider the television, we think not only about how it’s used, but also it’s impact on culture. The television, tv, telly, or tube, became popular in…
- New Books in Technology
Nathan Altice, “I Am Error: The Nintendo Family Computer-Entertainment System Platform” (MIT Press, 2015)
The genre of “platform studies” offers both researchers and readers more than an examination of the technical machinations of a computing system. Instead, the…
- New Books in Technology
Megan Prelinger, “Inside the Machine: Art and Invention in the Electronic Age” (Norton, 2015)
Megan Prelinger‘s beautiful new book brings together the histories of technology and visuality to ask the question, “What cultural history of electronics can…
- New Books in Technology
John Durham Peters, “The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)
John Durham Peters‘ wonderful new book is a brilliant and beautifully-written consideration of natural environments as subjects for media studies. Accessible…
- New Books in Technology
Eric T. Meyer and Ralph Schroeder, “Knowledge Machines: Digital Transformations of the Sciences and Humanities” (MIT Press, 2015)
By now it is incontrovertible that new technology has had an effect on how regular people get information. Whether in the form of an online newspaper or a…
- New Books in Technology
Gillian Isaacs Russell, “Screen Relations: The Limits of Computer-Mediated Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy” (Karnac, 2015)
At New Books in Psychoanalysis, interviews are conducted using Skype. As the program is audio rather than video based, it never occurred to me to use the…
- New Books in Technology
Joseph M. Reagle, “Reading the Comments: Likers, Haters and Manipulators at the Bottom of the Web” (MIT Press, 2015)
What do we know about the individuals who make comments on online news stories, blogs, videos and other media? What kind of people take the time to post all…
- New Books in Technology
Jessica Baldwin-Philippi, “Using Technology, Building Democracy: Digital Campaigning and the Construction of Citizenship” (Oxford UP, 2015)
Jessica Baldwin-Philippi is the author of Using Technology, Building Democracy: Digital Campaigning and the Construction of Citizenship (Oxford University…
- New Books in Technology
Tom Jackson, “Chilled: How Refrigeration Changed the World and Might Do So Again” (Bloomsbury, 2015)
Tom Jackson‘s Chilled: How Refrigeration Changed the World and Might Do So Again (Bloomsbury, 2015) is a completely engrossing look into the history and…
- New Books in Technology
Alexandra Minna Stern, “Telling Genes: The Story of Genetic Counseling in America” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012)
Due in part to lobbying efforts on behalf of the human genome project, human genes tend to be thought of in light of the present–genetic components of human…
- New Books in Technology
Janet Vertesi, “Seeing like a Rover: How Robots, Teams, and Images Craft Knowledge of Mars” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)
Janet Vertesi‘s fascinating new book is an ethnography of the Mars Rover mission that takes readers into the practices involved in working with the two robotic…
- New Books in Technology
Jonathan Coopersmith, “Faxed: The Rise and Fall of the Fax Machine” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015)
Jonathan Coopersmith‘s new book takes readers through the century-and-a-half-long history of the fax machine and the technologies that shaped and were shaped…
- New Books in Technology
Christian Fuchs, “Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media” (Routledge, 2015)
Social media is now a pervasive element of many people’s lives. in order to best understand this phenomenon we need a comprehensive theory of the political…
- New Books in Technology
Jenifer Van Vleck, “Empire of the Air: Aviation and the American Ascendancy” (Harvard UP, 2013)
[Re-posted with permission from Who Makes Cents?] Today’s guest discusses the history of aviation and how this provides a lens to interpret the history of…
- New Books in Technology
Charis Thompson, “Good Science: The Ethical Choreography of Stem Cell Research” (MIT Press, 2013)
Charis Thompson‘s Good Science: The Ethical Choreography of Stem Cell Research (MIT Press, 2013) is an important book. Good Science explores the “ethical…
- New Books in Technology
John Sharp, “Works of Game: On the Aesthetics of Games and Art” (MIT Press, 2015)
That games, particularly video games, could be viewed as art should come as no surprise. And yet, a debate exists over what is and should be considered art…
- New Books in Technology
Greg Siegel, “Forensic Media: Reconstructing Accidents in Accelerated Modernity” (Duke UP, 2014)
Greg Siegel‘s new book is a wonderfully engaging and meticulously researched account of a dual tendency in modern technological life: treating forensic…
- New Books in Technology
Jon L. Mills, “Privacy in the New Media Age” (University Press of Florida, 2015)
That privacy in the digital age is an important concept to be discussed is axiomatic. Cameras in mobile phones make it easy to record events and post them on…
- New Books in Technology
Myles W. Jackson, “The Genealogy of a Gene: Patents, HIV/AIDS, and Race” (MIT Press, 2015)
What happens when you allow human materials to become property? More specifically, how does granting monopoly rights over genetic material affect the potential…
- New Books in Technology
Naomi S. Baron, “Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World” (Oxford UP, 2015)
Screens are ubiquitous. From the screen on a mobile, to that on a tablet, or laptop, or desktop computer, screens appear all around us, full of content both…
- New Books in Technology
Christine L. Borgman, “Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World” (MIT Press, 2015)
Social media and digital technology now allow researchers to collect vast amounts of a variety data quickly. This so-called “big data,” and the practices that…
- New Books in Technology
Robert W. Gehl, “Reverse Engineering Social Media” (Temple UP, 2014)
Reverse Engineering Social Media: Software, Culture, and Political Economy in New Media Capitalism (Temple University Press, 2014) by Robert Gehl (University…
- New Books in Technology
Casey O’Donnell, “Developer’s Dilemma: The Secret World of Videogame Creators” (MIT Press, 2014)
In his new book, Developer’s Dilemma: The Secret World of Videogame Creators (MIT Press, 2014), Casey O’Donnell, an assistant professor in the department of…
- New Books in Technology
Yasmin B. Kafai and Quinn Burke, “Connected Code: Why Children Need to Learn Programming” (MIT, 2014)
Although the push to persuade everyone to learn to code is quite the current rage, the coding movement has roots that extend back for more than a few decades…
- New Books in Technology
Thomas Leitch, “Wikipedia U: Knowledge, Authority, and Liberal Education in the Digital Age” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014)
Wikipedia is one of the most popular resources on the web, with its massive collection of articles on an incredible number of topics. Yet, its user written and…
- New Books in Technology
Stephen Goldsmith and Susan Crawford, “The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance” (Jossey-Bass, 2014)
Without a doubt, the paramount duty of a municipality, of any size, is the delivery services to its constituents. These services range from the seasonal-think…
- New Books in Technology
Frank Pasquale, “The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information” (Harvard UP, 2015)
Hidden algorithms make many of the decisions that affect significant areas of society: the economy, personal and organizational reputation, the promotion of…
- New Books in Technology
Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, “Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe” (MIT Press, 2014)
Words have meaning. More specifically, the definitions attached to words shape our perspective on, and how we categorize, the things that we encounter. The…
- New Books in Technology
Johanna Drucker, “Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production” (Harvard University Press, 2014)
Johanna Drucker‘s marvelous new book gives us a language with which to talk about visual epistemology.Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Harvard…
- New Books in Technology
James Giordano, “Neurotechnology in National Security and Defense” (CRC Press, 2014)
Neurotechnology in National Security and Defense: Practical Considerations, Neuroethical Concerns (CRC Press, 2014), edited by Dr. James Giordano, is an…
- New Books in Technology
Carolyn L. Kane, “Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code” (U of Chicago Press, 2014)
Carolyn L. Kane’s new book traces the modern history of digital color, focusing on the role of electronic color in computer art and media aesthetics since…
- New Books in Technology
Victor Pickard, “America’s Battle for Media Democracy” (Cambridge UP, 2014)
The media system in the United States could have developed into something very different than what it is today. In fact, there was an era in which significant…
- New Books in Technology
Alon Peled, “Traversing Digital Babel: Information, E-Government, and Exchange” (MIT Press, 2014)
Failure by government agencies to share information has had disastrous results globally. From the inability to prevent terrorist attacks, like the 9-11 attacks…
- New Books in Technology
Ethan Zuckerman, “Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection” (Norton, 2013)
In the early days of the Internet, optimists saw the future as highly connected, where voices from across the globe would mingle and learn from one another as…