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
Chris Wiggins and Matthew L Jones, "How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms" (Norton, 2023)
From facial recognition―capable of checking people into flights or identifying undocumented residents―to automated decision systems that inform who gets loans…
- New Books in Technology
Idolatry and Idle Hands (with Jacob Howland)
Philosophy professor Jacob Howland applies the lessons of Greek classics and Jewish scripture to this our curious moment at the inception of Artificial…
- New Books in Technology
Cory Doctorow, "The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation" (Verso, 2023)
Big Tech locked us into their systems by making their platforms hard to leave by design. The impossibility of staying connected to people on their platforms…
- New Books in Technology
Driving While Black: African Americans and the Automobile
Gretchen Sorin, Director and Distinguished Professor of the Cooperstown Graduate Program at the State University of New York - Oneonta, talks about her book…
- New Books in Technology
The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games
We may think of video games as being "fun," but in The Art of Failure, Jesper Juul claims that this is almost entirely mistaken. When we play video games, our…
- New Books in Technology
The Future of Space Travel: A Discussion with Douglas C. Ligor
The expansion of space travel is much discussed but always seems subject to delay. Why is that and when will it happen on a much larger scale? Douglas Ligor…
- New Books in Technology
Robot Futures
With robots, we are inventing a new species that is part material and part digital. The ambition of modern robotics goes beyond copying humans, beyond the…
- New Books in Technology
Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet
The vast majority of all email sent every day is spam, a variety of idiosyncratically spelled requests to provide account information, invitations to spend…
- New Books in Technology
Moving Innovation: A History of Computer Animation
Computer graphics (or CG) has changed the way we experience the art of moving images. Computer graphics is the difference between Steamboat Willie and Buzz…
- New Books in Technology
Kathryn Cramer Brownell, "24/7 Politics: Cable Television and the Fragmenting of America from Watergate to Fox News" (Princeton UP, 2023)
As television began to overtake the political landscape in the 1960s, network broadcast companies, bolstered by powerful lobbying interests, dominated screens…
- New Books in Technology
Betty Adamou, "Games and Gamification in Market Research: Increasing Consumer Engagement in Research for Business Success" (Kogan Page, 2018)
Games are the most engaging medium of all time: they harness storytelling and heuristics, drive emotion and push the evolution of technology in a way that no…
- New Books in Technology
Powering American Farms: A Conversation with Richard Hirsh
Richard Hirsh, Professor of History at Virginia Tech, talks about his book, Powering American Farms: The Overlooked Origins of Rural Electrification (Johns…
- New Books in Technology
Alice E. Marwick, "The Private Is Political: Networked Privacy and Social Media" (Yale UP, 2023)
Online privacy is under constant attack by social media and big data technologies. But we cannot rely on individual actions to remedy this—it is a matter of…
- New Books in Technology
Rob Eschmann,, "When the Hood Comes Off: Racism and Resistance in the Digital Age" (U California Press, 2023)
From cell phone footage of police killing unarmed Black people to leaked racist messages and even comments from friends and family on social media, online…
- New Books in Technology
Jeremy Black, "A History of Artillery" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)
Jeremy Black's book A History of Artillery (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) traces the development of artillery through the ages, providing a thorough study of…
- New Books in Technology
Nina Lager Vestberg, "Picture Research: The Work of Intermediation from Pre-Photography to Post-Digitization" (MIT Press, 2023)
Picture Research: The Work of Intermediation from Pre-Photography to Post-Digitization (MIT Press, 2023) focuses on how pictures were saved, stored, and…
- New Books in Technology
Juliet Schor, "After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back" (U California Press, 2021)
When the "sharing economy" launched a decade ago, proponents claimed that it would transform the experience of work--giving earners flexibility, autonomy, and…
- New Books in Technology
Lin Zhang, "The Labor of Reinvention: Entrepreneurship in the Chinese Digital Economy" (Columbia UP, 2023)
Hello, world! This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series.In this episode, our host Jing Wang discusses the book The Labor of Reinvention…
- New Books in Technology
Jenna Grant, "Fixing the Image: Ultrasound and the Visuality of Care in Phnom Penh" (U Washington Press, 2022)
Jenna Grant is a cultural anthropologist from the University of Washington and author of Fixing the Image: Ultrasound and the Visuality of Care in Phnom Penh…
- New Books in Technology
Randall Patnode, "The Synchronized Society: Time and Control From Broadcasting to the Internet" (Rutgers UP, 2023)
The Synchronized Society: Time and Control From Broadcasting to the Internet (Rutgers University Press, 2023) by Dr. Randall Patnode traces the history of the…
- New Books in Technology
Palo Alto: A Conversation with Malcolm Harris
This is the second Peoples & Things episode featuring a guest host. In this case, it is M. R. “Mols” Sauter, an assistant professor of information studies at…
- New Books in Technology
The War on Learning: Gaining Ground in the Digital University
Behind the lectern stands the professor, deploying course management systems, online quizzes, wireless clickers, PowerPoint slides, podcasts, and…
- New Books in Technology
The Marketplace of Attention: How Audiences Take Shape in a Digital Age
Feature films, television shows, homemade videos, tweets, blogs, and breaking news: digital media offer an always-accessible, apparently inexhaustible supply…
- New Books in Technology
Helle Porsdam, "Science as a Cultural Human Right" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)
The human right to science, outlined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and repeated in the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social, and…
- New Books in Technology
Metadata
When "metadata" became breaking news, appearing in stories about surveillance by the National Security Agency, many members of the public encountered this…
- New Books in Technology
The Singer Sewing Machine in Spain and Mexico: Multinational Business, Gender, and Technologies
Historian Paula de la Cruz-Fernandez talks about her book, Gendered Capitalism: Sewing Machines and Multinational Business in Spain and Mexico, 1850-1940…
- New Books in Technology
Brian Cummings, "Bibliophobia: The End and the Beginning of the Book" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Bibliophobia: The End and the Beginning of the Book (Oxford UP, 2022) is a book about material books, how they are cared for, and how they are damaged…
- New Books in Technology
Make it New: A History of Silicon Valley Design
California's Silicon Valley is home to the greatest concentration of designers in the world: corporate design offices at flagship technology companies and…
- New Books in Technology
Reading the Comments: Likers, Haters, and Manipulators at the Bottom of the Web
Online comment can be informative or misleading, entertaining or maddening. Haters and manipulators often seem to monopolize the conversation. Some comments…
- New Books in Technology
Works of Game: On the Aesthetics of Games and Art
Games and art have intersected at least since the early twentieth century, as can be seen in the Surrealists' use of Exquisite Corpse and other games…
- New Books in Technology
Lars de Wildt, "The Pop Theology of Videogames: Producing and Playing with Religion" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)
Young people in the West are more likely to encounter religion in videogames than in places of worship like churches, mosques or temples. Lars de Wildt…
- New Books in Technology
This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture
Internet trolls live to upset as many people as possible, using all the technical and psychological tools at their disposal. They gleefully whip the media into…
- New Books in Technology
Richard Duncan, "The Money Revolution: How to Finance the Next American Century" (John Wiley & Sons, 2022)
In The Money Revolution: How to Finance the Next American Century, economist and bestselling author Richard Duncan lays out a farsighted strategy to maximize…
- New Books in Technology
The Future of Venture Capitalists: A Discussion with Sebastian Mallaby
By providing capital to back the ideas and efforts of others, venture capitalists can make absurd amounts of money. But there is another way of looking at it –…
- New Books in Technology
David A. Banks, "The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America" (U California Press, 2023)
The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America (U California Press, 2023) is the first book to explore how our cities gentrify by becoming…
- New Books in Technology
Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa, "The Celluloid Specimen: Moving Image Research into Animal Life" (U California Press, 2023)
In The Celluloid Specimen: Moving Image Research into Animal Life (U of California Press, 2023), Benjamín Schultz‑Figueroa examines rarely seen behaviorist…
- New Books in Technology
Brett Brehm, "Kaleidophonic Modernity: Transatlantic Sound, Technology, and Literature" (Fordham UP, 2023)
What stories remain hidden behind one of the most significant inventions of the nineteenth century? Kaleidophonic Modernity: Transatlantic Sound, Technology…
- New Books in Technology
Doctor Ex Machina: AI in Medicine and its Pitfalls
Could an artificial intelligence diagnosis what ails you? Medical futurists offer a techno-utopian vision of perfect personalized risk assessments, diagnoses…
- New Books in Technology
Payal Arora et al., "Feminist Futures of Work: Reimagining Labour in the Digital Economy" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)
The future of work is at the centre of debates related to the emerging digital society. Concerns range from the inclusion, equity, and dignity of those at the…
- New Books in Technology
Red Team Blues and the Social Dimensions of Technology
This episode is a first for the Peoples & Things podcast: it features a guest host. It is something you will be seeing more of in the future. Guest host Aaron…
- New Books in Technology
Zhouxiang Lu, "A History of Competitive Gaming" (Routledge, 2022)
Competitive gaming, or esports - referring to competitive tournaments of video games among both casual gamers and professional players - began in the early…
- New Books in Technology
Brendan Keogh, "The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist: Why We Should Think Beyond Commercial Game Production" (MIT Press, 2023)
The videogame industry, we're invariably told, is a multibillion-dollar, high-tech business conducted by large corporations in certain North American…
- New Books in Technology
Drone: Remote Control Warfare
Drone Warfare is the first comprehensive analysis of one of the fastest growing--and most secretive--fronts in global conflict: the rise of robot warfare. In…
- New Books in Technology
Amy Brady, "Ice: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks--a Cool History of a Hot Commodity" (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2023)
Ice is everywhere: in gas stations, in restaurants, in hospitals, in our homes. Americans think nothing of dropping a few ice cubes into tall glasses of tea to…
- New Books in Technology
Jen Ross, "Digital Futures for Learning: Speculative Methods and Pedagogies" (Routledge, 2022)
What is the future of education? In Digital Futures for Learning: Speculative Methods and Pedagogies (Routledge, 2022), Jen Ross, a senior lecturer in digital…
- New Books in Technology
Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell, "The Smartness Mandate" (MIT Press, 2023)
Over the last half century, "smartness"—the drive for ubiquitous computing—has become a mandate: a new mode of managing and governing politics, economics, and…
- New Books in Technology
Elizabeth Reddy, "¡Alerta!: Engineering on Shaky Ground" (MIT Press, 2023)
The Sistema de Alerta Sísmica Mexicano is the world’s oldest public earthquake early warning system. Given the unpredictability of earthquakes, the technology…
- New Books in Technology
Orly Lobel, "The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future" (PublicAffairs, 2022)
The fear of algorithmic decision-making and surveillance capitalism dominate today's tech policy discussions. But instead of simply criticizing big data and…
- New Books in Technology
Lawrence H. White, "Better Money: Gold, Fiat, or Bitcoin?" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
The recent rise of dollar, pound, and euro inflation rates has rekindled the debate over potential alternative monies, particularly gold and Bitcoin. Though…
- New Books in Technology
Kenneth Mondschein, "On Time: A History of Western Timekeeping" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020)
Western culture has been obsessed with regulating society by the precise, accurate measurement of time since the Middle Ages. In On Time: A History of Western…
- New Books in Technology
Amanda Parrish Morgan, "Stroller" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
Among the many things expectant parents are told to buy, none is a more visible symbol of status and parenting philosophy than a stroller. Although its…
- New Books in Technology
Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, "We Have Always Been Cyborgs: Digital Data, Gene Technologies, and an Ethics of Transhumanism" (Bristol UP, 2023)
The concept of transhumanism emerged in the middle of the 20th century, and has influenced discussions around AI, brain–computer interfaces, genetic…
- New Books in Technology
Meredith Broussard, "More than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech" (MIT Press, 2023)
The word "glitch" implies an incidental error, as easy to patch up as it is to identify. But what if racism, sexism, and ableism aren't just bugs in mostly…
New Books in TechnologyAmerica & Democracy Ep. 4: George Zarkadakis on Digital Liberalism
Around the world, liberal democracies are in crisis. Citizens have lost faith in their government; right-wing nationalist movements frame the political debate…
- New Books in Technology
Anne Kaun and Fredrik Stiernstedt, "Prison Media: Incarceration and the Infrastructures of Work and Technology" (MIT Press, 2023)
Prisons are not typically known for cutting-edge media technologies. Yet from photography in the nineteenth century to AI-enhanced tracking cameras today…
- New Books in Technology
Karen Schrier, "We the Gamers: How Games Teach Ethics and Civics" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Ethics and civics have always mattered, but perhaps they matter now more than ever before. Recently, with the rise of online teaching and movements like…
- New Books in Technology
Barbara Penner et al., "Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects" (Reaktion Books, 2021)
So-called extinct objects are those that were imagined but were never in use, or that existed but are now unused—superseded, unfashionable, or simply…
- New Books in Technology
Jason C. Cash and Craig T. Olsen, "The World of Final Fantasy VII: Essays on the Game and Its Legacy" (McFarland, 2023)
Final Fantasy VII altered the course of video game history when it was released in 1997 on Sony's PlayStation system. It converted the Japanese role-playing…
- New Books in Technology
Sarrah Kassem, "Work and Alienation in the Platform Economy: Amazon and the Power of Organization" (Bristol UP, 2023)
How have platforms transforming the world of work? In Work and Alienation in the Platform Economy: Amazon and the Power of Organisation (Bristol UP, 2023)…
- New Books in Technology
Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, "Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity" (PublicAffairs, 2023)
Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity (PublicAffairs, 2023) is a groundbreaking work by bestselling authors Daron…