New Books in Technology

How do young people use digital platforms? In The Kids are Online: Confronting the Myths and Realities of Young Digital Life (U California Press, 2025), Ysabel Gerrard, a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media and Society at the University of Sheffield explores the understandings and experience of young people as they navigate both the online and offline world. Drawing on a range of sociological, digita...

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Jeremy Braddock, Associate Professor of Literatures in English and Coordinator of the Media Studies Initiative at Cornell University, about his book, Firesign: The Electromagnetic History of Everything as Told on Nine Comedy Albums. The book explores themes of media and technology through nine albums made by Firesign Theatre, an experimental, surrealis...

Amid the fanfare around AI and autonomous weapons, decision-makers - both military and political - are imagining an augmented future for warfare that minimises human influence and connection. But in their rush for speed and lethality, leaders have failed to understand the behavioural and technical challenges that accompany these new weapon types, as well as the detail of their operation and the pr...

It’s the UConn Popcast, and we spoke with Duke Law Professor James Boyle about his new book The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood (MIT Press, 2024). We spoke with Boyle about how our legal and moral understandings of personhood are being challenged by advances in AI. We discussed the role of the law, popular culture, tests of sentience, and our capacity for empathy in shaping this urgent debat...

Elena Razlogova is an Associate Professor of History at Concordia University. She is the author of The Listener’s Voice: Early Radio and the American Public (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) and co-editor of “Radical Histories in Digital Culture” issue of the Radical History Review (2013). She has published articles in American Quarterly, Radical History Review, Russian Review, Journal of C...

For many, technology offers hope for the future―that promise of shared human flourishing and liberation that always seems to elude our species. Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies spark this hope in a particular way. They promise a future in which human limits and frailties are finally overcome―not by us, but by our machines. Yet rather than open new futures, today's powerful AI technologies...

It’s the UConn Popcast, and can you fall in love with ChatGPT? Can, and should, you have sex with a robot? We asked Professor Kate Devlin, a leading researcher on intimate relations between humans and artificial intelligences, to help us navigate the new landscape of sex and love with robots. Kate is a Professor of AI & Society in the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London. She’s...

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Today we present the first episode of a miniseries on audiobooks by getting into the history and theory of the medium. Audiobooks are having a moment—and it only took them over a century to get here. Dr. Matthew Rubery, a Harvard PhD and Professor of Modern Literature at Queen Mary University of London, pioneered the study of the audiobook, its history, and its affordances.  Among his other works,...

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Eleni Kalantidou, Assistant Professor at the Queensland College of Art and Design, about the volume of essays, Design/Repair: Place, Practice, and Community (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023), which Eleni co-edited with Abby Mellick Lopes, Alison Gill, Guy Keulemans, and Niklavs Rubenis. The volume examines both the relationship of design practices to repair a...

It’s the UConn Popcast, and we've been experiencing a revolution in the past few years, as artificial intelligence becomes an increasingly common part of everyday life. Powerful AI tools are now integrated into our work, our schools, our creative industries, and our experiences of dating and companionship. This is a disorientating experience, one that changes not only our views of technology, but...

Since their origins in eighteenth-century England, railroads have spread across the globe, changing everything in their path, from where and how people grew and made things to where and how they lived and moved. Railroads rewrote not only world geography but also the history of maps and mapping. Today, the needs of train companies and their users continue to shape the maps we consume and consult....

Digital technologies have changed how we shop, work, play, and communicate, reshaping our societies and economies. To understand digital capitalism, we need to grasp how advances in geospatial technologies underpin the construction, operation, and refinement of markets for digital goods and services.  In The Map in the Machine: Charting the Spatial Architecture of Digital Capitalism (U California...

Surround sound is often mistaken as a relatively new phenomenon in cinemas, one that emerged in the 1970s with the arrival of Dolby. Making Stereo Fit: The History of a Disquieting Film Technology (University of California Press, 2024) reveals that, in fact, filmmakers have been creating stereo and surround-sound effects for nearly a century, since the advent of talking pictures, and argues that t...

Succinct and eloquent, On Privacy and Technology (Oxford UP, 2025) is an essential primer on how to face the threats to privacy in today's age of digital technologies and AI. With the rapid rise of new digital technologies and artificial intelligence, is privacy dead? Can anything be done to save us from a dystopian world without privacy? In this short and accessible book, internationally renowned...

Today we hear two scholars reading their recent work on artificial intelligence. Steph Ceraso studies the technology of “voice donation,” which provides AI-created custom voices for people with vocal disabilities. Hussein Boon contemplates the future of AI in music via some very short and thought-provoking fiction tales. And we start off the show with Mack reflecting on how hard the post-shutdown...

Revolutions in technology are fundamentally transforming what it means to be human. Or are they? As Webb Keane points out, before humans consulted ChatGPT, they propitiated oracles. Before they fell in love with robot boyfriends, they ventured into the forest to marry nature spirits.  In his new book Animals, Robots, Gods: Adventures in the Moral Imagination (Princeton UP, 2025) Keane combines ant...

How epidemic photography during a global pandemic of bubonic plague contributed to the development of modern epidemiology and our concept of the “pandemic.” In Visual Plague: The Emergence of Epidemic Photography (MIT Press, 2022), Christos Lynteris examines the emergence of epidemic photography during the third plague pandemic (1894–1959), a global pandemic of bubonic plague that led to over twel...

My guest today Sam Srauy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, Journalism, and Public Relations at Oakland University, Her research examines race, video games, and the political economy of the video game industry. Srauy’s work appears in various academic journals including Social Media + Society, First Mondays, Games and Culture, and Television and New Media. She teaches co...

As the second Trump administration reshapes the U.S. government and its role in the world, how do technology, media, and political power intersect? In this episode of International Horizons, host John Torpey speaks with Zeynep Tufekci—New York Times columnist, Princeton professor, and author of Twitter and Tear Gas—about the evolving relationship between social media platforms, political movements...

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Aure Schrock, an interdisciplinary technology scholar and writing coach and editor at Indelible Voice, about their book, Politics Recoded: The Infrastructural Organizing of Code for America (MIT Press, 2024) Politics Recoded examines the history and culture of Code for America, an organization that, as one of its leaders put it, aimed “to promote ‘civi...

Machine learning, big data and AI are reshaping the human experience and forcing us to develop a new ethical intelligence. In Buddhism and Intelligent Technology: Toward a More Humane Future (Bloomsbury, 2021), Peter Hershock offers a new way to think about attention, personal presence, and ethics as intelligent technology shatters previously foundational certainties and opens entirely new spaces...

X-rays are powerful. Moving through objects undetected, revealing the body as a tryptic of skin, tissue, and bone. X-rays gave rise to a transparent world and the belief that transparency conveys truth. It stands to reason, then, that our relationship with X-rays would be a complicated one of fear and fascination, acceptance and resistance, confusion and curiosity.  In X-Ray (Bloomsbury, 2024), N...

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, and guest host, Paula Bialski, Associate Professor for Digital Sociology at the University of St. Gallen in St. Gallen, Switzerland, interview Gabriella Coleman, Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University, about her long career studying hacker cultures. Topics include how hacking has changed over time, the different colored “hats” used to describe different...

It’s the UConn Popcast, and when did we really start dreaming about the promise, and the danger, of artificial intelligence? When ChatGPT was released in 2022? When IBMs Deep Blue defeated Chess world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997? When Stanley Kubrick introduced us to HAL 9000 in 1968? Or perhaps you think it was much earlier. Maybe we have had the dream of AI since the development of the first...