New Books in Technology

Jeremy Black's book A History of Artillery (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) traces the development of artillery through the ages, providing a thorough study of these weapons. From its earliest recorded use in battle over a millennium ago, up to the recent Gulf War, Balkan, and Afghanistan conflicts, artillery has often been the deciding factor in battle. Black shows that artillery sits within the gene...

Picture Research: The Work of Intermediation from Pre-Photography to Post-Digitization (MIT Press, 2023) focuses on how pictures were saved, stored, and searched for in a time before scanners, servers, and search engines, and describes the dramatic difference it made when images became scannable, searchable, and distributable via the internet. While the camera, the darkroom, and the printed page a...

When the "sharing economy" launched a decade ago, proponents claimed that it would transform the experience of work--giving earners flexibility, autonomy, and a decent income. It was touted as a cure for social isolation and rampant ecological degradation. But this novel form of work soon sprouted a dark side: exploited Uber drivers, neighborhoods ruined by Airbnb, racial discrimination, and risin...

Hello, world! This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series. In this episode, our host Jing Wang discusses the book The Labor of Reinvention: Entrepreneurship in the New Chinese Digital Economy (Columbia UP, 2023) by Lin Zhang. You’ll hear about: A history of the book and Zhang’s entry into the fieldwork through family stories; How to understand entrepreneurialism as a dominant ideology...

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, published by University of Washington Press in 2022.  Introduced in Phnom Penh around 1990, at the twilight of socialism and after two decades of conflict and upheaval, ultrasound took root in humanitarian and then privatized medicine. Servi...

The Synchronized Society: Time and Control From Broadcasting to the Internet (Rutgers University Press, 2023) by Dr. Randall Patnode traces the history of the synchronous broadcast experience of the twentieth century and the transition to the asynchronous media that dominate today. Broadcasting grew out of the latent desire by nineteenth-century industrialists, political thinkers, and social refor...

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 the University of Maryland. Sauter and Lee Vinsel interview writer Malcolm Harris about his recent book, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World. Palo Alto (Little, Brown, and Company, 2023) is a BIG history of a single...

Behind the lectern stands the professor, deploying course management systems, online quizzes, wireless clickers, PowerPoint slides, podcasts, and plagiarism-detection software. In the seats are the students, armed with smartphones, laptops, tablets, music players, and social networking. Although these two forces seem poised to do battle with each other, they are really both taking part in a war on...

Feature films, television shows, homemade videos, tweets, blogs, and breaking news: digital media offer an always-accessible, apparently inexhaustible supply of entertainment and information. Although choices seems endless, public attention is not. How do digital media find the audiences they need in an era of infinite choice? In The Marketplace of Attention, James Webster explains how audiences t...

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 Cultural Rights, recognizes everyone's right to "share in scientific advancement and its benefits" and to "enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications." This right also requires state parties to develop and disseminate sc...

When "metadata" became breaking news, appearing in stories about surveillance by the National Security Agency, many members of the public encountered this once-obscure term from information science for the first time. Should people be reassured that the NSA was "only" collecting metadata about phone calls--information about the caller, the recipient, the time, the duration, the location--and not r...

Historian Paula de la Cruz-Fernandez talks about her book, Gendered Capitalism: Sewing Machines and Multinational Business in Spain and Mexico, 1850-1940 (Routledge, 2021), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Gendered Capitalism tells the fascinating tale of how the Singer corporation operated in Spain and Mexico. Along the way, Cruz-Fernandez finds that selling sewing machines was not a top-d...

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, throughout the 5000-year history of writing from Sumeria to the smartphone. Its starting point is the contemporary idea of 'the death of the book' implied by the replacement of physical books by digital media, with accompanying twenty-first-century...

California's Silicon Valley is home to the greatest concentration of designers in the world: corporate design offices at flagship technology companies and volunteers at nonprofit NGOs; global design consultancies and boutique studios; research laboratories and academic design programs. Together they form the interconnected network that is Silicon Valley. Apple products are famously “Designed in Ca...

Online comment can be informative or misleading, entertaining or maddening. Haters and manipulators often seem to monopolize the conversation. Some comments are off-topic, or even topic-less. In Reading the Comments, Joseph Reagle urges us to read the comments. Conversations "on the bottom half of the Internet," he argues, can tell us much about human nature and social behavior. Reagle visits comm...

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, Duchamp's obsession with Chess, and Fluxus event scores and boxes--to name just a few examples. Over the past fifteen years, the synthesis of art and games has clouded for both artists and gamemakers. Contemporary art has drawn on the tool set of vi...

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 interviews developers and players of games such as Assassin’s Creed to find out how and why the Pop Theology of Videogames is so appealing to modern audiences. Based on extensive fieldwork, Lars de Wildt's book The Pop Theology of Videogames: Produ...

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 a frenzy over a fake teen drug crisis; they post offensive messages on Facebook memorial pages, traumatizing grief-stricken friends and family; they use unabashedly racist language and images. They take pleasure in ruining a complete strang...

In The Money Revolution: How to Finance the Next American Century, economist and bestselling author Richard Duncan lays out a farsighted strategy to maximize the United States' unmatched financial and technological potential. In compelling fashion, the author shows that the United States can and should invest in the industries and technologies of the future on an unprecedented scale in order to ig...

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 – venture capitalists take huge risks and produce great benefits. Many of the companies we rely on today began with a punt by a venture capitalist. Sebastian Mallaby discusses venture capitalists with Owen Bennett Jones. Mallaby is the author...

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 social media influencers—and why it works. Cities, like the people that live in them, are subject to the attention economy. In The City Authentic, author David A. Banks shows how cities are transforming themselves to appeal to modern desires...

In The Celluloid Specimen: Moving Image Research into Animal Life (U of California Press, 2023), Benjamín Schultz‑Figueroa examines rarely seen behaviorist films of animal experiments from the 1930s and 1940s. These laboratory recordings—including Robert Yerkes's work with North American primate colonies, Yale University's rat‑based simulations of human society, and B. F. Skinner's promotions for...

What stories remain hidden behind one of the most significant inventions of the nineteenth century? Kaleidophonic Modernity: Transatlantic Sound, Technology, and Literature (Fordham University Press, 2023) reexamines the development of mechanical sound recording technology by charting the orbits of writers, scientists, and artists in France and the United States. Working between comparative litera...

Could an artificial intelligence diagnosis what ails you? Medical futurists offer a techno-utopian vision of perfect personalized risk assessments, diagnoses, and treatment recommendations. Yet, recent stories belie this optimism. Many of these robot doctors are rather stupid, and they seem more interesting in cutting costs than providing care. Medical AIs are largely unregulated and unverified, a...

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 far end of the value chain, who participate on and off platforms, often in the shadows, invisible to policymakers, designers, and consumers. Precarity and informality characterize this largely female workforce, across sectors ranging from ar...