New Books in Technology

In Radiant Infrastructures: Media, Environment, and Cultures of Uncertainty (Duke UP, 2020), Rahul Mukherjee explores how the media coverage of nuclear power plants and cellular phone antennas in India—what he calls radiant infrastructures—creates environmental publics: groups of activists, scientists, and policy makers who use media to influence public opinion. In documentaries, lifestyle televis...

Death and the dead body have never been more alive in the public imagination--not least because of current debates over modern medical technology that is deployed, it seems, expressly to keep human bodies from dying, blurring the boundary between alive and dead. In Technologies of the Human Corpse (MIT Press, 2020), John Troyer examines the relationship of the dead body with technology, both mater...

This book sounds an alarm: after decades of being lulled into complacency by narratives of technological utopianism and neutrality, people are waking up to the large-scale consequences of Silicon Valley–led technophilia. This book trains a spotlight on the inequality, marginalization, and biases in our technological systems, showing how they are not just minor bugs to be patched, but part and parc...

We are now living in the richest age of public memory. From museums and memorials to the vast digital infrastructure of the internet, access to the past is only a click away. Even so, the methods and technologies created by scientists, espionage agencies, and information management coders and programmers have drastically delimited the ways that communities across the globe remember and forget our...

Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India (Institute of Networked Cultures, 2020) maps the historical and emergent dynamics of big data, computing, and society in India. Data infrastructures are now more global than ever before. In much of the world, new sociotechnical possibilities of big data and artificial intelligence are unfolding under the long shadows cast by infra/structur...

Design and Spirituality: A Philosophy of Material Cultures (Routledge, 2021) examines the philosophical context of our current situation and its implications for design. It explores how modernity and our constricted notions of progress have contributed to today’s crisis of values, and argues for a re-establishment and re-affirmation of self-transcending priorities, together with an ethos of modera...

Javier Guerrero's "Narcosubmarines: Outlaw Innovation and Maritime Interdiction in the War on Drugs" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020) is about the encounters of Colombian drug smugglers and the Colombian Navy, both in the open seas and along coastlines. Guerrero specifically examines the technologies involved in the War on Drugs, such as the narcosubmarines and patrol boats, the knowledge required to tr...

Today I talked to Carla Diana about her new book My Robot Gets Me: How Social Design Can Make New Products More Human (Harvard Business Review Press, 2021). Carla Diana is a robot designer responsible for the creative aspects of Diligent Robotics’ new hospital service robot named Moxi. She created and leads the 4D Design masters program at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, wrote the world’s first chil...

In this interview, I talked with Professor Sonia Livingstone about her book Parenting for a Digital Future: How Hopes and Fears about Technology Shape Children’s Lives (Oxford UP, 2020). The book is co-authored with Alicia Blum-Ross who is the Public Policy Lead for Kids & Families at Google. Professor Livingstone is a professor in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of...

In the first half of the twentieth century, urban elevated highways were much more than utilitarian infrastructure, lifting traffic above the streets; they were statements of civic pride, asserting boldly modern visions for a city’s architecture, economy, and transportation network. Yet three of the most ambitious projects, launched in Chicago, New York, and Boston in the spirit of utopian models...

Completed in 1938, the Trans-Iranian Railway connected Tehran to Iran's two major bodies of water: the Caspian Sea in the north and the Persian Gulf in the south. Iran's first national railway, it produced and disrupted various kinds of movement—voluntary and forced, intended and unintended, on different scales and in different directions—among Iranian diplomats, tribesmen, migrant laborers, techn...

The figure of the human looms large of the history of philosophy, from the ancient Greeks speculating about featherless bipeds to contemporary programmers wondering if they can recreate human intelligence with a series of algorithms. Much philosophical thought in the last few decades has involved much speculation about the human subject, even if it was often hostile to the idea that there is such...

The American atomic bomb was born in secrecy. From the moment scientists first conceived of its possibility to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and beyond, there were efforts to control the spread of nuclear information and the newly discovered scientific facts that made such powerful weapons possible. The totalizing scientific secrecy that the atomic bomb appeared to demand was new, unusual...

What are digital inequalities? In The Digital Disconnect: The Social Causes and Consequences of Digital Inequalities (Sage, 2021), Ellen Helsper, a Professor of Digital Inequalities in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics, explores the unequal nature of our now digital world. The book introduces the corresponding fields theoretical framework, as a way of ble...

The word ‘data’ has entered everyday conversation, but do we really understand what it means? How can we begin to grasp the scope and scale of our new data-rich world, and can we truly comprehend what is at stake. In Data Lives: How Data Are Made and Shape Our World (Policy Press, 2021), renowned social scientist Rob Kitchin explores the intricacies of data creation and charts how data-driven tech...

Social media has become the front-and-center arena for feminist activism. Responding to and enacting the political potential of pain inflicted in acts of sexual harassment, violence, and abuse, Asian American and Asian Canadian feminist icons such as rupi kaur, Margaret Cho, and Mia Matsumiya have turned to social media to share their stories with the world. But how does such activism reconcile wi...

The “smart” city of today looks little like what experts of yesteryear expected them to. In this book, Aaron Shapiro, Ph. D. takes readers on a behind the scenes tour of the smart city and shows the revolution in urban technology that is currently taking place in large metropolitan areas around the United States. Technology has fundamentally transformed urban life. Throughout Design, Control, Pred...

How has social media shaped contemporary society? In The Social Media Age (Sage, 2021), Zoetanya Sujon, a Senior Lecturer and Programme Director in Communications and Media at London College of Communication, analyses social media, from pre-history through to our more contemporary critical turn. The book considers a wide range of issues and perspectives, from platforms and power, through data and...

Where racism and sexism meet—an understanding of anti-Black misogyny. When Moya Bailey first coined the term misogynoir, she defined it as the ways anti-Black and misogynistic representation shape broader ideas about Black women, particularly in visual culture and digital spaces. She had no idea that the term would go viral, touching a cultural nerve and quickly entering into the lexicon. Misogyno...

Providing one of the first comprehensive, cross-cultural examinations of the dynamic market for sexual services, this book presents an evidence-based look at the multiple factors related to purchasing patterns and demand among clients who have used the internet. The data is drawn from two large surveys of sex workers' clients in the US and UK. The book presents descriptive baseline data on client...

Tetyana Lokot's new book Beyond the Protest Square: Digital Media and Augmented Dissent (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021) examines how citizens use digital social media to engage in public discontent and offers a critical examination of the hybrid reality of protest where bodies, spaces and technologies resonate. It argues that the augmented reality of protest goes beyond the bodies, the tents, and the...

Hello Everyone, and welcome to New Books in Gender and Sexuality, a channel on the New Books Network. I’m your host, Jana Byars, and I’m here today with Pallavi Guha, assistant professor in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Towson, MD, to talk to her about her new book, Hear #MeToo in India: News, Social Media, and Anti-Rape and Sexual Harassment Activism, out this year,...

As Twitter enters its own adolescence, both the users and the creators of this famous social media platform find themselves engaging with a tool that certainly could not have been imagined at its inception. In their engaging book Twitter: A Biography (NYU Press, 2020), Jean Burgess and Nancy K. Baym (@nancybaym) tell the fascinating and surprising story of how this platform developed from a quirky...

What is the impact of surveillance capitalism on our right to free speech? The Internet once promised to be a place of extraordinary freedom beyond the control of money or politics, but today corporations and platforms exercise more control over our ability to access information and share knowledge to a greater extent than any state. From the online calls to arms in the thick of the Arab Spring to...

Why do we keep trying to solve poverty with technology? What makes us feel that we need to learn to code--or else? In The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope (MIT Press, 2021), Daniel Greene argues that the problem of poverty became a problem of technology in order to manage the contradictions of a changing economy. Greene shows how the digital divide emerg...