New Books in Technology

In Hacking Diversity: The Politics of inclusion in Open Technology Cultures (Princeton University Press, 2020), Christina-Dunbar Hester, an associate professor in the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, explores the world of open technology – communities centered on knowledge sharing. In particular, she investigates how these communities are considering the question of diversity...

To the average landlubber, the merchant ships that crossed the Atlantic Ocean in 1800 seem little different from their counterparts two centuries beforehand. By detailing how these ships were built and operated, though, Philip Reid shows in his book The Merchant Ship in the British Atlantic, 1600-1800 (Brill, 2020), how these vessels underwent considerable adaptation over the course of the 17th an...

Remember when Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) were going to shake higher education to its foundations by giving courses from the world’s most prestigious colleges and universities away free to the world? Today’s guest, Jeffrey Young – Senior Editor at the online educational publication EdSurge and host of the Edsurge podcast – talks about his time on the front lines of MOOCs and other technolo...

When we talk about technology we always talk about the future—which makes it hard to figure out how to get there. In Future Histories: What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine, and the Paris Commune Can Teach Us about Digital Technology (Verso), Lizzie O’Shea argues that we need to stop looking forward and start looking backwards. Weaving together histories of computing and social movements with modern theori...

With the burst of new technologies in the 1870s, many inventors and visionaries believed that the transmission of moving images was just around the corner. As Doron Galili details in his book Seeing by Electricity: The Emergence of Television, 1878-1939 (Duke University Press, 2020), the half-century of speculations that followed did much to shape the development of broadcast television well befor...

In this interview, I talk to Dr. Ainissa Ramirez about her new book, The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another (MIT Press, 2020) Dr. Ramirez examines eight inventions―clocks, steel rails, copper communication cables, photographic film, light bulbs, hard disks, scientific labware, and silicon chips―and reveals how they shaped the human experience. These fascinating and inspir...

What is the culture of the tech industry? In The Culture of Women in Tech: An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (Emerald, 2019), Mariann Hardey, an Associate Professor in Marketing at Durham University, shows the ongoing inequalities faced by women in the IT industry. The book uses a range of case studies from across the world’s ‘tech cities’, drawing on interviews, focus groups, ethnography, and a femin...

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-s...

Nick Prior—Professor of Cultural Sociology at the University of Edinburgh—discusses his new book, Popular Music, Digital Technology and Society (SAGE Publications, 2018). The book explores the social, cultural and industrial contexts for the changes that have taken place in popular music since the widespread adoption of digital technology by creators, distributors, and listeners from the early 198...

How does technology shape music? In Digital Sampling: The Design and Use of Music Technologies (Routledge, 2019), Paul Harkins, a lecturer in music at Edinburgh Napier University, looks at the relationship between the rise of digital sampling, technology, and music. The book draws inspiration from Science and Technology Studies to explore the impact of specific technologies, such as the Fairlight...

Technology has been instrumental in allowing audiences to encounter expressions of culture to which they may have no direct connection. The popular commercial platforms like Twitter and Instagram mediate culture, the affordances of each determining how aspects of culture translate on the sites. In his new book, Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (NYU Press, 2020), Andre Brock, a...

Cars are among our most ubiquitous technologies; one could say that the cultural lore of the postwar United States is written in tire marks. But as much as they have been a vehicle for liberation and expression, historian Lee Vinsel argues that automobiles have been shaped by government regulation through and through. In Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States...

The ubiquity of technology that collects massive volumes of all kinds of data lends itself to one overarching question: “What?” As in what is the purpose(s) of this collection? What are the benefits? And, what are the impacts? In his new book, Too Smart: How Digital Capitalism is Extracting Data, Controlling Our Lives, and Taking Over the World (MIT Press, 2020), Jathan Sadowski explores this ques...

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administr...

Everything we know about how planets form and how life arises suggests that human civilization on Earth should not be unique. We ought to see abundant evidence of extraterrestrial activity―but we don't. Where is everybody? In Extraterrestrials (MIT Press, 2020), science and technology writer Wade Roush examines one of the great unsolved problems in science: is there life, intelligent or otherwise,...

In Sonic Writing: Technologies of Material, Symbolic, and Signal Inscriptions (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), Thor Magnusson—musician, Professor of Future Music, and member of the Experimental Music Technologies Lab at the University of Sussex—provides a sweeping overview of the tools and techniques of music-making both before and after the dawn of computing as well a set of forward-looking strategie...

Weaving together intellectual, social, cultural, and material histories, Theodora Varbouli and Olga Touloumi's book Computer Architectures: Constructing the Common Ground (Routledge, 2019) paints the landscape that brought computing into the imagination, production, and management of the built environment, whilst foregrounding the impact of architecture in shaping technological development. The bo...

Arthur Asseraf’s Electric News in Colonial Algeria (Oxford University Press, 2019) examines the workings of the “news ecosystem” in Algeria from the 1880s to the beginning of the Second World War. The study of a society divided between a dominant (European) settler minority and an Algerian Muslim majority, the book tracks the development and impact of new information technologies—the printing pres...

Hot Molecules, Cold Electrons: From the Mathematics of Heat to the Development of the Trans-Atlantic Telegraph Cable (Princeton University Press, 2020), by Paul Nahin, is a book that is meant for someone who is comfortable with calculus, but for those readers who are, it is a treat. It is a thorough study of the history and mathematics of the heat equation, which is not only important as an analys...

Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight...

The rise of digital technology is transforming the world in which we live. Our digitalized societies demand new ways of thinking about the social, and this short book introduces readers to an approach that can deliver this: digital sociology. In What is Digital Sociology (Polity, 2019), Neil Selwyn examines the concepts, tools and practices that sociologists are developing to analyze the intersect...

In this episode I talk Stefan Lorenz Sorgner. Stefan teaches philosophy at John Cabot University in Rome. He is director and co-founder of the Beyond Humanism Network, Fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET), Research Fellow at the Ewha Institute for the Humanities at Ewha Woman's University in Seoul, and Visiting Fellow at the Ethics Centre of the Friedrich-Schiller-Un...

In his new book Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Jacob Turner explains why AI is unique, what legal and ethical problems it could cause, and how we can address them. It argues that AI is unlike is any other previous technology, owing to its ability to take decisions independently and unpredictably. This gives rise to three issues: responsibility―who is li...

The idea of the seductive sex robot is the stuff of myth, legend and science fiction. From the ancient Greeks to twenty-first century movies, robots in human form have captured our imagination, our hopes and our fears. But beyond the fantasies there are real and fundamental questions about our relationship with technology as it moves into the realm of robotics. Artificial intelligence raises very...

The increased datafication our interactions and permeation of data science into more aspects of our lives requires analysis of the systems of power surrounding and undergirding data. The impacts of the creation, use, collection, and aggregation of data are such that individuals from various communities face disparate, negative impacts. In their new book, Data Feminism (MIT Press, Catherine D’Ignaz...