My own experience on Facebook piqued my interest in digital photography and social media. My emotional response to what I saw there ran the gamut from super anxious or angry to happy and even optimistic. As a scholar of religion with some expertise in traditional media and photography, I wanted to know why and how so I could respond better. I turned to experts in these new technologies – particularly those who write good books aimed at curious people, not just their peers! – for help. I learned a lot from these books and I’m confident you will, too!
I wrote
Seeing and Believing: Religion, Digital Visual Culture, and Social Justice
The title of Turkle’s book aptly describes our social reality these days, I think.
Even when we’re with others, we’re often focused on our own screens, not the other people in the room. Being alone together is impacting our ability to truly be there for each other. She helped me see how important it is to find ways to maximize technology’s benefits while minimizing its downsides – and prompted me to begin to imagine how to do my part.
Technology has become the architect of our intimacies. Online, we fall prey to the illusion of companionship, gathering thousands of Twitter and Facebook friends, and confusing tweets and wall posts with authentic communication. But this relentless connection leads to a new solitude. We turn to new technology to fill the void, but as MIT technology and society specialist Sherry Turkle argues, as technology ramps up, our emotional lives ramp down. Even the presence of sociable robots in our lives that pretend to demonstrate empathy makes us feel more isolated, as Turkle explains in a new introduction updating the book to…
Depending on the day, I’m either encouraged or terrified by social media’s effect on our social and political lives.
This book does a fantastic job of illuminating social media’s positive import – and its limits – for social and political organizing. An activist, social organizer, and sociologist, Tufecki draws on both her personal experience and her academic expertise to produce a compelling and insightful narrative.
The examples that ground it, the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, may have been supplanted in our memories with other movements and events, but they’re worth revisiting and the insights Tufecki shares definitely translate.
From New York Times opinion columnist Zeynep Tufekci, an firsthand account and incisive analysis of the role of social media in modern protest
"[Tufekci's] personal experience in the squares and streets, melded with her scholarly insights on technology and communication platforms, makes [this] such an unusual and illuminating work."-Carlos Lozada, Washington Post
"Twitter and Tear Gas is packed with evidence on how social media has changed social movements, based on rigorous research and placed in historical context."-Hannah Kuchler, Financial Times
To understand a thwarted Turkish coup, an anti-Wall Street encampment, and a packed Tahrir Square, we must first comprehend the…
Insta’s not the only platform that’s full of photos and videos. Facebook is, too – most of them taken on and posted from someone’s cell phone.
Photography’s role in our private, public, and political lives has dramatically changed thanks to the cell phone camera and social media. Jurgenson helped me think through the impact of what he calls “the social photo” on us and on our world in a super accessible way.
With the rise of the smart phone and social media, cameras have become ubiquitous, infiltrating nearly every aspect of social life. The glowing camera screen is the lens by which many of us apprehend and communicate our experience. But our thinking about photography has been slow to catch-up; this major fixture of everyday life is still often treated in the terms of art or journalism.
In The Social Photo, social theorist Nathan Jurgenson develops bold new ways of understanding the transformations wrought by these image-making and sharing technologies and the cultural objects they have ushered in: the selfie, the faux-vintage…
I rarely think about why I see what I see online. Yes, I know algorithms had something to do with it, but they’re just algebra on steroids, right? Well, not so fast!
This book opened my eyes to how and why bias – in this case, racial bias – shows up online and what we can do about it. I learned a lot about the intricate connections between our online lives and our real ones.
A revealing look at how negative biases against women of color are embedded in search engine results and algorithms
Run a Google search for "black girls"-what will you find? "Big Booty" and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms. But, if you type in "white girls," the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and un-moderated discussions about "why black women are so sassy" or "why black women are so angry" presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society.
In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search…
Social media platforms connect us to each other with unprecedented global reach. They function as our new public square, but they are owned and managed by private multinational corporations!
Those corporations make money by tracking what gets our attention – and feeding us more of that! Zuboff’s book will open your eyes to the effects of this new economic engine and how it works – on us, if not always for us.
'Everyone needs to read this book as an act of digital self-defense.' -- Naomi Klein, Author of No Logo, the Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything and No is Not Enough
The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control us.
The heady optimism of the Internet's early days is gone. Technologies that were meant to liberate us have deepened inequality and stoked divisions. Tech companies gather our information online and sell…
Can we believe what we see on social media? I lay out the challenges—technological and ethical—that our visually saturated “new public square” raises for us, especially in this divisive time. I conclude by offering suggestions for how we might turn those challenges into opportunities to see and be differently – and better.
Every picture tells a story, but it’s not always the one we expect or remember. Christmas Actually is a festive drama about family and forgiveness and a snapshot of modern family life, addressing Instagram to motherhood and everything in between.
Why Christmas? My publisher wanted my new novel to have a festive theme, specifically set in Australia–sun, surf, sunburn, and prawns. Christmas in Australia is very different from Christmas in the UK, USA, and Canada. We typically wear shorts and t-shirts, eat salad and seafood for Christmas lunch, and play beach cricket in the afternoon. Despite the season, conflicts, secrets,…
Time spent with family can be challenging, especially at Christmas actually…
Kate Cavendish is stuck in a rut. That is until a former colleague contacts her and offers her a chance to fulfil her lifelong dream of becoming a successful photographer.
With her focus pulled in all directions by her children, her pregnant sister, her newly-dating mother, and the niggling worry that her husband might be having an affair, Kate is filled with self-doubt.
Then as the countdown to Christmas begins, and memories of her own childhood resurface, Kate’s anxiety deepens – both personally and professionally. Can she move on…
