Here are 32 books that Digitizing the News fans have personally recommended if you like
Digitizing the News.
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I’ve been fascinated by the news media and technology for as long as I can remember. I successfully campaigned for a VCR as a five-year-old, and watched multiple news programs with my grandfather growing up. Alongside these interests, I managed to read as many books as I possibly could. I’ve managed to somehow parlay that into a job as a researcher, where I study the news media sector and technological transformation. I read everything on this list while I was writing my latest book, and hope you enjoy them as much as I did!
Philip Napoli is a leading media policy expert and was one of the first people to identify some of the problems that emerge when news gets distributed online through social media algorithms.
I love this book because it provides a great narrative of how we got to this point, but also some fantastic suggestions for how policymakers can respond. It’s quite readable for an academic book, and worth checking out.
Facebook, a platform created by undergraduates in a Harvard dorm room, has transformed the ways millions of people consume news, understand the world, and participate in the political process. Despite taking on many of journalism's traditional roles, Facebook and other platforms, such as Twitter and Google, have presented themselves as tech companies-and therefore not subject to the same regulations and ethical codes as conventional media organizations. Challenging such superficial distinctions, Philip M. Napoli offers a timely and persuasive case for understanding and governing social media as news media, with a fundamental obligation to serve the public interest.
I’ve been fascinated by the news media and technology for as long as I can remember. I successfully campaigned for a VCR as a five-year-old, and watched multiple news programs with my grandfather growing up. Alongside these interests, I managed to read as many books as I possibly could. I’ve managed to somehow parlay that into a job as a researcher, where I study the news media sector and technological transformation. I read everything on this list while I was writing my latest book, and hope you enjoy them as much as I did!
My favourite thing about Terry Flew is while he covers contemporary issues, he always accounts for the long-term historical developments that got us to this point.
His latest book, Regulating Platforms, stands as a perfect example of this approach. The book explores why governments are so desperate to regulate platforms right now and considers how this differs from previous historical approaches to regulating technology and the internet.
If you want to understand some of the broader regulatory trends surrounding news and technology, this book is a must read.
We once thought of cyberspace as a borderless world. As the internet has become increasingly platformized, with a small number of technology giants that dominate the global digital economy, concerns about information monopolies, hateful online content, and the impact on media content creators and creative industries have become more marked. Consequently governments, politicians, and civil society are questioning how digital platforms can or should be regulated.
In this up-to-the-minute study, Terry Flew engages with important questions surrounding platform regulation. Starting from the premise that governance is an inherent feature of digital platforms, he argues that the challenge is to develop…
I’ve been fascinated by the news media and technology for as long as I can remember. I successfully campaigned for a VCR as a five-year-old, and watched multiple news programs with my grandfather growing up. Alongside these interests, I managed to read as many books as I possibly could. I’ve managed to somehow parlay that into a job as a researcher, where I study the news media sector and technological transformation. I read everything on this list while I was writing my latest book, and hope you enjoy them as much as I did!
Many of the concerns around news and technology, center around how the distribution of news through social media impacts the news business.
However, we can only understand how these two sectors interact by understanding platform economics. Thankfully, Robin Mansell and W. Edward Steinmueller have written a simple and concise introduction to a complicated topic. A great way to quickly deepen your understanding of an important issue.
Elgar Advanced Introductions are stimulating and thoughtful introductions to major fields in the social sciences and law, expertly written by the world's leading scholars. Designed to be accessible yet rigorous, they offer concise and lucid surveys of the substantive and policy issues associated with discrete subject areas.
This cutting edge book introduces the origins and consequences of digital platforms, examining how artificial intelligence-enabled digital platforms collect and process data from and about users by providing social media and e-commerce services. Robin Mansell and W. Edward Steinmueller compare and contrast neoclassical, institutional and critical political economy approaches. They show how uneven…
I’ve been fascinated by the news media and technology for as long as I can remember. I successfully campaigned for a VCR as a five-year-old, and watched multiple news programs with my grandfather growing up. Alongside these interests, I managed to read as many books as I possibly could. I’ve managed to somehow parlay that into a job as a researcher, where I study the news media sector and technological transformation. I read everything on this list while I was writing my latest book, and hope you enjoy them as much as I did!
I had the privilege of talking with Angèle at an event and discussing our different book projects.
The wonderful thing about this book it is reveals that the interaction between technology and journalism is incredibly culturally specific. We tend to think that every newsroom engages with technology in the same way, but Angèle shows that long-standing national journalistic cultures influence how technologies are adopted and used.
The book is also an ethnography, which means that it offers a wonderful insight into the day-to-day practices of the newsroom.
The starkly different ways that American and French online news companies respond to audience analytics and what this means for the future of news
When the news moved online, journalists suddenly learned what their audiences actually liked, through algorithmic technologies that scrutinize web traffic and activity. Has this advent of audience metrics changed journalists' work practices and professional identities? In Metrics at Work, Angele Christin documents the ways that journalists grapple with audience data in the form of clicks, and analyzes how new forms of clickbait journalism travel across national borders.
Drawing on four years of fieldwork in web newsrooms…
I love words, their sound, and their power. When I was a little girl, I would adopt one and make it my own. My parents long recalled my love affair with “nonsense,” which I would wield like a wand when hearing anything silly or irrational. I think words are interwoven with what we feel in a deep and inextricable way. I am also fascinated with how Indian thought offers millennia of wide and deep explorations of human experience in ways that trouble the basic assumptions of the modern West.
Though I am not an anthropologist, I devour ethnographies with a gusto that can only be attributed to disciplinary envy. There are several fascinating ethnographies of emotions and how they differ across cultures. Beatty’s book stands out among them for its rich ethnographic description as well as the sophistication with which he treats the relationship of emotion and culture.
He spots the limitations that lab experiments impose on studying emotions and suggests instead that we have to pay attention to the narratives in which emotions are situated, made, and deemed meaningful. And I rather like how he punctures “affect theory.”
Are emotions human universals? Is the concept of emotion an invention of Western tradition? If people in other cultures live radically different emotional lives how can we ever understand them? Using vivid, often dramatic, examples from around the world, and in dialogue with current work in psychology and philosophy, Andrew Beatty develops an anthropological perspective on the affective life, showing how emotions colour experience and transform situations; how, in turn, they are shaped by culture and history. In stark contrast with accounts that depend on lab simulations, interviews, and documentary reconstruction, he takes the reader into unfamiliar cultural worlds through…
I grew up playing video games from a classic Atari onward. And, if I could go back and tell my younger self his job would be to travel around the world talking, writing, and teaching about video games he never would have believed me. But, if he did, he’d be really excited about what was coming for him. I am consistently both shocked and thrilled that I get to do this as a job, and my favorite bit is often the teaching and communicating about games. It’s a blast!
This is one of the foundational books in game studies and will shake up how you think about why and how people play games.
Consalvo introduces a concept called ‘avatar capital,’ which is about the reputation and relative fame players can chase within a game and its community. To acquire that capital, players often remake rules and expectations to excel.
A cultural history of digital gameplay that investigates a wide range of player behavior, including cheating, and its relationship to the game industry.
The widely varying experiences of players of digital games challenge the notions that there is only one correct way to play a game. Some players routinely use cheat codes, consult strategy guides, or buy and sell in-game accounts, while others consider any or all of these practices off limits. Meanwhile, the game industry works to constrain certain readings or activities and promote certain ways of playing. In Cheating, Mia Consalvo investigates how players choose to play games,…
I have been fascinated by the weather since as a schoolboy I avidly followed the cricket scores and the fate of tomorrow’s match. This co-dependence of my passion for cricket with the state of the weather turned into a professional career as, first, a research scientist and then later a professor of geography, I studied the idea of climate and the many ways in which it intersects with our social, ecological and imaginative worlds. As human-caused climate change became a defining public and political issue for the new century, my interests increasingly focused on understanding why people think so differently about the climate, its changes, its future trajectory—and what to do about it.
Too often, climate change debates reduce to throwing around scientific facts – how much warming, how soon will it happen, how many people will it affect, and so on. Candis Callison recognises that such arguments don’t get us very far when deciding what to do. There are different types of facts. In this book she shows why the facts about climate change that really matter in different human worlds – in corporations, in religious groups, amongst journalists, in village communities – are social facts; these are shared ‘facts’ about what climate change means to different social formations. And it is through these diverse communal facts that climate change comes to matter.
During the past decade, skepticism about climate change has frustrated those seeking to engage broad publics and motivate them to take action on the issue. In this innovative ethnography, Candis Callison examines the initiatives of social and professional groups as they encourage diverse American publics to care about climate change. She explores the efforts of science journalists, scientists who have become expert voices for and about climate change, American evangelicals, Indigenous leaders, and advocates for corporate social responsibility.
The disparate efforts of these groups illuminate the challenge of maintaining fidelity to scientific facts while transforming them into ethical and moral…
I grew up in Valladolid, a semi-rural city of Yucatan. My parents loved the history and archaeology of the Yucatan peninsula, which not long ago was a single cultural and linguistic entity. I grew up dreaming of becoming an archaeologist. With time, I became fascinated with people and sociality within and beyond Yucatan, so I became an anthropologist. I trained as an anthropologist in Mexico and Canada, and have done research in Canada, Italy, Mexico, and Spain. I live and work in Yucatan, as a professor of anthropology. Good ethnographies are what anthropology is about, and those I write about here are some of the best.
I read this book when I was a teenager growing up in Yucatan.
Stephens’ description of both the everyday life of Yucatecans in local villages and cities, and of the imposing ruins left by the Maya are enchanting. Catherwood’s drawings and plates are both accurate and dream-like representations of Yucatecan life, Maya ruins and artifacts at the time.
The book left vivid pictures in my mind; I could and still can see across Yucatan the traces of what Stephens described and Catherwood caught with his drawings and plates.
This book has resisted the passage of time as a story of travel and discovery. As a tale of adventure and wonderment, it was and remains a brilliant prelude to the ethnography of the area.
Both volumes of John Lloyd Stephens epic accounts of the Yucatan are united in this single volume, complete with over 100 illustrations of encounters on his journeys in Central America.
Prior to the 1840s, when J. L. Stephens published this superb account of his explorations, the Yucatan was only crudely charted by Western explorers. Yet their descriptions of the odd ruins and beautiful landscape intrigued the young John Lloyd Stephens, who spent years yearning to explore and better chart the faraway lands. After a number of years spent traversing Europe and Egypt, Stephens was in 1839 commissioned as a Special…
My interest in bureaucratic power and its pervasive control grew out of my social and feminist activity no less than from my critical thinking about State institutions. Combining field research as a social anthropologist with my activism exposed me to the harmful implications of bureaucratic power. I delved into social and gender power relations in contexts like absorption centers with immigrants from Ethiopia, women's empowerment projects in "developing" countries, threatened motherhood in the welfare state, and others. My personal experience as an involved participant enabled me to better understand the ethnocentric and exploiting nature of international development projects, of Israeli "absorbing" agencies, and of child care policies.
This book served me greatly in teaching courses on education and social stratification in Israel.
Its ethnography is fascinating and although it was published some 55 years ago its insights are still compelling and relevant. The book exposes the veiled bureaucratic interests which pull the strings behind the curtains of the educational system rather than ideals of justice and equity.
This critical analysis influenced my understanding with regard to the emergence of discrimination and racism that were the outcomes of concentrating Ethiopian children in separate classes for a long time.
Born and raised in Mississippi, I have long been fascinated with the natural history of the South and of the Americas in general. And as an outdoorsy guy, a NOLS graudate, mountain-biker, trail-runner, and paddler, I revel in reading accounts of the early days of Western exploration in the woodlands, mountains, and coastal regions of our hemisphere. Finally, as an avid reader and now author, I constantly seek out enthralling and wide-ranging narratives about exploration, outdoor adventure, and the natural world.
William Bartram is the first great Native American naturalist.
His Travels recount his journeys through the American Southeast between 1773 and 1776, and contain unparalleled descriptions of the flora and fauna of the region, as well as his ethnographic studies of Native Americans there. The Library of America edition is top-notch.
Artist, writer, botanist, gardener, naturalist, intrepid wilderness explorer, and self-styled “philosophical pilgrim,” William Bartram was an extraordinary figure in eighteenth-century American life. The first American to devote himself to what we would now call the environment, Bartram was the most significant American writer before Thoreau and a nature artist who rivals Audubon. He was also a pioneering ethnographer whose works are a crucial source for the study of the Indian cultures of southeastern America. The Library of America presents the first collection of his writings and the largest gathering of his remarkable drawings ever published.
