Showing titles in Media Studies

Streaming video games is now a billion-dollar industry. In 2022, Twitch alone had over 140 million active monthly users, with top players earning millions each year. But success breeds envy, and when big money's being made, everyone wants a piece.

Conspiracy theories pop up surrounding every major national and global event-some are possible, some are not. TikTok influencer and psychology professor Casey Lytle will teach you how to be an intelligent consumer of 'alternative' theories. Lytle's trademark 'project management approach' will help you discern possible from impossible in the popular and controversial theories surrounding 10 national and global events.

"Lisa Flanagan narrates journalist Margaret Sullivan's memoir/manifesto authoritatively....and gives this important audiobook the seriousness it merits." - AudioFile Magazine Prologue read by the author Over her four decades of working in newsrooms big and small, Margaret Sullivan has become a...

As World War II approached, the six most powerful media moguls in America and Britain tried to pressure their countries to ignore the fascist threat. The media empires of Robert McCormick, Joseph and Eleanor Patterson, and William Randolph Hearst spanned the United States, reaching tens of millions of Americans in print and over the airwaves with their isolationist views.

Napoleon famously observed that "history is a set of lies agreed upon", and Edward Steers Jr. investigates six of the most amazing frauds ever to gain wide acceptance in this engrossing book. The controversies that Steers presents show that there are two major factors involved in the success of a hoax or forgery - greed and the desire to believe.

In Hunting Girls, Kelly Oliver examines popular culture's fixation on representing young women as predators and prey and the implication that violence - especially sexual violence - is an inevitable, perhaps even celebrated, part of a woman's maturity. In such films as Kick-Ass (2010), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), and Maleficent (2014), power, control, and danger drive the story, but traditional relationships of care constrict the narrative. Even the protagonist's love interest adds to her suffering.

Social media on the internet can be a nightmarish place. A primary shield against hateful language, violent videos, and online cruelty uploaded by users is not an algorithm. It is people. Mostly invisible by design, more than 100,000 commercial content moderators evaluate posts on mainstream social media platforms: enforcing internal policies, training artificial intelligence systems, and actively screening and removing offensive material. Roberts, an award-winning social media scholar, offers the first extensive ethnographic study of the commercial content moderation industry.

The Illuminati dominates any discussion of secret societies. Search the web, spark up a conversation, or search through a library shelf, and soon enough you will encounter their name. They have become an ancient order and a modern sensation at the same time. At once a ubiquitous herald of the new world order and the people who market pop albums, trying to discern the truth about the organization can get lost amid the hail of noise that inevitably follows any mention of their name.

The New Hate takes listeners on a surprising, often shocking, sometimes bizarrely amusing tour through the swamps of nativism, racism, and paranoia that have long thrived on the American fringe. Arthur Goldwag shows us the parallels between the hysteria about the Illuminati that wracked the new American Republic in the 1790s and the McCarthyism that roiled the 1950s, and he discusses the similarities between the anti-New Deal forces of the 1930s and the Tea Party movement today.

Hewlett Packard is an American icon, the largest information technology company in the world. The bedrock of Silicon Valley, it employs more than 300,000 people, its market capitalization is in excess of $100 billion, and its products are in almost every home in the country where there is a printer or computer. But the story of Hewlett-Packard reflects power struggles that shape corporate America and is an alarming morality tale for our times.

Jeff Sharlet is the only journalist to have reported from inside the C Street House, the Fellowship residence known simply by its Washington, D.C., address. The house has lately been the scene of notorious political scandal, but more crucially, it is home to efforts to transform the very fabric of American democracy. And now, after laying bare its tenants' past in The Family, Sharlet reports from deep within fundamentalism in today's world.

Alex Marlow was just a 21-year-old UC Berkeley student when renowned media mogul Andrew Breitbart hired him as his first employee. Breitbart began mentoring Marlow on how to fight the culture war one headline at a time and to remain resilient in the face of personal attacks. Now, in this eye-opening and timely book, Marlow explains how the establishment press destroyed its own credibility with a relentless stream of “fake news” designed to smear Donald Trump and his supporters while advancing a leftist agenda.

It's tempting to think that we live in an unprecedentedly fertile age for conspiracy theories, with seemingly each churn of the news cycle bringing fresh manifestations of large-scale paranoia. But the sad fact is that these narratives of suspicion - and the delusional psychologies that fuel them - have been a constant presence in American life for nearly as long as there's been an America. In this sweeping book, Thomas Milan Konda traces the country's obsession with conspiratorial thought from the early days of the republic to our own anxious moment.

Many Americans believe that their own government is guilty of shocking crimes. Although paranoia has been a feature of the American scene since the birth of the Republic, in Real Enemies, Kathryn Olmsted tells us that it was only in the 20th century that strange and unlikely conspiracy theories became central to American politics, In particular, she posits World War I as a critical turning point and shows that as the federal bureaucracy expanded, Americans grew more fearful of the government itself.

The mysterious is all around us.... UFOs, extraterrestrial encounters, baffling disappearances - Mysteries Uncovered investigates, without prejudice, some of the most notorious, disturbing and enduring mysteries ever recorded. For every instance rationalised away, there is another that defies explanation. Emily G. Thompson has several years experience as an investigative reporter. She has her own popular true crime website and podcast, Morbidology, and is the co-author of DK's Unsolved Murders and Cults Uncovered.

For a century, magazines were the authors of culture and taste, of intelligence and policy — until they were overthrown by the voices of the public themselves online. Here is a tribute to all that magazines were, from their origins in London and on Ben Franklin’s press; through their boom — enabled by new technologies — as creators of a new media aesthetic and a new mass culture; into their opulent days in advertising-supported conglomerates; and finally to their fall at the hands of the internet.

Es wird alles immer schlimmer, eine schreckliche Nachricht jagt die andere: Die Reichen werden reicher, die Armen ärmer. Es gibt immer mehr Kriege, Gewaltverbrechen, Naturkatastrophen. Viele Menschen tragen solche beängstigenden Bilder im Kopf. Doch sie liegen damit grundfalsch. Unser Gehirn verführt uns zu einer dramatisierenden Weltsicht, die mitnichten der Realität entspricht, wie der geniale Statistiker und Wissenschaftler Hans Rosling erklärt.

In a world overflowing with information, how can we adapt our learning methods to thrive? Dave Cormier, a pioneering figure in digital education, presents a thought-provoking manifesto in Learning in a Time of Abundance. A leading voice in digital learning, Cormier offers a fresh perspective on how we can face the uncertainty of a world where our challenges don't have clear answers amid an overwhelming digital landscape.

" Alors que j’achevais la rédaction de ce livre, la cérémonie d’ouverture des Jeux olympiques est venue raviver le feu de ma plume : la France est la victime d’un mémoricide. Une ablation de sa mémoire. Une spoliation, une péremption de ses souvenirs. L’Esprit français a été immolé. Toute ma vie, je me suis battu. Contre un progressisme en quête incessante des figures nouvelles de l’insolite et du fantasque.

A smart, lively history of the Internet free culture movement and its larger effects on society - and the life and shocking suicide of Aaron Swartz, a founding developer of Reddit and Creative Commons - from Slate correspondent Justin Peters.