Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy

ISBN-13: 9780190056544 / Angielski / Miękka / 2021 / 336 str.

Siva Vaidhyanathan

Opis

This is the story of how Facebook devolved from an innocent social site hacked together by Harvard students into a force that, while it may make personal life just a little more pleasurable, makes democracy a lot more challenging. It's an indictment of how "social media" has fostered the deterioration of democratic culture around the world, from facilitating Russian meddling in support of Trump's election to the exploitation of it by murderous authoritarians inBurma and the Philippines.

Recenzje

Fortunately, finally, we seem ready to have the necessary conversations about how social media has changed our hearts and minds and politics, including the hard conversations. And this is the right book for our moment. It lays out, in crisp, compelling language, why Facebook may be good for some individuals but not good for democracy. Antisocial Media is not negative or defeatist. But it does not sugarcoat the facts. We can only remake technology to conform to new social values if we do the hard work of committing to what they are. That's a problem that Facebook can't solve. This is history, philosophy, and a call to action." -Sherry Turkle, Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology, MIT, and author of Reclaiming Conversation and Alone Together

O autorze

Siva Vaidhyanathan is the Robertson Professor of Media Studies and the Director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia. He produces a local public-affairs television program and several podcasts, and he directs the publication of Virginia Quarterly Review. A former professional journalist, he has published five previous books on technology, law, and society, including The Googlization of Everything. He has also contributed to publications such as The Nation, Slate, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Washington Post, BookForum, The New York Times Book Review, and The Baffler.