The History Book Club discussion

This is thread to discuss Facebook, Social Media, Data Mining, Internet Security, Data Security, Cambridge Analytica, Political Profiling, etc. and the Future of Media.

The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World

by David Kirkpatrick (no photo)

Synopsis:

The inside story of Facebook, told with the full, exclusive cooperation of founder Mark Zuckerberg and the company's other leaders.

IN LITTLE MORE THAN HALF A DECADE, Facebook has gone from a dorm-room novelty to a company with 500 million users. It is one of the fastest growing companies in history, an essential part of the social life not only of teenagers but hundreds of millions of adults worldwide. As Facebook spreads around the globe, it creates surprising effects even becoming instrumental in political protests from Colombia to Iran.

Veteran technology reporter David Kirkpatrick had the full cooperation of Facebook s key executives in researching this fascinating history of the company and its impact on our lives. Kirkpatrick tells us how Facebook was created, why it has flourished, and where it is going next. He chronicles its successes and missteps, and gives readers the most complete assessment anywhere of founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the central figure in the company s remarkable ascent. This is the Facebook story that can be found nowhere else.
How did a nineteen-year-old Harvard student create a company that has transformed the Internet and how did he grow it to its current enormous size? Kirkpatrick shows how Zuckerberg steadfastly refused to compromise his vision, insistently focusing on growth over profits and preaching that Facebook must dominate (his word) communication on the Internet. In the process, he and a small group of key executives have created a company that has changed social life in the United States and elsewhere, a company that has become a ubiquitous presence in marketing, altering politics, business, and even our sense of our own identity. This is the Facebook Effect.

Devil's Bargain

by Joshua Green (no photo)

Synopsis:

From the reporter who was there at the very beginning comes the revealing inside story of the partnership between Steve Bannon and Donald Trump—the key to understanding the rise of the alt-right, the fall of Hillary Clinton, and the hidden forces that drove the greatest upset in American political history.

Based on dozens of interviews conducted over six years, Green spins the master narrative of the 2016 campaign from its origins in the far fringes of right-wing politics and reality television to its culmination inside Trump’s penthouse on election night.

The shocking elevation of Bannon to head Trump’s flagging presidential campaign on August 17, 2016, hit political Washington like a thunderclap and seemed to signal the meltdown of the Republican Party. Bannon was a bomb-throwing pugilist who’d never run a campaign and was despised by Democrats and Republicans alike.

Yet Bannon’s hard-edged ethno-nationalism and his elaborate, years-long plot to destroy Hillary Clinton paved the way for Trump’s unlikely victory. Trump became the avatar of a dark but powerful worldview that dominated the airwaves and spoke to voters whom others couldn’t see. Trump’s campaign was the final phase of a populist insurgency that had been building up in America for years, and Bannon, its inscrutable mastermind, believed it was the culmination of a hard-right global uprising that would change the world.

Any study of Trump’s rise to the presidency is unavoidably a study of Bannon. Devil’s Bargain is a tour-de-force telling of the remarkable confluence of circumstances that decided the election, many of them orchestrated by Bannon and his allies, who really did plot a vast, right-wing conspiracy to stop Clinton. To understand Trump's extraordinary rise and Clinton’s fall, you have to weave Trump’s story together with Bannon’s, or else it doesn't make sense.

Note: This book discusses Cambridge Analytica, Psychological Profiling, Facebook, Data Breaches, Data Mining etc. in relationship to the above.

Watch Zuckerberg testify before Congress, day 1

Link: https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/10/17...

Source: The Verge

Watch Zuckerberg testify before Congress, day 2

Link: https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/11/17...

Source: The Verge

The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Trans (Complete in One Volume)

by Elizabeth L. Eisenstein (no photo)

Synopsis:

The first fully-documented historical analysis of the impact of the invention of printing upon European culture, and its importance as an agent of religious, political, social, scientific, and intellectual change.

Originally published in two volumes in 1980, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change is now issued in a paperback edition containing both volumes. The work is a full-scale historical treatment of the advent of printing and its importance as an agent of change. Professor Eisenstein begins by examining the general implications of the shift from script to print, and goes on to examine its part in three of the major movements of early modern times - the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the rise of modern science.

Preface to Plato

by Eric Alfred Havelock

Synopsis:

Plato's frontal attack on poetry has always been a problem for sympathetic students, who have often minimized or avoided it. Beginning with the premise that the attack must be taken seriously, Eric Havelock shows that Plato's hostility is explained by the continued domination of the poetic tradition in contemporary Greek thought.

The reason for the dominance of this tradition was technological. In a nonliterate culture, stored experience necessary to cultural stability had to be preserved as poetry in order to be memorized. Plato attacks poets, particularly Homer, as the sole source of Greek moral and technical instruction--Mr. Havelock shows how the Iliad acted as an oral encyclopedia. Under the label of mimesis, Plato condemns the poetic process of emotional identification and the necessity of presenting content as a series of specific images in a continued narrative.

The second part of the book discusses the Platonic Forms as an aspect of an increasingly rational culture. Literate Greece demanded, instead of poetic discourse, a vocabulary and a sentence structure both abstract and explicit in which experience could be described normatively and analytically: in short a language of ethics and science

How does this book relate to the Future of Media?

According to Journalism Professor at Columbia University - Todd Gitlin - "The Greeks matter because some of them, at least, recognized that they were passing through a change in how people frame the world. In their case, it was the change from the oral to the written, and this is of course the subject of one of the Platonic dialogues, Phaedrus. In it, Socrates declares himself fully aware that human capacities can change, and that as memory is displaced or funnelled into print, a variety of changes may set in which affect not only how we know things, but also who we are as human beings.

Eric Havelock’s Preface to Plato shows that the Greeks were aware that there was some connection, perhaps even an all-embracing connection, among forms of communication, memory and thought. It’s quite fascinating to me that people should have this awareness of a sea change in their way of knowing, this self-consciousness about it." -- Journalism Professor at Columbia University - Todd Gitlin in interview with Five Books

More:
https://fivebooks.com/best-books/todd...

The Creation Of The Media: Political Origins Of Modern Communications

by Paul Starr (no photo)

Synopsis:

America's leading role in today's information revolution may seem simply to reflect its position as the world's dominant economy and most powerful state.

But by the early nineteenth century, when the United States was neither a world power nor a primary center of scientific discovery, it was already a leader in communications-in postal service and newspaper publishing, then in development of the telegraph and telephone networks, later in the whole repertoire of mass communications.

In this wide-ranging social history of American media, from the first printing press to the early days of radio, Paul Starr shows that the creation of modern communications was as much the result of political choices as of technological invention.

With his original historical analysis, Starr examines how the decisions that led to a state-run post office and private monopolies on the telegraph and telephone systems affected a developing society.

He illuminates contemporary controversies over freedom of information by exploring such crucial formative issues as freedom of the press, intellectual property, privacy, public access to information, and the shaping of specific technologies and institutions.

America's critical choices in these areas, Starr argues, affect the long-run path of development in a society and have had wide social, economic, and even military ramifications.

The Creation of the Media not only tells the history of the media in a new way; it puts America and its global influence into a new perspective.

Raymond Williams on Culture and Society

by Raymond Williams

Synopsis:

-The most important Marxist cultural theorist after Gramsci, Williams' contributions go well beyond the critical tradition, supplying insights of great significance for cultural sociology today... I have never read Williams without finding something worthwhile, something subtle, some idea of great importance-
- Jeffrey C. Alexander, Professor of Sociology, Yale University

Celebrating the significant intellectual legacy and enduring influence of Raymond Williams, this exciting collection introduces a whole new generation to his work.

Jim McGuigan reasserts and rebalances Williams' reputation within the social sciences by collecting and introducing key pieces of his work.

Providing context and clarity he powerfully evokes the major contribution Williams has made to sociology, media and communication and cultural studies.

Powerfully asserting the on-going relevance of Williams within our contemporary neoliberal and digital age, the book:

Includes texts which have never been anthologized - Williams' work both biographically and historically

Provides a comprehensive introduction to Williams' social-scientific work

Demonstrates the enduring relevance of cultural materialism.

Original and persuasive this book will be of interest to anyone involved in theoretical and methodological modules within sociology, media and communication studies and cultural studies.

Review and Commentary:

According to Journalism Professor at Columbia University - Todd Gitlin - "This is an inaugural lecture Raymond Williams gave in 1974, when he assumed a professorship in drama at Cambridge University.

He’s one of the most fertile minds when it comes to media in the last century. Basically he’s saying that it’s extremely odd, and yet central, to the form of civilization that has evolved, that there’s so much drama.

And what he means by drama is not simply normal plays, but everything from advertising to television serials, to the contents of newspapers and magazines. He died in 1988 before a lot of the new technology we have now appeared; he had not encountered the iPhone.

But he anticipates a life in which people are immersed in narrative nonstop. I would add sound, or song, as another important component. This article is, at least to my way of thinking, the earliest statement of the point that quantity becomes quality.

The quantity of a certain kind of media experience creates a different way of life, which is in fact ours. Williams directed us into the whole problem of media saturation as a phenomenon worthy of treatment in its own right. -- Journalism Professor at Columbia University - Todd Gitlin in interview with Five Books

Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives

by Todd Gitlin (no photo)

Synopsis:

Everyone knows that the media surround us, but no one quite understands what this means for our lives.

In Media Unlimited, a remarkable and original look at our media-glutted, speed-addicted world, Todd Gitlin makes us stare, as if for the first time, at the biggest picture of all.

From video games to elevator music, action movies to reality shows, Gitlin evokes a world of relentless sensation, instant transition, and nonstop stimulus.

He shows how all media, all the time fuels celebrity worship, paranoia, and irony; and how attempts to ward off the onrush become occasions for yet more media.

Far from signaling a "new information age," the media torrent, as Gitlin argues, encourages disposable emotions and casual commitments, and threatens to make democracy a sideshow.

Both a startling analysis and a charged polemic, Media Unlimited/b> reveals the unending stream of manufactured images and sounds as a defining feature of our civilization and a perverse culmination of Western hopes for freedom.

A provocative new exploration of our media-saturated lives-a worthy successor to Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media.

Understanding Media

by Marshall McLuhan

Synopsis:

This reissue of Understanding Media marks the thirtieth anniversary (1964-1994) of Marshall McLuhan's classic expose on the state of the then emerging phenomenon of mass media.

Terms and phrases such as "the global village" and "the medium is the message" are now part of the lexicon, and McLuhan's theories continue to challenge our sensibilities and our assumptions about how and what we communicate.

Just today: (very sad for those laid off)

BuzzFeed lays off dozens of journalists in its news division as the media outlet restructures

By Oliver Darcy, CNN Business
Updated 4:34 PM ET, Fri January 25, 2019

New York (CNN Business)BuzzFeed laid off dozens of employees on Friday inside its prized news division as the media organization restructures to grapple with the tumultuous digital news landscape.

"It's a slaughter," one employee, who was not authorized to speak publicly, told CNN Business.

The entire national desk, which produced some of BuzzFeed News' most illustrious feature reporting, was cut. The health desk was also slashed, and the national security desk was disbanded. The website's LGBT desk, an area of coverage in which BuzzFeed News had invested significant resources, was left with only one staffer.

The entertainment team also suffered some cuts. Internationally, BuzzFeed News' offices in Spain were closed.

Some of BuzzFeed News' longest serving employees were affected. John Stanton, a senior national correspondent and the former BuzzFeed News DC bureau chief, was laid off. Michael Rusch, the website's global news curation director who helped build BuzzFeed News' social accounts into powerhouses, said he too was let go.

Remainder of article:
https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/25/media/...

Source: CNN

Currently reading by Sheera Frenkel no photo

Halfway through the book and it’s pretty darn ugly indeed.