Social Media Study

Today's computers are composing music that sounds "more Bach than Bach", turning photographs into paintings in the style of Van Gogh's Starry Night, and even writing screenplays. But are computers truly creative - or are they merely tools to be used by musicians, artists, and writers? Miller, an authority on creativity, identifies the key factors essential to the creative process, from "the need for introspection" to "the ability to discover the key problem." He talks to people on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence and explores the riches of computer-created art.

In this incisive new work, Adrian Daub analyzes the global spread of cancel culture discourse as a moral panic, showing that, though its object is fuzzy, talk of cancel culture in global media has become a preoccupation of an embattled liberalism. There are plenty of conservative voices who gin up worries about cancel culture to advance their agendas. But more remarkable perhaps is that it is centrist, even left-leaning, media that have taken up the rallying cry and really defined the outlines of what cancel culture is supposed to be.

Leading archaeogeneticist Johannes Krause and journalist Thomas Trappe investigate what DNA can tell us about how we got where we are and what our future might be. They show how the first humans were defeated again and again and suffered fatal setbacks, and how Homo sapiens succeeded in conquering continents, overcoming natural borders, and bringing other species under its control. But the genetic blueprint that enabled us to get to the place where we are today had one flaw: it didn't factor in planetary boundaries.

America is suffering from an information glut. Most Americans are no longer clear about what news is worth remembering or how any of it connects to anything else. Thus, Americans are rapidly becoming the least knowledgeable people in the industrial world. Author and academic Neil Postman and television journalist Steve Powers tell you how to become a discerning viewer.

Social media is a great place to keep up with family, friends and your favorite influencers online, but if we’re not careful, we can get caught trying to become who we’re following on social media, rather than following Jesus and becoming more like him. We can start trusting voices of people we’ve never met over the one voice who knows and loves us most. In this five-session experience, Sadie challenges us to consider who we’re following and how we are influenced. What would it look like if we were led by God’s love instead of by strangers' likes?

Local news is essential to democracy. Meaningful participation in civic life is impossible without it. However, local news is in crisis. According to one widely cited study, some 2,500 newspapers have closed over the last generation. And it is often marginalized communities of color who have been left without the day-to-day journalism they need to govern themselves in a democracy.

Why does writing exist? What does it mean to those who write? Born from the interplay of natural and cultural history, the seemingly magical act of writing has continually expanded our consciousness. Portrayed in mythology as either a gift from heroes or a curse from the gods, it has been used as both an instrument of power and a channel of the divine, a means of social bonding and of individual self-definition.

Franklin Foer reveals the existential threat posed by big tech, and in his brilliant polemic gives us the toolkit to fight their pervasive influence. Over the past few decades there has been a revolution in terms of who controls knowledge and information. This rapid change has imperiled the way we think. Without pausing to consider the cost, the world has rushed to embrace the products and services of four titanic corporations. We shop with Amazon, socialize on Facebook, turn to Apple for entertainment, and rely on Google for information.

A riveting exploration of how visual media has shifted the narrative on race and reignited the push towards justice by the author of the “worthy and necessary” (The New York Times) Nobody Marc Lamont Hill and the bestselling author and acclaimed journalist Todd Brewster.

Combining ancient epic and myth with analogies from biology and the natural world, Joel P. Christensen explores the creative process and how narratives develop. This bold work urges listeners to treat narratives as living things with their own agency in the world.

Each of us has an ever-growing collection of personal digital data: documents, photographs, PowerPoint presentations, videos, music, emails, and texts sent and received. To access any of this, we have to find it. The ease (or difficulty) of finding something depends on how we organize our digital stuff.

Unapologetically punk, the essays in Thunder Song segue from the miraculous to the mundane, from the spiritual to the physical, as they examine the role of art—in particular music—and community in helping a new generation of indigenous people claim the strength of their heritage while defining their own path in the contemporary world.

"Uma mentira pode dar a volta ao mundo no mesmo tempo que a verdade leva para calçar seus sapatos." Mark Twain. Aos olhos dos seus eleitores, as deficiências dos líderes populistas se transformam em qualidades, sua inexperiência demonstra que não pertencem ao círculo da "velha política", e sua incompetência é uma garantia da sua autenticidade. As tensões que causam em nível internacional são vistas como mostras de sua independência, e as fake News, marca inequívoca de sua propaganda, evidenciam sua liberdade de pensamento.

Almost everything about our day-to-day lives - and the broader scheme of human culture - can be found on the Internet. But what is it physically? And where is it really? Our mental map of the network is as blank as the map of the ocean that Columbus carried on his first Atlantic voyage. The Internet, its material nuts and bolts, is an unexplored territory. Until now. In Tubes, Andrew Blum goes inside the Internet's physical infrastructure and flips on the lights, revealing a fresh look at the online world we think we know.

Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, who in his perennial best seller On Killing revealed that most of us are not "natural born killers" - and who has spent decades training soldiers, police, and others who keep us secure to overcome the intrinsic human resistance to harming others and to use firearms responsibly when necessary - turns a laser focus on the threat posed to our society by violent video games.

In artist Paul Klee’s The Twittering Machine, the bird-song of a machine acts as bait to lure humankind into a pit of damnation. Leading political writer Richard Seymour argues that this is a chilling metaphor for our relationship with social media. Former social media executives tell us that the system is an addiction machine. We are users, waiting for our next hit as we like, comment and share. We write to the machine as individuals, but it responds by aggregating our fantasies, desires and frailties into data, and returning them to us as a commodity experience.

Is it just a phase, a fad, or a real issue with your teen? This comprehensive guidebook explores the unique challenges that thousands of families face every day raising a teenager who may be transgender, gender-variant, or gender-fluid. Covering extensive research and with many personal interviews, as well as years of experience working in the field, the author covers pressing concerns relating to physical and emotional development, social and school pressures, medical options, and family communications.

All forms of recreational digital consumption—whether on smartphones, tablets, game consoles, or TVs—have skyrocketed in the younger generations. Most media experts do not seem overly concerned about this situation: children are adaptable, they say, they are "digital natives," their brains have changed and screens make them smarter. But other specialists—including some pediatricians, psychiatrists, teachers, and speech therapists—dispute these claims, and many parents worry about the long-term consequences of their children's intensive exposure to screens.

In this book in praise of wait times, award-winning author Jason Farman passionately argues that the delay between call and answer has always been an important part of the message. Traveling backward from our current era of Twitter and texts, Farman describes how societies have worked to eliminate waiting in communication and how they have interpreted those times' meanings. And in a rebuttal to the demand for instant communication, Farman makes a powerful case for why good things can come to those who wait.

For many centuries the figure of the witch has haunted our imagination and our nightmares. There have been many attempts to quash our fascination with these wielders of forbidden powers, but all have failed. We invite you now on a journey through a moonlit world, where every shadow tells a tale of magic, persecution and persistence. In this fascinating volume, discover witches real and legendary, who once terrorized, devoured, helped or empowered their communities, but who are now largely forgotten.