Digital Media Use in Early Childhood: Birth to Six

Lelia Green, Leslie Haddon, Sonia Livingstone, Brian O’Neill, Kylie Stevenson, Donell Holloway (Bloomsbury, 2024)

The easy interface of touchscreen technologies like tablets and smartphones has enabled children to access the digital world from a very young age. But while some commentators are enthusiastic about how this can open a new world for fun, learning, and developing digital skills, others see the dangers of yet more screens, inauthentic play, and time spent isolated with electronic babysitters that detract from interaction with parents and learning social skills. Taking five as the age when children transition into formal education, this book draws on a three-year research project examining the realities of under six-year-olds' experiences of these technologies in the UK and Australia. With a theoretical context including Vygotsky, Bruner, Bronfenbrenner and Flewitt, the book examines how parents of young children evaluate the opportunities and risks of children's digital media use in the context of other significant influences such as children's time with grandparents, early childhood care and education. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 22 families, and rich ethnographic data from observation and exchanges with their 29 children, aged four months to five years, the book reveals how digital technologies complement and challenge important aspects of daily life for infants, toddlers and preschoolers.

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Dead Men's Propaganda: Ideology and Utopia in Comparative Communications Studies

Terhi Rantanen (LSE Press, 2024)

In Dead Men’s Propaganda: Ideology and Utopia in Comparative Communications Studies, Terhi Rantanen investigates the shaping of early comparative communications research between the 1920s and 1950s, notably the work of academics and men of practice in the United States. Often neglected, this intellectual thread is highly relevant to understanding the 21st-century’s challenges of war and rival streams of propaganda. By focusing on a generation at the forefront of comparative communications at this pivotal time in the 20th century, this book challenges orthodoxies in the intellectual histories of communication studies.

Read and download for free from LSE Press.

Wronged: The Weaponization of Victimhood

Lilie Chouliaraki (Columbia University Press, 2024)

In this timely and incisive book, Lilie Chouliaraki shows how claiming victimhood is about claiming power: who deserves to be protected as a victim and who should be punished as a perpetrator. She argues that even though victimhood has long been used to excuse violence and hierarchy, social media platforms and far-right populism have turned victimhood into a weapon of the privileged. Drawing on recent examples such as the overturning of Roe v. Wade, movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, and the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as historical ones from the major wars of the twentieth century and the Civil Rights Movement, Wronged reveals why claims of victimization are so effective at reinforcing instead of alleviating inequalities of class, gender, and race. Unless we come to recognize the suffering of the vulnerable for what it is – a matter not of victimhood but of injustice – Chouliaraki powerfully warns, the culture of victimhood will continue to perpetuate old exclusions and enable further injuries.

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Data Grab The new Colonialism of Big Tech and how to fight back

Ulises Mejias and Nick Couldry (Penguin & W.H. Allen, 2024)

In the new world order, data is the new oil. Big Tech companies are grabbing our most basic natural resources – our data – exploiting our labour and connections, and repackaging our information to control our views, track our movements, record our conversations and discriminate against us. Every time we unthinkingly click ‘Accept’ on Terms and Conditions, we allow our most personal information to kept indefinitely, repackaged by big Tech companies to control and exploit us for their own profit. In this searing, cutting-edge guide, two leading global researchers – and founders of the concept of data colonialism – reveal how history can help us both to understand the emerging future and to fight back.

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Read Professor Couldry's article, Are we giving away too much online? and watch the video for LSE Research.

Routledge Handbook of Humanitarian Communication

Lilie Chouliaraki  (Routledge, 2023)

The Routledge Handbook of Humanitarian Communication is an authoritative and comprehensive guide to research in the academic sub-field of humanitarian communication. It is broadly focused on communication that presents human vulnerability as a cause for public concern and encompasses communication with respect to humanitarian aid and development as well as human rights and "humanitarian" wars.
Recent years have seen the expansion of critical scholarship on humanitarian communication across a range of academic fields, sharing recognition of the centrality of media and communications to our understanding of humanitarianism as an agent of transnational power, global governance and cosmopolitan solidarity.

The Handbook brings into dialogue these diverse fields, their theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches as well as the public debates that lie at the heart of the contemporary politics of humanitarianism. It consolidates existing knowledge and maps out this emerging field as an important site of interdisciplinary knowledge production on media, communication and humanitarianism.

As such, the Handbook is not simply a collection of texts sharing a similar theme. It is a coherent intellectual contribution which systematizes current critical scholarship in terms of Domains, Methods and Issues and sets an agenda of emerging and evolving research priorities in the field. Consisting of 26 chapters written by international scholars, who have contributed to laying the foundation of the field, this volume provides an essential guide to the key ideas, issues, concepts and debates of humanitarian communication.

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Being Human in Digital Cities

Myria Georgiou (Polity Press, 2023)

In this perceptive book, Georgiou sets out to investigate the new configuration of social order that is taking shape in today’s cities. Although routed through extractive datafication, compulsive connectivity, and regulatory AI technologies, this digital order nonetheless displaces technocentrism and instead promotes new visions of humanism, all in the name of freedom, diversity, and sustainability. But the digital order emerges in the midst of neoliberal instability and crises, resulting in a plurality of contrasting responses to securing digitally mediated human progress. While corporate, media, and state actors mobilize such positive sociotechnical imaginaries to promise digitally mediated human progress, urban citizens and social movements propose alternative pathways to autonomy and dignity through and sometimes against digital technologies.

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Confidence Culture

Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad (Duke Press, 2022)

In Confidence Culture, Orgad and Gill argue that imperatives directed at women to “love your body” and “believe in yourself” imply that psychological blocks rather than entrenched social injustices hold women back. Interrogating the prominence of confidence in contemporary discourse about body image, workplace, relationships, motherhood, and international development, Orgad and Gill draw on Foucault’s notion of technologies of self to demonstrate how “confidence culture” demands of women near-constant introspection and vigilance in the service of self-improvement. They argue that while confidence messaging may feel good, it does not address structural and systemic oppression. Rather, confidence culture suggests that women—along with people of color, the disabled, and other marginalized groups—are responsible for their own conditions. Rejecting confidence culture’s remaking of feminism along individualistic and neoliberal lines, Orgad and Gill explore alternative articulations of feminism that go beyond the confidence imperative.

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Read a review here.

The Digital Border: Migration, Technology, Power

Lilie Chouliaraki and Myria Georgiou (NYU Press, 2022)

Chouliaraki and Georgiou introduce an expansive conception of Europe’s digital border: an assemblage that includes both several locations and a network of actors. Crucially, the book not only shows how migrants are continuously followed and impacted by the border, but also points out acts of and possibilities for resistance. Therefore, this timely book makes well-needed room for nuance, offering an alternative to the often-repeated idea of totalising technology.

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Read a review here.

Social Media and Hate

Shakuntala Banaji and Ramnath Bhat (Routledge, 2021)

Using expert interviews and focus groups, this book investigates the theoretical and practical intersection of misinformation and social media hate in contemporary societies. Social Media and Hate argues that these phenomena, and the extreme violence and discrimination they initiate against targeted groups, are connected to the socio-political contexts, values and behaviours of users of social media platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, ShareChat, Instagram and WhatsApp. The argument moves from a theoretical discussion of the practices and consequences of sectarian hatred, through a methodological evaluation of quantitative and qualitative studies on this topic, to four qualitative case studies of social media hate, and its effects on groups, individuals and wider politics in India, Brazil, Myanmar and the UK. The technical, ideological and networked similarities and connections between social media hate against people of African and Asian descent, indigenous communities, Muslims, Dalits, dissenters, feminists, LGBTQIA communities, Rohingya and immigrants across the four contexts is highlighted, stressing the need for an equally systematic political response.

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Read a review here.

Media Freedom

Damian Tambini (Polity Press, 2021)

The contentious role of social media in recent elections and referendums has brought to the fore once again the fundamental question of media freedom and the extent to which, and the way in which, the media should be regulated in a modern democratic society. This book surveys the history of media in the US, the UK and Europe in order to develop a new theory of media freedom that is capable of resolving current controversies about how best to regulate the media, including the internet and social media. Tambini argues that democratic regulation of the media must build upon – and learn from – the long history of accommodation between the press, broadcasting, the state and corporate power. By attending to this history, we can see that media freedom is not absolute but rather conditional, taking the form of a social contract of privileges and connected duties. Tambini develops this social contract account of media freedom and applies it to different media sectors, from the press and broadcasting to the internet and social media. Above all, he argues for a renewed role for international human rights law standards in media governance, and an end to American exceptionalism.

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Read a review here.

Proxies: The Cultural Work of Standing In

Dylan Mulvin (MIT Press, 2021)

Our world is built on an array of standards we are compelled to share. In Proxies, Mulvin examines how we arrive at those standards, asking, "To whom and to what do we delegate the power to stand in for the world?" Mulvin shows how those with the power to design technology, in the very moment of design, are allowed to imagine who is included--and who is excluded--in the future. For designers of technology, some bits of the world end up standing in for other bits, standards with which they build and calibrate. These "proxies" carry specific values, even as they disappear from view. Mulvin explores the ways technologies, standards, and infrastructures inescapably reflect the cultural milieus of their bureaucratic homes. Drawing on archival research, he investigates some of the basic building-blocks of our shared infrastructures. He tells the history of technology through the labor and communal practices of, among others, the people who clean kilograms to make the metric system run, the women who pose as test images, and the actors who embody disease and disability for medical students. Each case maps the ways standards and infrastructure rely on prototypical ideas of whiteness, able-bodiedness, and purity to control and contain the messiness of reality. Standards and infrastructures, Mulvin argues, shape and distort the possibilities of representation, the meaning of difference, and the levers of change and social justice.

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Read an interview with author Dylan Mulvin about the book here.

What Do We Know and What Should We Do About Fake News?

Nick Anstead (Sage Publishing, 2021)

Voters need to be informed to make political decisions, but what if their media diet not only prevents them from getting the information they need, but actively shapes inaccurate perceptions of the world? Drawing on examples and evidence from around the world, this book aims to make a timely intervention to the debate about the concept of fake news. Its underlying argument will have three objectives. First, to offer more precise definitions for a term that is often loosely used. Second, to offer a less technologically determinist view of fake news. New social media platforms, such as Facebook and WhatsApp, are clearly an important part of the story, but they exist in wider social, political and institutional settings. Third, to situate the idea of fake news (and our concern about it) in broader arguments about an ongoing crisis and loss of confidence in liberal democratic institutions. Only with this perspective, it will be argued, can we possibly address the question of what we should do about fake news.

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Read a review here.

Undoing Optimization: Civic Action in Smart Cities

Alison Powell (Yale University Press, 2021)

City life has been reconfigured by our use—and our expectations—of communication, data, and sensing technologies. This book examines the civic use, regulation, and politics of these technologies, looking at how governments, planners, citizens, and activists expect them to enhance life in the city. Powell argues that the de facto forms of citizenship that emerge in relation to these technologies represent sites of contention over how governance and civic power should operate. These become more significant in an increasingly urbanized and polarized world facing new struggles over local participation and engagement. The author moves past the usual discussion of top-down versus bottom-up civic action and instead explains how citizenship shifts in response to technological change and particularly in response to issues related to pervasive sensing, big data, and surveillance in “smart cities.”

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The Digital Disconnect: The Social Causes and Consequences of Digital Inequalities

Ellen Helsper (Sage Publishing, 2021)

With the increased digitisation of society comes an increased concern about who is left behind. From societal causes to the impact of everyday actions, The Digital Disconnect explores the relationship between digital and social inequalities, and the lived consequences of digitisation. Helsper goes beyond questions of digital divides and who is connected and asks why and how social and digital inequalities are linked and shows the tangible outcomes of socio-digital inequalities in everyday lives. The Digital Disconnect is an expert exploration of contemporary theory, research and practice in socio-digital inequalities.

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Read a review here.

Parenting for a Digital Future: How Hopes and Fears about Technology Shape Children's Lives

Sonia Livingstone and Alicia Blum-Ross (Oxford University Press, 2020)

In the decades it takes to bring up a child, parents face challenges that are both helped and hindered by the fact that they are living through a period of unprecedented digital innovation. In Parenting for a Digital Future, Livingstone and Blum-Ross draw on extensive and diverse qualitative and quantitative research with a range of parents in the UK to reveal how digital technologies characterize parenting in late modernity, as parents determine how to forge new territory with little precedent or support. They chart how parents often enact authority and values through digital technologies since "screen time," games, and social media have become both ways of being together and of setting boundaries. Parenting for a Digital Future moves beyond the panicky headlines to offer a deeply researched exploration of what it means to parent in a period of significant social and technological change.

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Read a review here.

Advanced Introduction to Platform Economics

Robin Mansell and and W. Edward Steinmueller (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020)

Artificial intelligence-enabled digital platforms collect and process data from and about users. These companies are largely self-regulating in Western countries. How do economic theories explain the rise of a very few dominant platforms? Mansell and Steinmueller compare and contrast neoclassical, institutional and critical political economy explanations. They show how these perspectives can lead to contrasting claims about platform benefits and harms. Uneven power relationships between platform operators and their users are treated differently in these economic traditions. Sometimes leading to advocacy for regulation or for public provision of digital services. Sometimes indicating restraint and precaution. The authors challenge the reader to think beyond the inevitability of platform dominance to create new visions of how platforms might operate in the future.

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Read a review here.

Fashioning Postfeminism: Spectacular Femininity and Transnational Culture

Simidele Dosekun (University of Illinois Press, 2020)

Women in Lagos, Nigeria, practice a spectacularly feminine form of black beauty. From cascading hair extensions to immaculate makeup to high heels, their style permeates both day-to-day life and media representations of women not only in a swatch of Africa but across an increasingly globalized world. Dosekun's interviews and critical analysis consider the female subjectivities these women are performing and desiring. She finds that the women embody the postfeminist idea that their unapologetically immaculate beauty signals--but also constitutes--feminine power. As empowered global consumers and media citizens, the women deny any need to critique their culture or to take part in feminism's collective political struggle. Throughout, Dosekun unearths evocative details around the practical challenges to attaining their style, examines the gap between how others view these women and how they view themselves, and engages with ideas about postfeminist self-fashioning and subjectivity across cultures and class.

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Read an interview with author Simidele Dosekun here.

Youth Active Citizenship in Europe: Ethnographies of Participation

Shakuntala Banaji and Sam Mejias, eds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)

This volume engages with the contested concept of ‘active citizenship’. It analyses the use and understanding of active citizenship in youth civic and political initiatives in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Italy, Portugal and the UK. Using ethnographic data and insights from the cross-European project CATCH-EyoU, the contributors to this collection illuminate the experiences of young people taking action for social change. It does so at a unique moment when a resurgent populist political right is deploying racial prejudice and neoliberal protectionism in both established media and new digital media to fuel xenophobic nationalism. The book asks a range of questions, including: What is life like for active young citizens with an interest in the civic and political spheres? What practices, relationships and motivations characterise their participatory movements, organisations, initiatives and groups? The chapters use case studies to analyse how friendship and emotion, social media, diversity-work, racism, precarity and burnout feed into motivating and developing or curtailing sustained pro-democratic activism.
Youth Active Citizenship in Europe will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines including politics, sociology, education and cultural studies.

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African Luxury: Aesthetics and Politics

Mehita Iqani and Simidele Dosekun, eds (Intellect Books, 2020)

Moving far beyond predominant views of Africa as a place to be 'saved', and even more recent celebratory formulations of it as 'rising', African Luxury: Aesthetics and Politics highlights and critically interrogates the visual and material cultures of lavish and luxurious consumption already present on the continent. Methodologically, conceptually and analytically, the collection dismantles taken-for-granted ideas that the West is the source and focus of high-end and hyper-desirable material cultures. It explores what the culture of consumption means in Africa in both historical and contemporary contexts, studying diverse luxury phenomena including fashion advertising, reality television, retail, gendered consumption and gardening to re-centre the discussion on existing contemporary luxury cultures across the continent.

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Media, Voice, Space and Power: Essays of Refraction

Nick Couldry (Routledge, 2019)

Couldry is one of the world’s leading analysts of media power and voice, and has been publishing widely for 25 years. This volume, published 20 years after The Place of Media Power, brings together a rich collection of essays from his earliest to his latest writings, some of them hard to access, plus two previously unpublished chapters. The book’s 15 chapters cover a variety of themes from voice to space, from Big Data to democracy, and from art to reality television. Taken together, they give a unique insight into the range of Couldry’s interests and passions. Throughout, Couldry’s commitment to connecting media research to wider debates in philosophy and social theory is clear. A substantial Afterword reflects on the common themes that run throughout his work and this volume, and the particular challenges of grasping media’s contribution to social order in an age of datafication. A preface by leading US media scholar Jonathan Gray sets these essays in context. The result is an exciting and clearly-written text that will interest students and researchers of media, culture and social theory across the world.

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Media: Why It Matters

Nick Couldry (Routledge, 2019)

From TV bulletins to social media newsfeeds, the media plays a massive role in shaping the world as we see it. In fact, different media have helped make possible our world of independent nations, binding together disparate communities through shared cultural touchstones, such as the press and national broadcasters. With the transfer of people’s lives to the online world, the media has become crucial to almost every aspect of how human beings live. A new social order is being built through our relations with media, but what power over us does this give to corporations and governments? Couldry explains the significance of five core dimensions of media: representing, connecting, imagining, sharing and governing. He shows that understanding these dynamics is a vital skill that every person needs in the digital age, when the fate of our political worlds and social environment may rest on how we communicate with each other.

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Racism Postrace

Roopali Mukherjee, Sarah Banet-Weiser and Herman Gray, eds (Duke University Press, 2019)

With the election of Barack Obama, the idea that American society had become postracial—that is, race was no longer a main factor in influencing and structuring people's lives—took hold in public consciousness, increasingly accepted by many. The contributors to Racism Postrace examine the concept of postrace and its powerful history and allure, showing how proclamations of a postracial society further normalize racism and obscure structural antiblackness. They trace expressions of postrace over and through a wide variety of cultural texts, events, and people, from sports (LeBron James's move to Miami), music (Pharrell Williams's “Happy”), and television (The Voice and HGTV) to public policy debates, academic disputes, and technology industries. Outlining how postrace ideologies confound struggles for racial justice and equality, the contributors open up new critical avenues for understanding the powerful cultural, discursive, and material conditions that render postrace the racial project of our time.

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Children and Media in India: Narratives of Class, Agency and Social Change

Shakuntala Banaji (Routledge, 2019)

Is the bicycle, like the loudspeaker, a medium of communication in India? Do Indian children need trade unions as much as they need schools? What would you do with a mobile phone if all your friends were playing tag in the rain or watching Indian Idol? Children and Media in India illuminates the experiences, practices and contexts in which children and young people in diverse locations across India encounter, make, or make meaning from media in the course of their everyday lives. From textbooks, television, film and comics to mobile phones and digital games, this book examines the media available to different socioeconomic groups of children in India and their articulation with everyday cultures and routines. 

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Read a review here.

Globalization and the Media

Terhi Rantanen and César Jiménez-Martínez (Routledge, 2019)

As serious academic work on and around globalization and the media continues to flourish as never before, this new title in Routledge’s Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies series meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of a rapidly growing and ever more complex corpus of literature, and to provide a map of the area as it has emerged and developed. It is a landmark collection of foundational and the best cutting-edge scholarship in the field and is organized in four volumes.

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The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism

Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias (Standford University Press, 2019)

Just about any social need is now met with an opportunity to "connect" through digital means. But this convenience is not free—it is purchased with vast amounts of personal data transferred through shadowy backchannels to corporations using it to generate profit. The Costs of Connection uncovers this process, this "data colonialism," and its designs for controlling our lives—our ways of knowing; our means of production; our political participation. Confronting the alarming degree of surveillance already tolerated, they offer a stirring call to decolonize the internet and emancipate our desire for connection.

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Heading Home: Motherhood, Work, and the Failed Promise of Equality

Shani Orgad (Columbia University Press, 2019)

In this book, Orgad draws on in-depth, personal, and profoundly ambivalent interviews with highly educated London women who left paid employment to take care of their children while their husbands continued to work in high-powered jobs. Despite identifying the structural forces that maintain gender inequality, these women still struggle to articulate their decisions outside the narrow cultural ideals that devalue motherhood and individualize success and failure.

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Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny

Sarah Banet-Weiser (Duke University Press, 2018)

In Empowered, Banet-Weiser examines the deeply entwined relationship between popular feminism and popular misogyny as it plays out in advertising, online and multimedia platforms, and nonprofit and commercial campaigns. Examining feminist discourses that emphasize self-confidence, body positivity, and individual achievement alongside violent misogynist phenomena such as revenge porn, toxic geek masculinity, and men's rights movements, Banet-Weiser traces how popular feminism and popular misogyny are co-constituted.

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Listen to Sarah Banet-Weiser's LSE lecture on this topic here.
Read Sarah Banet-Weiser's Los Angeles Review of Books series about popular feminism here.

The Politics of Chinese Media: Consensus and Contestation 

Bingchun Meng (Palgrave, 2018)

This book offers an analytical account of the consensus and contestations of the politics of Chinese media at both institutional and discursive levels. It considers the formal politics of how the Chinese state manages political communication internally and externally in the post-socialist era, and examines the politics of news media, focusing particularly on how journalists navigate the competing demands of the state, the capital and the urban middle class readership. 

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Understanding Public Relations: Theory, Culture, Society

Lee Edwards (Sage, 2018)

In this book, Edwards argues that public relations is not merely an organizational tool, but a powerful influence on social and political life. From carefully considered communication by multinational corporations, to government campaigns that manage public opinion, to the self-promotion of celebrities via social media, public relations is central to our individual and collective lives.

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Digital Dominance: The Power of Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple

Martin Moore and Damian Tambini, eds (Oxford University Press, 2018)

In this volume, Moore and Tambini draw together the world's leading researchers to examine the digital dominance of technologies platforms and look at the evidence behind the rising tide of criticism of the tech giants. In fifteen chapters, the authors examine the economic, political, and social impacts of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft, in order to understand the different facets of their power and how it is manifested. Digital Dominance is the first interdisciplinary volume on this topic, contributing to a conversation which is critical to maintaining the health of democracies across the world.

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The Circulation of Anti-Austerity Protest

Bart Cammaerts (Palgrave, 2018)

In this book a set of theoretical and methodological resources are presented to study the way in which protest, resistance and social movement discourses circulate through society and looks at the role of media and of communication in this process. Empirically, the focus of this book is on the UK’s anti-austerity movement. ‘The Circuit of Protest’, as developed in this volume, is comprised of an analysis of the discourses of the anti-austerity movement and their corresponding movement frames, and the self-mediation practices geared at communicating these.

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Jane Vincent and Leslie Haddon, eds. (Routledge, 2018)

Smartphone Cultures explores emerging questions about the ways in which mobile technology and its apps have been produced, represented, regulated and incorporated into everyday social practices. The various authors in this volume each locate their contributions within the circuit of culture model. More specifically, this book engages with issues of production and regulation in the case of the electrical infrastructure supporting smartphones and the development of mobile social gambling apps.

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The Mediated Construction of Reality

Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp (Polity, 2017)

WINNER of the 2017 German Communication Association (DGPuK) Theory Prize. Social theory needs to be completely rethought in a world of digital media and social media platforms driven by data processes. Fifty years after Berger and Luckmann published their classic text The Social Construction of Reality, two leading sociologists of media, Couldry and Hepp, revisit the question of how social theory can understand the processes through which an everyday world is constructed in and through media.

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Read a review here and here.

Children and Media in India: Narratives of class, agency and social change

Shakuntala Banaji (Routledge, 2017)

Children and Media in India illuminates the experiences, practices and contexts in which children and young people in diverse locations across India encounter, make, or make meaning from media in the course of their everyday lives. From textbooks, television, film and comics to mobile phones and digital games, this book examines the media available to different socioeconomic groups of children in India and their articulation with everyday cultures and routines.

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Caring in crisis? Humanitarianism, the Public and NGOs

Irene Bruna Seu and Shani Orgad, eds. (Palgrave, 2017)

Drawing on an original UK-wide study of public responses to humanitarian issues and how NGOs communicate them, this timely book provides the first evidence-based psychosocial account of how and why people respond or not to messages about distant suffering. The book highlights what NGOs seek to achieve in their communications and explores how their approach and hopes match or don’t match what the public wants, thinks and feels about distant suffering

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The Class: Living and Learning in the Digital Age

Sonia Livingstone and Julian Sefton-Green (NYU Press, 2016) 

Based upon fieldwork at an ordinary London school, The Class examines young people's experiences of growing up and learning in a digital world. In this original and engaging study, Livingstone and Sefton-Green explore youth values, teenagers’ perspectives on their futures, and their tactics for facing the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. The authors follow the students as they move across their different social worlds—in school, at home, and with their friends, engaging in a range of activities from video games to drama clubs and music lessons. By portraying the texture of the students’ everyday lives, The Class seeks to understand how the structures of social class and cultural capital shape the development of personal interests, relationships and autonomy.

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Everyday Media Culture in Africa: Audiences and Users

Wendy Willems and Winston Mano, eds. (Routledge, 2016)

African audiences and users are rapidly gaining in importance and increasingly targeted by global media companies, social media platforms and mobile phone operators. This is the first edited volume that addresses the everyday lived experiences of Africans in their interaction with different kinds of media: old and new, state and private, elite and popular, global and national, material and virtual. So far, the bulk of academic research on media and communication in Africa has studied media through the lens of media-state relations, thereby adopting liberal democracy as the normative ideal and examining the potential contribution of African media to development and democratization. Focusing instead on everyday media culture in a range of African countries, this volume contributes to the broader project of provincializing and decolonizing audience and internet studies.

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Youth Participation in Democratic Life: Stories of Hope and Disillusion

Michael Bruter, Shakuntala Banaji, Sarah Harrison, Bart Cammaerts, and Nick Anstead (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

This book analyses and assesses the contexts, nature and the diversity of young people's participation in European democratic life. The authors provide an interdisciplinary conceptual framework addressing participation, power, democracy, efficacy and media. Using dynamic, original data collected in surveys, focus groups, interviews and a field experiment, Youth Participation in Democratic Life address young people's attitudes towards voting, participation and representation in policy processes and politicians.

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Participatory Mapping: New Data, New Cartography

Jean-Christophe Plantin (Wiley, 2014)

The social and technical properties of the Web redefine how maps are created, published and used online. This book characterizes these contemporary forms of Web-based cartography. It draws a comparison with both previous analogical and digital maps, it characterizes the new online cartographers, and it shows how maps interact with other Web applications and sources of data. The case study of the Fukushima-Daiichi power plant disaster in March 11, 2011 provides a vivid example of how these maps can sustain the involvement of citizens during a crisis. By presenting the international collaboration of mapmakers who created online radiation maps, this case study illustrates how science and politics are inseparable in Web-based maps.

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Media and the City: Cosmopolitanism and Difference

Myria Georgiou (Polity, 2013) 

With the majority of the world's population now living in cities, questions about the cultural and political trajectories of urban societies are increasingly urgent. Media and the City explores the global city as the site where these questions become most prominent. As a space of intense communication and difference, the global city forces us to think about the challenges of living in close proximity to each other. Do we really see, hear and understand our neighbours? This engaging book examines the contradictory realities of cosmopolitanization as these emerge in four interfaces: consumption, identity, community and action. Each interface is analysed through a set of juxtapositions to reveal the global city as a site of antagonisms, empathies and co-existing particularities.

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The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-Humanitarianism

Lilie Chouliaraki (Polity, 2012)

WINNER of the 2015 ICA Outstanding Book Award. This path-breaking book explores how solidarity towards vulnerable others is performed in our media environment. It argues that stories where famine is described through our own experience of dieting or where solidarity with Africa translates into wearing a cool armband tell us about much more than the cause that they attempt to communicate. They tell us something about the ways in which we imagine the world outside ourselves.

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Read a review here and here.

Imagining the Internet: Communication, Innovation and Governance

Robin Mansell (Oxford University Press, 2012)

This book is an impressive survey of our collective and cumulative understanding of the evolution of digital communication systems and the Internet. Whilst the information societies of the twenty-first century will develop ever more sophisticated technologies, the Internet is now a familiar and pervasive part of the world in which we live, work, and communicate. As such it is important to take stock of some fundamental questions - whether, for example, it contributes to progress, social cohesion, democracy, and growth - and at the same time to review the rich and varied theories and perspectives developed by thinkers in a range of disciplines over the last fifty years or more.

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Read a review here and here.

WikiLeaks: News in the Networked Era

Charlie Beckett, with James Ball (Polity, 2012)

This is the first book to examine WikiLeaks fully and critically and its place in the contemporary news environment. The authors combine inside knowledge with the latest media research and analysis to argue that the significance of Wikileaks is that it is part of the shift in the nature of news to a network system that is contestable and unstable. Welcome to Wiki World and a new age of uncertainty.

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When News Was New

Terhi Rantanen (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)

This book investigates how news has re–invented itself at different historical moments––from medieval storytellers to 19th century telegraph news agencies to 21st century bloggers. It offers a new way of understanding news in our history and culture

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