This academic analysis explores social media, specifically examining its influence on the cultural, political, and economic organization of our society and the role capitalism plays within its domain. In this examination of society and technology, author and educator Derek Hrynyshyn explores the ways in which social media shapes popular culture and how social power is expressed within it. He debunks the misperception of the medium as a social equalizer—a theory drawn from the fact that content is created by its users—and compares it to mass media, identifying the capitalist-driven mechanisms that drive both social media and mass media. The work captures his assessment that social media legitimizes the inequities among the social classes rather than challenging them. The book scrutinizes the difference between social media and mass media, the relationship between technologies and social change, and the role of popular culture in the structure of political and economic power. A careful look at social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google suggests that these tools are systems of surveillance, monitoring everyday activities for the benefit of advertisers and the networks themselves. Topics covered within the book's 10 detailed chapters include privacy online, freedom of expression, piracy, the digital divide, fragmentation, and social cohesion.
Astronomer Gerard P. Kuiper ignored the traditional boundaries of his subject. Using telescopes and the laboratory, he made the solar system a familiar, intriguing place. “It is not astronomy,” complained his colleagues, and they were right. Kuiper had created a new discipline we now call planetary science. Kuiper was an acclaimed astronomer of binary stars and white dwarfs when he accidentally discovered that Titan, the massive moon of Saturn, had an atmosphere. This turned our understanding of planetary atmospheres on its head, and it set Kuiper on a path of staggering discoveries: Pluto was not a planet, planets around other stars were common, some asteroids were primary while some were just fragments of bigger asteroids, some moons were primary and some were captured asteroids or comets, the atmosphere of Mars was carbon dioxide, and there were two new moons in the sky, one orbiting Uranus and one orbiting Neptune. He produced a monumental photographic atlas of the Moon at a time when men were landing on our nearest neighbor, and he played an important part in that effort. He also created some of the world’s major observatories in Hawai‘i and Chile. However, most remarkable was that the keys to his success sprang from his wartime activities, which led him to new techniques. This would change everything. Sears shows a brilliant but at times unpopular man who attracted as much dislike as acclaim. This in-depth history includes some of the twentieth century’s most intriguing scientists, from Harold Urey to Carl Sagan, who worked with—and sometimes against—the father of modern planetary science. Now, as NASA and other space agencies explore the solar system, they take with them many of the ideas and concepts first described by Gerard P. Kuiper.
The greatest engineering problem facing Australia - the tyranny of distance - had a solution: the electric telegraph, and its champion was the sheep-farming colony of South Australia. In two years, Charles Heavitree Todd, leading hundreds of men, constructed a telegraph line across the centre of the continent from Port Augusta to Darwin. At nearly 3,000 kilometres long and using 36,000 poles at '20 to the mile', it was a mammoth undertaking but in October 1872, Adelaide was finally linked to London. The Overland Telegraph Line crossed Aboriginal lands first seen by John McDouall Stuart just 10 years before. Messages which previously took weeks to cross the country now took hours. Passing through eleven new repeater stations and the remotest parts of Australia, the line joined the vast global telegraph network, and a new era was ushered in. Each station held a staff of six. They became centres of white civilization and the cattle or sheep industry and, in many places, the Aborigines were displaced. The unique stories of how men and women lived and/or died on the line range from heroic through desperate to tragic, but they remain an indelible part of Australia's history. '...a book written with heart and determination ... a lasting tribute to the inventiveness and tenacity of the people behind the planning, building and execution of the Overland Telegraph - a true nation building endeavour.' - His Excellency, The Honourable Hieu Van Le, AC.
Documenting the rise of the accountancy profession in Britain the authors of this volume focus on the individual - the professional accountant - and adopt an economic determinist analysis to explain why such a rise has occurred.
State formation after civil war offers a new model for studying the formation of the state in a national peace transition as an integrated national phenomenon. Current models of peacebuilding and state building limit that possibility, reproducing a fragmented, selective view of this complex reality. Placing too much emphasis on state building as design they place too little on understanding state formation as unplanned historical process. The dominant focus on national institutions also ignores the role that cities and civic polities have played in constituting the modern state. Mining ideas from many disciplines and evidence from 19 peace processes, including South Africa, the book argues that the starting point for building a systematic theory is to explain a distinct pattern to state formation that can be observed in practice: Despite their conflicts people in fragile societies bargain terms for peaceful coexistence, they make attempts to constitute the right to rule as valid state authority, in circumstances prone to conflict, over which they have imperfect influence, not control. Though the kind of institutions created will differ with context, how rules for state authority are institutionalized follows a consistent basic pattern. That pattern defines state formation in peace transitions as both a unified, if contingent, field of normative practice and an object of comparative study. Where the national-centric models see local government as a matter belonging to policy on decentralization for later in the reconstruction phase, the book uncovers a distinct "local government dimension" to peace transitions: A civic dimension to national conflicts that must be explained; incipient or proto-local authorities that emerge even during civil war, in peace making, after state collapse; the fact that it is common for peace agreements and constitutions to include rules for local authority, for local elections to be held as part of broader democratization, and for laws to be enacted to establish local government as part of peace compacts. The book develops the concept of local peace transition to explain the distinctive constitutive role of this local dimension in peace-making and state formation. This path-breaking book will be of compelling interest to practitioners, scholars and students of comparative constitutional studies, international law, peace building and state building.
Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL offers backgrounds in information studies, computer science, and sociology. This book is divided into three parts: analyzing social media, NodeXL tutorial, and social-media network analysis case studies. Part I provides background in the history and concepts of social media and social networks. Also included here is social network analysis, which flows from measuring, to mapping, and modeling collections of connections. The next part focuses on the detailed operation of the free and open-source NodeXL extension of Microsoft Excel, which is used in all exercises throughout this book. In the final part, each chapter presents one form of social media, such as e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and Youtube. In addition, there are descriptions of each system, the nature of networks when people interact, and types of analysis for identifying people, documents, groups, and events. Walks you through NodeXL, while explaining the theory and development behind each step, providing takeaways that can apply to any SNA Demonstrates how visual analytics research can be applied to SNA tools for the mass market Includes case studies from researchers who use NodeXL on popular networks like email, Facebook, Twitter, and wikis Download companion materials and resources at https://nodexl.codeplex.com/documentation
Johnson astutely reveals that franchises are not Borg-like assimilation machines, but, rather, complicated ecosystems within which creative workers strive to create compelling 'shared worlds.' This finely researched, breakthrough book is a must-read for anyone seeking a sophisticated understanding of the contemporary media industry." —Heather Hendershot, author of What's Fair on the Air?: Cold War Right-Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest While immediately recognizable throughout the U.S. and many other countries, media mainstays like X-Men, Star Trek, and Transformers achieved such familiarity through constant reincarnation. In each case, the initial success of a single product led to a long-term embrace of media franchising—a dynamic process in which media workers from different industrial positions shared in and reproduced familiar cultureacross television, film, comics, games, and merchandising. In Media Franchising, Derek Johnson examines the corporate culture behind these production practices, as well as the collaborative and creative efforts involved in conceiving, sustaining, and sharing intellectual properties in media work worlds. Challenging connotations of homogeneity, Johnson shows how the cultural and industrial logic of franchising has encouraged media industries to reimagine creativity as an opportunity for exchange among producers, licensees, and evenconsumers. Drawing on case studies and interviews with media producers, he reveals the meaningful identities, cultural hierarchies, and struggles for distinction that accompany collaboration within these production networks. Media Franchising provides a nuanced portrait of the collaborative cultural production embedded in both the media industries and our own daily lives.
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