Category: Read
📗 Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci
👓 My book, Twitter and Tear Gas, is out! News and Details! | Zeynep Tufekci
Dear Friends, My book, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, is officially out today, as of May 16th! It is published by Yale University Press, and it weaves stories w…
Some news: there will be a free creative commons copy of my book. It will be available as a free PDF download in addition to being sold as a bound book. This is with the hopes that anyone who wants to read it can do so without worrying about the cost. However, this also means that I need to ask that a few people who can afford to do so to please consider purchasing a copy. This is not just so that Yale University Press can do this for more authors, but also because if it is not sold (at least a little bit!) in the initial few weeks, bookstores will not stock it and online algorithms will show it to fewer people. No sales will mean less visibility, and less incentive for publishers to allow other authors creative commons copies. ❧
I negotiated the creative commons copy with my (wonderful!) publisher Yale University Press because I really wanted to do what I could to share my insights as broadly as I could about social movements and the networked public sphere. If I make a penny more from this book because it sells well by some miracle, I will donate every extra penny to groups supporting refugees, and if I ever meet you in person and you purchased a copy of the book in support, please let me know and I’ll buy the coffee or beer. 😀 This isn’t at all about money for me.
An excellent example of academic samizdat
November 28, 2018 at 11:24AM
👓 Think Melania’s red forest is kooky? Consider the Christmas tree once hidden in a White House closet. | Washington Post
President Benjamin Harrison is credited with starting the tradition of having a Christmas tree inside the White House in 1889 when he set up a tree for his grandchildren. The tree glowed with wax candles, and Harrison even dressed up as Santa Claus. “Let me hope,” the president said, “that my example will be followed by every family in the land.”
👓 'Sneaky Pete' Producers Adjusting Season 3 After Ricky Jay's Death | Hollywood Reporter
The magician and actor, who died Saturday, had his final acting role on the Amazon series.
👓 The Biggest Scam in Publishing? | Good e-reader
The digital publishing revolution is so old that a great many reading consumers might not be able to envision a time when they couldn’t simply pop online to order a book, download a new title from their favorite author, or use an app or PDF for supplemental book material. eBooks and digital publishing have simply become a part of everyday life for many people.
👓 Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith Wins Miss. Senate Runoff After Racially Charged Campaign | NPR
Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith won the Senate runoff in Mississippi by a margin of 54-to-46 percent, according to the Associated Press, overcoming a series of missteps that brought the state's dark history of racism and violence to the forefront. Hyde-Smith, who was appointed to the Senate earlier this year after Republican Thad Cochran stepped down because of health reasons, defeated former congressman and agriculture secretary Mike Espy. Neither candidate had won the requisite 50 percent in the first round of the special election on Election Day. She is the first woman elected to the Senate from Mississippi.
Too often I’m just saddened at what America is producing.
👓 Why suicide is falling around the world, and how to bring it down more | The Economist
Urbanisation, fewer forced marriages and more curbs on the means of self-destruction
👓 Special measures: well-being | Economist Espresso
How should society’s progress be measured? GDP tends to be used as a proxy. But its imperfections are widely known: it focuses on market-oriented production, for instance, and ignores how the gains from that output are distributed. Today experts gather in Seoul to discuss work on alternative measures led by Joseph Stiglitz and Jean-Paul Fitoussi, two eminent economists, and commissioned by the OECD, a group of mostly rich countries. Their report recommends adding a number of indicators to policymakers’ dashboards, including measures of inequality, environmental sustainability, happiness and trust. Economic insecurity—such as income buffers available to people when trouble strikes—also matters. If governments had considered insecurity during the 2007-08 financial crisis, they would have provided their economies with more support, and continued to do so even after GDP started to recover. But, as the report says, “what you measure affects what you do.”
👓 MSNBC declines to allow Sarah Sanders to dictate its programming | Washington Post
It had been nearly a month since Sarah Sanders had held what was once known as a “daily” briefing. So when the White House press secretary — along with White House officials Larry Kudlow and John Bolton — took the podium on Tuesday afternoon, cable-news channels jumped right on the proceedings. Well, most of them, anyway. While CNN and Fox News carried the tripartite briefing from the very beginning, MSNBC stayed away — until it had blown off the entire session.
👓 Opinion | Maybe They’re Just Bad People | New York Times
Not all Trump support is ideological.
👓 Twitter and Tear Gas: part two of our book club’s reading | Bryan Alexander
With this post we discuss Chapters 2: “Censorship and Attention” and 3: “Leading the Leaderless”.
👓 Twitter and Tear Gas: part one of our book club’s reading | Bryan Alexander
With this post we discuss the Preface, Introduction, and chapter 1, “A Networked Public.”
In this post I’ll briefly summarize the text, then add some reflections and questions. You can participate by writing comments here, or through whichever other means you like (Twitter comments, Hypothes.is annotations, etc.).
👓 Our Twitter and Teargas book club reading schedule | Bryan Alexander
The schedule runs as follows:
November 19, 2018: Preface, Introduction, and chapter 1, “A Networked Public”.
November 26: Chapters 2: “Censorship and Attention” and 3: “Leading the Leaderless”.
December 3: Chapters 4: “Movement Cultures” and 5: “Technology and People”.
December 10: Chapters 6: “Platforms and Algorithms” and 7: “Names and Connections”.
December 17: Chapters 8: “Signaling Power and Signaling to Power” and 9: “Governments Strike Back”.
December 24: Epilogue, “The Uncertain Climb.”
As I’m looking at this, folks who want a quick and brief background (or who need to be sold on the importance of the topic) may appreciate Frontline’s recent two part documentary which I recently watched [1][2]. Tufekci appears and gives some excellent commentary in it. For additional overview/background, I’ll also recommend her three TED talks which I’ve watched in the recent past.[1][2][3] I suspect they cover some of the details in this book.
👓 Our next book club reading is Zeynep Tufekci’s Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest | Bryan Alexander
How our reading will proceed: in a few days I’ll blog up a reading schedule, assigning certain chapters to a weekly timeline. Then, once enough time has passed for everyone to get an analog or digital copy, we’ll dig in. All posts will be tagged https://bryanalexander.org/tag/tufekci/, and so will be available in that one spot for any reader now and in the future.
From the author’s bio (and it’s pronounced /too-FEK-chee/):
Zeynep’s work explores the interactions between technology and society. She started her career as a programmer, and switched to social science after getting interested in social impacts of technology. Zeynep, who grew up in Istanbul, Turkey, and came to the United States for graduate school, is now an associate professor at the University of North Carolina and a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times. She’s currently also a faculty associate at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Previously, she was an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, a fellow at Princeton University Center for Information Technology, and an assistant professor of sociology at UMBC.
Still, it’s almost assuredly reading for the additional details. I’m hoping she has more detail on her work on the the Civil Rights Movement as a precursor to her more digital social media work.