A Political Economy of Canadian Broadcasting takes readers from the days of the telegraph to the current digital age, examining the role of public broadcasting in anglophone Canada in the wider context of regulation, private capital, and foreign programming. This comprehensive history spans over a hundred years, from the 1920s to the present, encompassing the establishment […]
The United States is awash in manipulated information about everything from election results to the effectiveness of medical treatments. Corporate social media is an especially good channel for manipulative communication, with Facebook a particularly willing vehicle for it. In Social Engineering, Robert Gehl and Sean Lawson show that online misinformation has its roots in earlier […]
The term “Dark Web” conjures up drug markets, unregulated gun sales, stolen credit cards. But, as Robert Gehl points out in Weaving the Dark Web, for each of these illegitimate uses, there are other, legitimate ones: the New York Times's anonymous whistleblowing system, for example, and the use of encryption by political dissidents. Defining the […]
Many users of the Internet are aware of bots: automated programs that work behind the scenes to come up with search suggestions, check the weather, filter emails, or clean up Wikipedia entries. More recently, a new software robot has been making its presence felt in social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter – the […]
Robert Gehl's timely critique, Reverse Engineering Social Media, rigorously analyzes the ideas of social media and software engineers, using these ideas to find contradictions and fissures beneath the surfaces of glossy sites such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Gehl adeptly uses a mix of software studies, science and technology studies, and political economy to reveal […]
Lecturer Florence Jacobowitz, who has worked within the Department of Communications & Media, as well as the Department of Humanities, has published a new book entitled Isabelle Huppert, Modernist Performance that looks at the work of French actress Isabelle Huppert. She argues that the actress’s oeuvre constitutes one of the most significant feminist bodies of […]
The book examines how refusing to engage in new technologies, and being skeptical of them, can lead to new possibilities in various communities. The book was a collaborative project by The DISCO Network (Digital Inquiry Speculation Collaboration Optimism Network) which is an intergenerational collective of researchers, artists, technologists, policymakers, and practitioners working together to challenge […]
This book bridges media, technocultural, urban and journalism studies to examine the role of journalism in relation to a smart city project on Toronto’s waterfront. From the announcement of the public-private partnership called Sidewalk Toronto to the project’s termination, a mediatized controversy unfolded. Through an assemblage approach to this project and a case study of […]
Textile has been used as a medium of communication since the prehistoric period. Up until the 19th century, civilizations throughout the world manipulated thread and fabric to communicate in a way that would astound many of us now. Unlike text and images, textile is haptic and three-dimensional. Its meaning is unfixed, constantly shifting as it […]
“Two Minds, Three talks, One Life” is built around the idea that every conversation is important at two levels (1) the larger situation its part of – how the social, and cultural backgrounds of the people talking may influence the way they communicate, and (2) the needs and intentions of people as they speak to […]