Showing titles in Media Studies

Research polls, media interviews, and everyday conversations reveal an unsettling truth: citizens, while well-meaning and even passionate about current affairs, appear to know very little about politics. Hundreds of surveys document vast numbers of citizens answering even basic questions about government incorrectly. Given this unfortunate state of affairs, it is not surprising that more knowledgeable people often deride the public for its ignorance.

In 2021, when the gavel fell at Christie’s on the sale of Mike Winkelmann’s Everydays series—a compilation of 5,000 digital artworks—it made a thunderous announcement: Non-fungible tokens had arrived. The ludicrous world of CryptoKitties and Bored Apes had just produced a piece of art worth $69.3 million (at least according to the highest bidder). On that day, the traditional art market—the largest unregulated market in the world—put its stamp of approval on a very new and carnivalesque digital reality. But what did it mean for these two worlds to collide?

Everyone reads the headlines. Millennials aren’t buying diamonds or saving for retirement. Millennials want cushy jobs handed to them by organizations with futuristic nap pods. Millennials are killing the housing market because they eat too many avocados. The truth is, millennials were raised being told they could do anything if they worked hard, and then they worked hard only to be told the world owes them nothing. Here’s a headline people need to read: Millennials were set up. The tide of young adults standing up for themselves is culminating in massive societal change.

The book, Diary of a Conspiracy Theorist, tells the experience of an alleged conspiracy theorist seeing through the lies behind the lockdowns and Covid-19. Scott Anderson, a twin and engineer born and living in the Scottish Highlands was just a normal guy working in construction in 2019, whilst he was aware of previous events and their dishonest backgrounds, he knew something big was coming but it wasn’t quite as he expected.

With security scares like the Heartbleed bug (which compromised even supposedly safe internet behemoths like Google and Yahoo!) becoming more commonplace, this book is a must-listen for anybody who values their privacy in a wired world.

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.

Jesse Ventura's Marijuana Manifesto calls for an end to the War on Drugs. Just because something is illegal, that doesn't mean it goes away; it just means that criminals run it. Legalizing marijuana will serve to rejuvenate our pathetic economy and just might make people a little happier. Ventura's book will show us all how we can take our country back.

The rules of entertainment have changed. Last year the vlogger PewDiePie made more money from his YouTube videos than high-profile movie stars such as Meryl Streep, Cameron Diaz and Anne Hathaway. And no one knows more about how it works than Robert Kyncl, chief business officer at YouTube. YouTube is the first truly global media platform, reaching 87 percent of all online adults in the UK.

In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Amaranth Borsuk considers the history of the book, the future of the book, and the idea of the book. Tracing the interrelationship of form and content in the book's development, she bridges book history, book arts, and electronic literature to expand our definition of an object we thought we knew intimately. Contrary to the many reports of its death (which has been blamed at various times on newspapers, television, and e-readers), the book is alive.

When a murderous psychopath goes on a killing spree, law enforcement officials and the media never make his religion the central issue - unless he happens to be a Muslim. Then it sets off another frenzied wave of commentary about the inherent evils that lurk within the Muslim faith. From Fox News talking heads, who regularly smear Muslim leaders as secret terrorists, to Bill Maher, who has made Islam a routine target, it has become widely acceptable to libel a religion with a following of over 1.5 billion people.

The most powerful political tool of the modern presidency is control of the message and the image. In Republic of Spin - a vibrant history covering more than 100 years of politics - presidential historian David Greenberg recounts the rise of the White House spin machine, from Teddy Roosevelt to Barack Obama. His sweeping, startling narrative takes us behind the scenes to see how the tools and techniques of image making and message craft work.

As is often observed, Trump is a symptom of a virus that has been incubating for at least 50 years. But not often observed is where the virus is imbedded: in the psychic core of our identity. In American Manifesto: Saving Democracy from Villains, Vandals, and Ourselves, Bob Garfield examines the tragic confluence of the American preoccupation with identity and the catastrophic disintegration of the mass media.

Have you ever seen a baby pigeon? You haven’t, have you? No one has, not in many, many years. They used to be everywhere. You couldn’t walk out of your front door in New York City in the 1930s without seeing dozens of those little guys scurrying around. Today, there are millions of grown up pigeons in New York, but not a baby pigeon to be seen. That’s because they come out of the factory as adults. In Birds Aren’t Real, whistleblowers Peter McIndoe and Connor Gaydos trace the roots of a political conspiracy so vast and well-hidden that it almost seems like an elaborate hoax.

Provocative political commentator Arianna Huffington yanks back the curtain on the unholy alliance of CEOs, politicians, lobbyists, and Wall Street bankers who have shown a brutal disregard for those in office cubicles and on factory floors.

The world is full of secrets and things that have yet to be learned. We can’t imagine that everything we hear on the news and media is completely truthful. Whether things start out as a cover-up for the truth or somebody had the wrong information to begin with, there are a number of things in life that we may not know the entire story about. This book is about some of those types of things. Whether you are already a conspiracy theory buff or you’re just looking for something interesting to hear, this book can provide you with some amazing information.

Pedogate Primer is a concise intro and overview of a growing child abuse epidemic worldwide. Pedogate Primer delves into material that for many may seem like the stuff of conspiracy theory. For this reason the book draws on academic sources, declassified documents and other reliable sources and steers clear of conjecture. Such shocking, true stories need no embellishment.

Disinformation: The Nature of Facts and Lies in the Post-Truth Era cannot cure all the ills of a post-truth world, but by demonstrating how the emergence of digital technology into everyday life has knitted together a number of seemingly loosely related forces-historical, psychological, economic, and cultural-to create the post-truth culture, Disinformation will help you better understand how we got to where we now are, see how we can move beyond a culture in which facts are too easily dismissed, and develop a few highly practical skills for separating truth from lies.

Discover the leaders of the Knights Templar, the fiercest warriors of the Church during the Crusades, from beginning to end. The Knights Templar is one of history’s greatest mysteries. They began as a completely transparent, public apparatus of European Christendom in the Middle Ages but eventually transformed into what many would regard as a secret society. Leading the Knights throughout these changes were their Grand Masters. These men were military as well as spiritual masters who led by their own example.

Corona ist eine Erfindung der Pharmaindustrie! Menschen, die daran erkranken, müssen so für ihre Sünden büßen! Oder: Das Virus wurde in chinesischen Geheimlaboren gezüchtet! Verschwörungstheorien verbreiten sich nicht nur im Netz wie Lauffeuer und sind schon lange kein Randphänomen mehr. Katharina Nocun und Pia Lamberty beschreiben, wie sich Menschen aus der Mitte der Gesellschaft durch Verschwörungstheorien radikalisieren und die Demokratie als Ganzes ablehnen. Welche Rolle spielen neue Medien in diesem Prozess?

A deep dive into UFO cover-ups by the deep state. A wake-up call to what has and is being hidden.