New Books in Technology

Pegasus: How a Spy in Your Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity, and Democracy (Henry Holt, 2023) is the inside story of a worldwide investigation, sparked by the leak which revealed that cyber-intrusion and cyber-surveillance are happening with exponentially increasing frequency, across the globe. Pegasus, it turns out, is less a law enforcement tool than a weapon for hire and not only a threat to privacy but also to democracy, as the most notorious human-rights-violating governments and autocrat-wannabes are licensing and utilizing Pegasus spyware in the most vulnerable democracies in the world. Pegasus follows the personal stories of real victims--intrepid individuals who have spoken truth to some of the most corrupt, risible powers around the globe.Laurent Richard is a Paris-based award-winning documentary filmmaker and journalist who was named the 2018 European Journalist of the Year at the Prix Europa in Berlin. He is the founder of Forbidden Stories, a network of investigative journalists devoted continuing the unfinished work of murdered reporters to ensure the work they died for is not buried with them.Sandrine Rigaud is a French investigative journalist. As editor of Forbidden Stories since 2019, she coordinated the award-winning Pegasus Project and the Cartel Project, an international investigation of assassinated Mexican journalists.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Why technology is most transformative when it is playful, and innovative spatial design happens only when designers are both tinkerers and dreamers.In Urban Play: Make-Believe, Technology, and Space (MIT Press, 2021), Fábio Duarte and Ricardo Álvarez argue that the merely functional aspects of technology may undermine its transformative power. Technology is powerful not when it becomes optimally functional, but while it is still playful and open to experimentation. It is through play—in the sense of acting for one's own enjoyment rather than to achieve a goal—that we explore new territories, create new devices and languages, and transform ourselves. Only then can innovative spatial design create resonant spaces that go beyond functionalism to evoke an emotional response in those who use them.The authors show how creativity emerges in moments of instability, when a new technology overthrows an established one, or when internal factors change a technology until it becomes a different technology. Exploring the role of fantasy in design, they examine Disney World and its outsize influence on design and on forms of social interaction beyond the entertainment world. They also consider Las Vegas and Dubai, desert cities that combine technology with fantasies of pleasure and wealth. Video games and interactive media, they show, infuse the design process with interactivity and participatory dynamics, leaving spaces open to variations depending on the users' behavior. Throughout, they pinpoint the critical moments when technology plays a key role in reshaping how we design and experience spaces.Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington, 2022). His general area of study is on media representations of people and place at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on his next book where he conducted research on an annual canoeing and kayaking event that takes place on the Upper Mississippi River. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

The story of the British amusement arcade from the 1800s to the present. Amusement arcades are an important part of British culture, yet discussions of them tend to be based on American models. Alan Meades, who spent his childhood happily playing in British seaside arcades, presents the history of the arcade from its origins in traveling fairs of the 1800s to the present. Drawing on firsthand accounts of industry members and archival sources, including rare photographs and trade publications, he tells the story of the first arcades, the people who made the machines, the rise of video games, and the legislative and economic challenges spurred by public fears of moral decline. Arcade Britannia: A Social History of the British Amusement Arcade (MIT Press, 2022) highlights the differences between British and North American arcades, especially in terms of the complex relationship between gambling and amusements. He also underlines Britain’s role in introducing coin-operated technologies into Europe, as well as the industry’s close links to America and, especially, Japan. He shows how the British arcade is a product of centuries of public play, gambling, entrepreneurship, and mechanization. Examining the arcade’s history through technological, social, cultural, biographic, and legislative perspectives, he describes a pendulum shift between control and liberalization, as well as the continued efforts of concerned moralists to limit and regulate public play. Finally, he recounts the impact on the industry of legislative challenges that included vicious taxation, questions of whether copyright law applied to video-game code, and the peculiar moment when every arcade game in Britain was considered a cinema.Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

What’s actually going on in a cell–or on the spiky outside of an invading virus? Gael McGill, Director of Molecular Visualization at the Center for Molecular and Cellular Dynamics at Harvard Medical School is founder and CEO of Digizyme and has spent his career exploring and developing different modes for visualizing evidence.For this scientific conversation taped back in 2021, Recall this Book host John is joined once again by Brandeis neuroscientist Gina Turrigiano (think ep 4 Madeline Miller; think ep 2 Addiction!).You may want to check out Digizyme‘s images of the spike protein attaching the SARS-CoV2 virus to a hapless cell and fusing their membranes. Or click through to watch a gorgeous video Gael and his team have created.Mentioned in the Episode: Gael praised Galileo’s revolutionary images (drawings? diagrams?) of Jupiter’s moons: Leonardo’s stunning anatomical drawings: The DNA Double-Helix: We all knew that Watson and Crick‘s revelation came with this model: But it’s easy to forget this indispensable antecedent: the enigmatic yet foundational x-ray crystallography of Rosalind Franklin: “All models are wrong; some are useful.”smiley statistician George Box “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 115 And what sort of deceptive picture did Wittgenstein have in mind? well, how about the 1904 “Plum-pudding model” of what the atom might look like? Wrong, and productive of all sorts of mistaken hypotheses. Gina credited the beautiful drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal with inspiring and illuminating generations of neuroscientists. John credits Science in the Marketplace, an edited collection reminding us that even in crowded lecture-halls, to display science may also mean doing science….. Gael ended his historical tour by praising David Goodsell, cell-painter extraordinaire: John also raved (as he is wont to do) about cave paintings as the first animation in the world (e.g. these horses from Peche-Merle). Listen and Read Here:47 Glimpsing COVID: Gael McGill on Data Visualization Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Zack Furness, an associate professor of communications at Penn State Greater Allegheny, talks about his 2010 book, One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility (Temple University Press), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. One Less Car examines the history of how bicycles became a tool and object of advocacy and activism. With roots going back 1960s countercultures and growing through punk subcultures and the Critical Mass movement, bicycle activism has been an important focus of environmentalism and countering what Furness calls the “automobile-industrial complex.” Over a wide-ranging conversation, Furness and Vinsel also discuss Furness’s more recent research project on the history of Israeli punk bands. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Before there were Instagram likes, Twitter hashtags, or TikTok trends, there were bloggers who seemed to have the passion and authenticity that traditional media lacked. The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media (Princeton UP, 2023) tells the story of how early digital creators scrambling for work amid the Great Recession gave rise to the multibillion-dollar industry that has fundamentally reshaped culture, the flow of information, and the way we relate to ourselves and each other.Drawing on dozens of in-depth interviews with leading social media influencers, brand executives, marketers, talent managers, trend forecasters, and others, Emily Hund shows how early industry participants focused on creating and monetizing digital personal brands as a means of exerting control over their professional destinies in a time of acute economic uncertainty. Over time, their activities coalesced into an industry whose impact has reached far beyond the dreams of its progenitors--and beyond their control. Hund illustrates how the methods they developed for creating, monetizing, and marketing social media content have permeated our lives and untangles the unforeseen cultural and economic costs.The Influencer Industry reveals how, in an increasingly fractured and profit-driven communications environment, the people we think of as "real" are merely those who have learned to exploit the industry's ever-shifting constructions of authenticity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Eric Hintz, a historian and fellowship coordinator with the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, talks about his book, American Independent Inventors in an Era of Corporate R&D, with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. The two discuss why independent inventors are often invisible in histories of 20th century invention and innovation, the role that independent inventors played in the two world wars, and the complicated history of gender and race around invention, which was a path of both promise and risk for women and black people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Aaron Gordon, Senior Writer at Motherboard, Vice’s science and technology website, talks about his co-authored article, “‘The Least Safe Day’: Rollout of Gun-Detecting AI Scanners Has Been a ‘Cluster,’ Emails Show,” with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. They also discuss Gordon’s career trajectory, going from a sports reporter to a writer focused on infrastructure, maintenance, bureaucracy, and related topics. Additionally, the two chat about systematic bottlenecks around electric vehicles, a promising technology too-often cast as a cure-all. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

In 14 original essays, The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book (Oxford UP, 2022) reveals the history of books in all their various forms, from the ancient world to the digital present. Leading international scholars offer an original and richly illustrated narrative that is global in scope.The history of the book is the history of millions of written, printed, and illustrated texts, their manufacture, distribution, and reception. Here are different types of production, from clay tablets to scrolls, from inscribed codices to printed books, pamphlets, magazines, and newspapers, from written parchment to digital texts. The history of the book is a history of different methods of circulation and dissemination, all dependent on innovations in transport, from coastal and transoceanic shipping to roads, trains, planes and the internet. It is a history of different modes of reading and reception, from learned debate and individual study to public instruction and entertainment. It is a history of manufacture, craftsmanship, dissemination, reading and debate.Yet the history of books is not simply a question of material form, nor indeed of the history of reading and reception. The larger question is of the effect of textual production, distribution and reception - of how books themselves made history. To this end, each chapter of this volume, succinctly bounded by period and geography, offers incisive and stimulating insights into the relationship between books and the story of their times.James Raven is Professor of Modern History at the University of Essex and a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge. Formerly he was Reader in Social and Cultural History, University of Oxford, and Professorial Fellow of Mansfield College. He is the author, editor and co-editor of numerous books in early modern and modern British, European and colonial history, including Judging New Wealth (1992); The Practice and Representation of Reading (1996); The English Novel 1770-1829 (2000); Free Print and Non-Commercial Publishing (2000); London Booksellers and American Customers (2002); Lost Libraries (2004); The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade (2007); Books between Europe and the Americas (2011); Publishing Business (2014) and Bookscape: Geographies of Printing and Publishing in London before 1800 (2014).Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found at https://fifteenminutefilm.podb... and on Twitter @15MinFilm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Communication researcher Nirit Weiss-Blatt talks about her book, The Techlash and Tech Crisis Communication, as well as some of her recent and forthcoming pieces on the digital technology industry with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Weiss-Blatt’s work examines both the rise of the “techlash”—the development of negative public and expert sentiment about the digital technology industry—and how company public relations efforts responded to this development. Weiss-Blatt and Vinsel also talk about how some claims about the negative impacts of social media do not seem to hold up to empirical scrutiny and what all of this means for regulation of the digital technology industry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology