Archives de catégorie : Anthropology/Sociology

THE SHAPE OF SOUND de Fiona Murphy

Blending memoir with observations on the healthcare industry, THE SHAPE OF SOUND is a story about the corrosive power of secrets, stigma and shame, and how deaf experiences and disability are shaped by economics, social policy, medicine and societal expectations.

THE SHAPE OF SOUND
by Fiona Murphy
Text Publishing Australia, April 2021

I am still unlearning the habit of secrecy. And yet, whenever somebody discovers that I am deaf, my body still reacts with churning terror. How do you build up a sense of robust pride when your body has taught itself to be fearful?
Fiona Murphy’s memoir about being deaf is a revelation.
Secrets are heavy, burdensome things. Imagine carrying a secret that if exposed could jeopardise your chances of securing a job and make you a social outcast. Fiona Murphy kept her deafness a secret for over twenty-five years. But then, desperate to hold onto a career she’d worked hard to pursue, she tried hearing aids. Shocked by how the world sounded, she vowed never to wear them again. After an accident to her hand, she discovered that sign language could change her life, and that Deaf culture could be part of her identity. Just as Fiona thought she was beginning to truly accept her body, she was diagnosed with a rare condition that causes the bones of the ears to harden. She was steadily losing her residual hearing. The news left her reeling. This is the story of how Fiona learns to listen to her body.

Fiona Murphy is a Deaf poet and essayist. Her work has been published in Kill Your Darlings, Overland, Griffith Review and the Big Issue, among other publications. In 2019, she was awarded the Overland Fair Australia Essay Prize and the Monash Undergraduate Creative Writing Prize. In 2018, she was shortlisted for the Richell Prize and highly commended by the Wheeler Centre Next Chapter program.

FILTERWORLD de Kyle Chayka

Author of The Longing For Less and a contributor to The New Yorker and NYT Magazine, Kyle Chayka’s FILTERWORLD focuses on the history and investigation of living in a world ruled by algorithms, which profoundly determine and shape culture in both digital and physical spaces, leading to flat and frictionless experiences that are remaking human identity.

FILTERWORLD:
How Algorithms Flattened Culture
by Kyle Chayka
Doubleday, Fall 2023
(via Frances Goldin Literary)

You’ve seen the smooth, uncanny artifacts: a blank, white café that looks like it could be located anywhere in the world; TikTok dance videos repeating in a dull echo; restaurant design and food plating which begs to be posted on Instagram; endlessly bingeable streaming television; influencers’ faces made up and surgically altered towards a certain photogenic ideal. While appearing in different mediums, these pieces of culture are characterized by a slick sameness. Rather than provoking us, they’re pleasing, ambient, frictionless.
In this new book, Kyle Chayka argues that these seemingly disparate cultural phenomena all have been shaped by a similar force: the algorithms governing and filtering the content that appears on digital platforms. We increasingly live in a world where the culture we encounter is not simply curated by these algorithms, but in which algorithms profoundly determine and shape culture itself in both digital and physical spaces. Chayka names this new reality, of a world both inescapably mediated and changed by algorithmic filtration, “Filterworld”.
In FILTERWORLD, Chayka traces a brief history of how we arrived in this place—from the rise of the algorithm through the corresponding erosion of human curation and taste—before launching a penetrating exploration of the flat hallmarks of Filterworld byproducts and the way that algorithmically determined taste is fundamentally reshaping human identity. Ultimately a pointed critique of the frictionless culture of Filterworld, the book turns towards what we might do to escape and dismantle this numbing cycle.
Building on the popular criticism Kyle Chayka has published for both The New Yorker online and elsewhere, FILTERWORLD is the product of a career spent as one of our keenest observers of the intersection of technology and modern culture. While much has been written about the way that algorithms impact everything from news to policy, there has been no major book published on the impact of algorithms on culture.
FILTERWORLD will appeal strongly to readers of Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror and Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing: a book that not only seeks to give language to the slippery ways that technology is reshaping our lived experience, but also gives readers tools to imagine a world in which things could be otherwise.

Kyle Chayka is a freelance writer and critic whose work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, the New Republic, Rolling Stone, n+1, Vox, the Paris Review, and other publications. He has contributed chapters to Reading Pop Culture: A Portable Anthology and A Companion to Digital Art. Chayka is cofounder of Study Hall, a newsletter and digital community for journalists. He began his career as a visual art critic for Hyperallergic in Brooklyn, and now lives in Washington, D.C.

OUTRAGE MACHINE de Tobias Rose-Stockwell

An invaluable guide to the underlying machinery and technology that controls modern society – and a roadmap to navigate it. Foreword by social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind.

OUTRAGE MACHINE:
How Tech Amplifies Discontent and Disrupts Democracy―And What We Can Do About It
by Tobias Rose-Stockwell
Legacy Lit/Hachette US, July 2023
(via Park & Fine)

Throughout history, new technologies have disrupted our capacity to make sense of the world, from the printing press to the telegraph, from radio to television. OUTRAGE MACHINE explores the serious recent disruption caused by social media, and how it has triggered an urgent society-wide crisis of trust. Drawing from deep historical context, as well as cutting-edge research, author, designer, and media researcher Tobias Rose-Stockwell shows how social media has bound us to an unprecedented outrage machine, training us to react rather than reflect, and attack rather than debate.
Rose-Stockwell expertly illustrates how social media platforms were unintentionally designed to reward outrage and penalize tolerance, leading to distorted public conversations that live at the extremes and deepen political divisions. Pulling from extensive personal experience in tech and media, he exposes the triggers and tactics used to exploit our anger, unpacking how these technologies hack our deep tribal instincts and cognitive biases. These tools have now become opportunistic platforms for authoritarians and a threat to democratic norms everywhere.
​But this book is not just about the problem. OUTRAGE MACHINE situates social media within a historical cycle of intense conflict and emerging tolerance. Using clear language and powerful illustrations, this book reveals the magnitude of the challenges we face, while offering realistic solutions and a promising pathway out.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell is a renowned media researcher and strategic advisor to Jonathan Haidt’s organization, OpenMind. Tobias’s work has been featured in major outlets such as The Atlantic, FastCompany, Quartz, Medium, NPR, the BBC, and many others. In his role as a media researcher, he has advised the directors of Gannett, one of the largest news organizations in the country, and was also a guest lecturer at Stanford University. He has been honored with the Unsung Hero Award by the 14th Dalai Lama for his work helping to rebuild essential infrastructure in Cambodia. Tobias lives in New York.
Jonathan Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. He lives in New York City.

Série « Photographs That Make You Think » de Henry Carroll

HUMANS, Abrams Image, October 2021:
A startling and original look at what it means to be human in a rapidly changing world, from bestselling author and art writer Henry Carroll, with images by a diverse and innovative group of contemporary photographers.
See through the eyes of a new generation of photographers responding to the rapidly unfolding issues shaping our lives. In this series of small, insightful, and beautifully presented books, Henry Carroll, the bestselling photography writer of the last decade, considers the ideas behind images to present personal perspectives on climate change, race, sexuality, gender, faith, inequality, beauty, power, and our contradictory relationship to animals and the natural world. The first book in the series, HUMANS, reveals how contemporary photographers use visual language to pose honest and confronting questions about our bodies, the purpose of faith in a fact-based world, systemic social structures that limit and allow freedom, and the opposing forces of unconditional love and abject cruelty.
In this diverse collection of arresting images and insightful text, Carroll regards the photographers as modern-day philosophers, original thinkers who fuse technique, concept, and imagination in order to provoke meaningful visual reflections on what matters most. For both creators and consumers of images, HUMANS is an immersive and supremely relevant book offering a treasure trove of ideas and visual inspiration designed to cultivate a deeper, more personal understanding of who we are, why we are, and what we think.

ANIMALS, Abrams Image, October 2021:
An innovative and insightful look at our relationship with animals in the age of the Anthropocene with original images from an array of contemporary photographers.
See through the eyes of a new generation of photographers responding to the rapidly unfolding issues shaping our lives. In this series of small, revealing, and beautifully presented books, Henry Carroll, the bestselling photography writer of the last decade, considers the ideas behind images to present personal perspectives on climate change, race, sexuality, gender, faith, inequality, beauty, power, and the natural world. In this second book of the series, ANIMALS, Carroll deep-dives into an ecosystem of contemporary images to consider how we relate to animals in the Anthropocene. His accessible analysis of emotive imagery suggests that our appreciation for some animals and disregard, or repulsion, for others is shaped by our own physicality as much as theirs. He shows how the conventions of natural history offer a very politicized understanding of fauna and how the role of animals as spiritual, cultural, and personal symbols can be an equally valid means of classification. Carroll reflects on the psychological power struggles infusing our daily interactions with animals and unpacks the photographers’ visual insights relating to our treatment of animals, whether it’s the way we pamper them as pets or consume them to excess. In this diverse collection of arresting images and engaging text, Carroll regards the photographers as modern-day philosophers, original thinkers who show us how to fuse technique, concept, and imagination in order to pose intriguing questions about the animal kingdom and human nature. For both the creators and consumers of images, this timely book contains a treasure trove of meaningful visual reflections that will prompt you to rethink your relationship with animals both domestic and wild.

LAND, Abrams Image, March 2022:
A look at sublime landscapes, with images from today’s most innovative photographers.
How do the most diverse and relevant voices of contemporary photography respond to the urgent issues of today? In this series of small, insightful, and beautifully presented books, Henry Carroll, the bestselling photography writer of the last decade, unpacks the ideas behind images to reflect on race, gender, faith, inequality, beauty, politics, and our shifting relationship to animals, nature, and the environment. Following HUMANS and ANIMALS, the third book in the series, LAND, considers humanity’s changing relationship with the sublime, a relationship that has seen us edge further away from real encounters. The photographs explore how the sublime can, and has been, commodified, packaged, and distributed, leading to an alarming emotional distancing. With images from a diverse group of photographers, Carroll explores the impermanence of borders, the human reaction to scenes of devastation on Instagram feeds, and the many variables that inform one’s relationship to land. He considers how a photographer’s response to landscape is subjective, full of meaning that’s colored by their own psyches, foibles, fears, and hopes. With captivating and striking photography, Henry Carroll invites the reader to contemplate how their inner world influences their interactions with the natural world.

Henry Carroll is a writer, editor, and concept developer. He is the author of the series Read This If You Want to Take Great Photographs, as well as Photographers on Photography: How the Masters See, Think & Shoot, and the children’s books Be a Super Awesome Photographer and Be a Super Awesome Artist. He is originally from London and has an MFA from the Royal College of Art. Carroll now lives in Los Angeles.

HOW TRUST WORKS de Peter H. Kim

A timely and important examination of one of the most essential factors in all successful relationships: trust, by a leading expert in the field of trust, betrayal and redemption, in a debut book that is the result of more than twenty years of research into the science of trust repair.

HOW TRUST WORKS (And The Science of How to Repair It)
by Dr. Peter H. Kim
Flatiron, Publication Date TBD

In HOW TRUST WORKS, Dr. Kim will explain the two most powerful determinants of trust (perceived competence and perceived integrity) and why those determinants can be weighted so unevenly when we are deciding whether to trust or forgive someone—or not. We as humans are bad at determining the trustworthiness of other people, and we are even worse at defending our own trustworthiness when it comes under fire. Yet despite this shortcoming, and the fact that we are all keenly aware of how important trust is in all of our personal and professional relationships, surprisingly little substantive research had been done on the topic before Dr. Kim began his inquiries. In fact, the majority of our institutional knowledge at the time seemed to rely almost entirely on case studies and other anecdotes. Dr. Kim was forced to develop his own set of rigorous scientific tools that would help him analyze how people interact with one another in the face of conflict.
Dr. Kim will illustrate how the patterns he identified in the lab play out in the real world using both recent and infamously public examples of trust violations and attempts at repair. These examples range from why the public was willing to overlook Arnold Schwarzenegger’s sex scandal but never forgave Bill Clinton, to revisiting the 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville and reactions to the police killing of George Floyd, including an examination of how different cultures can develop very different views about what constitutes an irredeemable transgression.

A Professor of Management and Organization at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business, Dr. Peter H. Kim is a leading expert in the field of trust, betrayal and redemption. His work has been published in leading scientific journals, including the Journal of Experimental Psychology, as well as in popular news outlets such as The New York Times, TIME, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, NPR, and others. Dr. Kim was born in Korea, and his family came to the United States when he was a child. He has given talks in Australia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Turkey, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea and Canada, and he hopes to expand his international speaking circuit as soon as it is safe to do so.