Before the totalitarian reign of Mao Zedong and his immediate successors, never in human history had an entire nation been under such intense surveillance. The Chinese not only had to speak alike; they had to think alike. Traveling to China regularly since 1967, and spending all of 2005 and 2006 there, Guy Sorman saw it all, and in this jaw-dropping book, he documents the horrifying stories of China through the 21st century. He shows how the Party's primary concern is not improving the lives of the downtrodden; it seeks power more than it seeks social development. It expends extraordinary energy in suppressing Chinese freedoms-the media operate under suffocating censorship, and political opposition can result in expulsion or prison-even as it tries to seduce the West, which has conferred greater legitimacy on it than do the Chinese themselves.

In this insightful social commentary, David Weinberger goes beyond misdirected hype to reveal what is truly revolutionary about the Web. Just as Marshall McLuhan forever altered our view of broadcast media, Weinberger shows that the Web is transforming not only social institutions but also bedrock concepts of our world such as space, time, self, knowledge-even reality itself. Through stories of life on the Web, a unique take on Web sites, and a pervasive sense of humor, Weinberger is the first to put the Web into the social and intellectual context we need to begin assessing its true impact on our lives. The irony, according to Weinberger, is that this seemingly weird new technology is more in tune with our authentic selves than is the modern world. Funny, provocative, and ultimately hopeful, Small Pieces Loosely Joined makes us look at the Web as never before.

This volume brings together contributions from researchers in the field of social cognition, whose work reflects the full range of ways that goals and cognitive processes interact in mediating social phenomena and processes. The text should be of interest to students and scholars in social and cognitive psychology alike.

"In Screening Social Justice, award-winning anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner presents an ethnographic study of Brave New Films, a nonprofit film production company that makes documentaries intended to mobilize progressive grassroots activism. Ortner positions the work of the company within a tradition of activist documentary filmmaking and within the larger field of "alternative media" that is committed to challenging the mainstream media and telling the truth about the world today. The company's films cover a range of social justice issues, with particular focus on the hidden workings of capitalism, racism, and right-wing extremism. Beyond the films themselves, Brave New Films is also famous for its creative distribution strategies. All of the films are available for free on YouTube. Central to the intention of promoting political activism, the films circulate through networks of other activist and social justice organizations and are shown almost entirely in live screenings in which the power of the film is amplified. Ortner takes the reader inside both the production process and the screenings to show how a film can be made and used to mobilize action for a better world"--

Mixing biography, autobiography, fiction, criticism, and conversations among friends, with 'Social Practices' Chris Kraus continues the anthropological exploration of artistic lives and the art world begun in 2004 with 'Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness'. 'Social Practices' includes writings from and around the legendary "Chance Event-Three Days in the Desert with Jean Baudrillard" (1996), and "Radical Localism," an exhibition of art and media from Puerto Nuevo's Mexicali Rose that Kraus co-organized with Marco Vera and Richard Birkett in 2012. Attuned to the odd and the anomalous, Kraus profiles Elias Fontes, an Imperial Valley hay merchant who has become an important collector of contemporary Mexican art, and chronicles the demise of a rural convenience store in northern Minnesota. She considers the work of such major contemporary artists as Jason Rhoades, Channa Horowitz, Simon Denny, Yayoi Kusama, Henry Taylor, Julie Becker, Ryan McGinley, and Leigh Ledare. Although Kraus casts a skeptical eye at the genre that's come to be known as "social practice," her book is less a critique than a proposition as to how art might be read through desire and circumstance, delirium, gossip, coincidence, and revenge. All art, she implies, is a social practice.

Does the American Dream still exist when nearly 30 million Americans live in families in which workers find a paycheck and poverty in the same envelope? Just as Michael Harrington's The Other America shocked the nation with its disclosure of poverty in the 1960s, John E. Schwarz and Thomas J. Volgy's The Forgotten Americans exposes the breadth of poverty that exists today among responsible, hardworking Americans. At the end of the prosperous 1980s, the number of Americans living in working-poor families equaled the combined populations of the nation's 25 largest cities. Contrary to conventional wisdom, this situation is not largely confined to minorities, women, the undereducated or young adults. It is commonplace for workers from nearly all segments of society to be employed in low-paying jobs even during good economic times. The Forgotten Americans reveals the betrayal of the hopes and expectations of these industrious people through broad-based factual evidence and the real-life stories of individual families. Their hardship has been ignored at enormous cost to them and the country. Numerous problems at the forefront of national debate--welfare dependency, crime, and the inadequate performance of many American school children--are closely connected to the existence of working poverty on a large scale. Unless corrective action is taken, the country risks the creation of a deeply fractured society arising from the despair of millions of employed people who have discovered that practicing the work ethic yields little reward. The problem is staggering and often misunderstood by politicians, the media, and the public. Once Schwarz and Volgy have outlined the implications of this social and economic tragedy, they propose effective solutions that require simple changes to existing policies--solutions that are politically feasible and can be accomplished without new taxes.

The protests unleashed by Iran's disputed presidential election in June 2010 brought the Islamic Republic's vigorous cyber culture to the world's attention. Iran has an estimated 700,000 bloggers, and new i media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were thought to have played a key role in spreading news of the protests. The internet is often celebrated as an agent of social change in countries like Iran, but most literature on the subject has struggled to grasp what this new phenomenon actually means. In this work, the authors give a flavour of contemporary Internet culture in Iran and analyse how this new form of communication is affecting the social and political life of the country. Although they warn against stereotyping bloggers as dissidents, they argue that the internet is changing things in ways which neither the government nor the democracy movement could have anticipated. Blogistan offers both a new reading of Iranian politics and a new conceptual framework for understanding the politics of the internet, with implications for the wider Middle East, China and beyond. -- Book cover.

Media philosopher Vilém Flusser proposed a revolutionary new way of thinking about photography. An analysis of the medium in terms of aesthetics, science and politics provided him with new ways of understanding both the cultural crises of the past and the new social forms nascent within them. Flusser showed how the transformation of textual into visual culture (from the linearity of history into the two-dimensionality of magic) and of industrial into post-industrial society (from work into leisure) went hand in hand, and how photography allows us to read and interpret these changes with particular clarity.

A pioneer of the New Queer Cinema, Todd Haynes (b. 1961) is a leading American independent filmmaker. Whether working with talking dolls in a homemade short (Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story) or with Oscar-winning performers in an HBO miniseries (Mildred Pierce), Haynes has garnered numerous awards and nominations and an expanding fan base for his provocative and engaging work. In all his films, Haynes works to portray the struggles of characters in conflict with the norms of society. Many of his movies focus on female characters, drawing inspiration from genres such as the woman's film and the disease movie (Far from Heaven and Safe); others explore male characters who transgress sexual and other social conventions (Poison and Velvet Goldmine). The writer-director has drawn on figures such as Karen Carpenter, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Bob Dylan in his meditations on American and British music, celebrity, and the meaning of identity. His 2007 movie I'm Not There won a number of awards and was notable for Haynes's decision to cast six different actors (one of whom was a woman) to portray Dylan. Gathering interviews from 1989 through 2012, this collection presents a range of themes, films, and moments in the burgeoning career of Todd Haynes. JULIA LEYDA, Tokyo, Japan, is associate professor of English at Sophia University. She has published in Television and New Media, Bright Lights Film Journal, La Furia Umana, Contemporary Women's Writing, Cinema Journal, and other journals.

How authoritarian and racist discourse functions A classic book that analyzes and defines media appeals specific to American pro-fascist and anti-Semite agitators of the 1940s, such as the application of psychosocial manipulation for political ends. The book details psychological deceits that idealogues or authoritarians commonly used. The techniques are grouped under the headings "Discontent", "The Opponent", "The Movement" and "The Leader". The authors demonstrate repetitive patterns commonly utilized, such as turning unfocused social discontent towards a targeted enemy. The agitator positions himself as a unifying presence: he is the ideal, the only leader capable of freeing his audience from the perceived enemy. Yet, as the authors demonstrate, he is a shallow person who creates social or racial disharmony, thereby reinforcing that his leadership is needed. The authors believed fascist tendencies in America were at an early stage in the 1940s, but warned a time might come when Americans could and would be "susceptible to ... [the] psychological manipulation" of a rabble rouser. A book once again relevant in the Trump era, as made clear by Alberto Toscano's new introduction.

What has happened in Poland? Poland has erupted four times in the last twenty five years, but only the events of 1980 have had comprehensive media coverage. As a result, many questions have been raised in the minds of Western observers. How were such changes possible? What forces lay behind them? In what way did the workers' strike relate to the demands for political democracy? Although a colourful and vivid eye-witness account of the 1980 upheavals, it is to these questions that Neal Ascherson's brilliant and thoughtful analysis mainly addresses itself. Viewing the situation in perspective, he argues that the Polish working class has brought about a controlled revolution, but is not intent on taking power for itself: the real heirs to the gains of 1980 and 1981 are likely to be the intelligentsia, in or out of the Communist Party. It is this social and political ferment that poses fundamental questions about the future of the whole Soviet system in Eastern Europe.

After studying at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Fine Arts Academy of Paris, Nancy Spero distinguished herself as one of the most significant protagonists on the New York art scene, where she has lived and worked since 1964. Among the most prominent andinfluential figures in American art today, she has always been involved in feminist and peace movements, and has elaborated a language of painting that is intimately tied to social and anthropological realities. This volume focuses on the artist's social commitments, as documented in photographs and an interview, and also includes recent works recording her path through art and politics. Thanks to important solo shows in public museums and at important venues such as the 2007 Venice Biennale curated by Robert Storr, which featured her work " Take No Prisoners," and solo exhibitions in Spain, over the past few years Spero has conquered the European art scene.Nancy Spero is an American-Jewish artist who works in many media, both traditional and experimental. Spero was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1926. After attending the University of Colorado at Boulder from 1944-1945, she received her BA from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1949. Her first solo exhibit was in Paris in 1962.

In recent years, the refugee problem has become impossible to ignore, as multiple crises in the Middle East and Africa have driven thousands of desperate people to attempt Mediterranean crossings in hopes of reaching Europe, and safety. Many have died en route, and those who make it face a far from certain future, as European governments have proved reluctant to fully acknowledge, let alone commit to ameliorating, their plight. In Charges (The Supplicants), Nobel Prize-winning writer Elfriede Jelinek offers a powerful analysis of the plight of refugees, from ancient times to the present. She responds to the immeasurable suffering among those fleeing death, destruction, and political suppression in their home countries and, drawing on sources as widely separated in time and intent as up-to-the-minute blog postings and Aeschylus's "The Supplicants," Jelinek asks what refugees want, how we as a society view them, and what political, moral, and personal obligations they impose on us. Looking at the global refugee crisis of our current moment, she analyzes challenges to the political, social, and psychological realities in safe, comfortable Western countries, exploring what everyday language and media coverage reveal about Western perceptions of refugees. In a world where insecurity seems to spread by the day, Charges (The Supplicants) is a timely, unflinching account of how we treat those who come to us in need. --

In just a decade, blogging changed from a fad to a phenomenon with an estimated 51 million participants, mostly creative citizens with something to say or express. Citizens who want to participate in media rather than be subjected to it. Blogothon is a selection of blogs and essays posted by raconteur par excellence, gadfly of the media, and "News Dissector" Danny Schechter in an award-winning daily blog that he began writing in 2000. In Blogothon Schechter demonstrates the importance of blogging as an alternative media in an age when mainstream media has come under increasing scrutiny for a lack of credibility, real news and social value. This compilation of Schechter's blog posts describes the financial crisis developed during the first decade of the 21st century, the influence of activists such as Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson on Occupy Wall Street, the ascent of Al Jazeera, the expulsion of Helen Thomas and Keith Olbermann from mainstream media, and increased partisanship and polarization in U.S. politics. Blogothon is a fascinating read for followers of Schechter's blog, anyone interested in an authentic account of historic events still unfolding, and aspiring bloggers. A graduate of Cornell University and the London School of Economics, DANNY SCHECHTER is a writer, television producer, and independent filmmaker who also speaks about media and financial issues. He is the editor of Mediachannel1.org, the global media issues site, and blogs daily as the News Dissector at NewsDissector.net. Schechter is the author of fourteen books and has produced and directed more than thirty documentaries and television specials. His blog was named the 2009 "Blog of the Year" by the Hunter College Media Department of the City University of New York.

"Seeking Love in Modern Britain charts the emergence of the modern British single through an account of the dating industry that sprang up to serve men and women. It shows how - amid a period of unprecedented sexual and social change - 'the single' became a key unisex identity and lifestyle. From around 1970, a growing, cottage-style matchmaking industry in Britain was offering the romantically solo a choice between computer dating firms, such as Dateline or Compudate, introduction agencies and the lonely hearts pages of Private Eye , Time Out and others. Zoe Strimpel reveals how this rapidly expanding landscape of services was catering to a new breed of single people, and how - by the late 1990s - singleness had become the culturally mainstream, wholly expected part of the romantic life cycle that it is today. Refuting the widespread idea that the Internet invented modern dating, this book uses an eclectic and engaging range of first-person accounts and snapshots from the time to show that the story of contemporary romance, mediated courtship and singleness began in a time long before Tinder."--

The pathbreaking essays in this collection explore the history of consumption by synthesizing discrete historical literatures on consumer culture, gender, and the history of technology. Luxury hotels and the chocolate industry are among the diverse array of topics these authors use to demonstrate that consumption is both a material and a cultural process. Production and consumption become equally inextricable under close analysis. Tools from both the history of technology and gender studies illuminate how these categories intersect. Although broad social and technological trends influence the outcome of these stories, the authors emphasize the agaency of particular groups, including consumers, workers, manufacturers, and the "mediators" who communicate between producers and consumers. This volume will be of interest to historians in a wide range of fields.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Step back in time and explore the fascinating world of ancient Greece through "The Home Life of the Ancient Greeks" by H. Blümner. This detailed study offers a captivating glimpse into the daily routines, social structures, and customs that shaped the lives of people in ancient Greece up to 146 B.C. Delve into the nuances of domestic life, uncovering the traditions and practices that governed households. From social interactions to the intricacies of daily existence, this book provides a comprehensive overview of a bygone era. Discover the unique aspects of ancient Greek culture, meticulously researched and presented. A valuable resource for anyone interested in ancient history, social customs, and the rich tapestry of life in ancient Greece. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

If you use a personal computer or automated teller machine, make purchases online, or consume media of any kind, your life is directly impacted by the five digital-age visionaries profiled in The New Imperialists . Reams have already been written, of course, about Microsoft's Bill Gates, AOL-Time Warner's Steve Case, Oracle's Larry Ellison, Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos, and Cisco's John Chambers. But Mark Leibovich, national technology reporter for The Washington Post , digs deeper here to present insightful individual portraits of these "generals of the networked world's ruling empires" that reveal what has really driven them to the leading edge of today's business universe. Based on some 400 interviews with relatives, friends, associates, and adversaries, in addition to one-on-one sessions with its usually more reticent subjects, the book offers a very readable account of key formative events and subsequent reactions that are not typically part of such titans' shared résumés. From the personal experiences that helped shape their generally serene youth--Ellison "had difficulty telling the truth," for example, while Chambers "battled dyslexia and for a time believed he was stupid"--to the public manifestations that now affect millions, Leibovich presents eye-opening accounts recommended for anyone drawn to the human stories behind our day's most ubiquitous corporate names. --Howard Rothman