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Vendor
Liepman Literary Agency
Marc Koralnik
Original language
English

ANTI-SOCIAL MEDIA:

Siva Vaidhyanathan

How Facebood Has Disconnected Citizens and Undermined Democracy

If you wanted to build a machine that would distribute propaganda to millions of people, distract them from important issues, energize hatred and bigotry, erode social trust, undermine respectable journalism, foster doubts about science, and engage in massive surveillance all at once, you would make something a lot like Facebook. Of course, none of that was part of the plan.
ANTI-SOCIAL MEDIA will be a wide-ranging critique of Facebook, and its powerful effects, not just on politics and civic participation, but on our culture in general. It will tell the story of Facebook, from its founding, to its vaunted heyday during the Arab Spring and its initial public offering, and its current dubious role in American politics. It will talk about techno-utopianism of Silicon Valley, and how far Facebook has fallen from the idealism of “connecting the world.”

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN is Professor of Media Studies and the Director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia. He is the author of THE GOOGLIZATION OF EVERYTHING, COPYRIGHTS AND COPYWRONGS, THE ANARCHIST IN THE LIBRARY, and INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION. Siva has written for The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, The Nation, and Washington Post among many others.
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Published 2018-05-01 by Oxford University Press

Comments

NPR's Michel Martin talks with University of Virginia media studies professor Siva Vaidhyanathan about whether this is a watershed moment for Facebook users. Read more...

“What distinguishes the book is Vaidhyanathan's skill in putting the social media phenomenon into a broader context - legal, historical and political." —Nicholas Carr, The Washington Post

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/10/25/facebook-autocracy-app/ Read more...

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/international/london-book-fair/article/76555-london-book-fair-2018-why-the-problem-with-facebook-is-facebook.html

There are plenty of critical books and articles on Facebook. A lot of them are one-sided and apocalyptic in their projections and many are poorly researched or have theses that barely hold scientific backing. With ''Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy'', Siva Vaidhyanathan, media professor at the University of Virginia, has now presented a book that does it better. What distinguishes Vaidhyanathan's book from others is not only the depth of his research, but the fact that Facebook in placed into a larger social, historical and political context, thus delivering a comprehensive and systematic analysis of the company over the past years. At its core, ''Antisocial Media'' is the history of a relationship marred by false expectations and hopes with naive ideas on the one side and brutal business interests on the other. This inevitably had to go wrong. Vaidhyanathan outlines in detail how Facebook developed from a relatively innocent social website to a global power, which makes our private life a bit easier, but threatens democracy. The latter is especially made possible by communications conditions created by the California-based company: a system in which emotions, rather than arguments, thrive. An environment that favours populists and demagogues.