Books

Sejal Parmar Contributes to Journalism at Risk

Sejal Parmar, core faculty member of CMDS and Assistant Professor of Law at CEU's Department of Legal Studies has contributed to the Council of Europe's new book, Journalism at Risk, in which ten experts from different backgrounds examine the role of journalism in democratic societies.

Lina Dencik and Peter Wilkin: Worker Resistance and Media

September 17, 2015

With developments in media technologies creating new opportunities and challenges for social movements to emerge and mobilize, Worker Resistance and Media, written by CMDS fellow Lina Dencik and Peter Wilkin, published by Peter Lang is a timely and necessary examination of how organized labour and workers movements are engaging with this shifting environment.

Shawn M. Powers and Michael Jablonski: The Real Cyber War

April 20, 2015

Discussions surrounding the role of the internet in society are dominated by terms such as internet freedom, surveillance, cybersecurity, and, most prolifically, cyber war. But behind the rhetoric of cyber war is an ongoing state-centered battle for control of information resources. Shawn Powers and Michael Jablonski conceptualize this real cyber war as the utilization of digital networks for geopolitical purposes, including covert attacks against another state’s electronic systems, but also, and more importantly, the variety of ways the internet is used to further a state’s economic and military agendas. 

Philip N. Howard: Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Lock Us Up or Set Us Free

April 10, 2015

Should we fear or welcome the internet’s evolution? The “internet of things” is the rapidly growing network of everyday objects—eyeglasses, cars, thermostats—made smart with sensors and internet addresses. Soon we will live in a pervasive yet invisible network of everyday objects that communicate with one another. In this original and provocative book, Director of CMDS, Philip N. Howard envisions a new world order emerging from this great transformation in the technologies around us.

Monroe Price: Free Expression, Globalism and the New Strategic Communication

January 29, 2015

Building on examples drawn from the Arab Spring, the shaping of the Internet in China, Iran's perception of foreign broadcasting, and Russia's media interventions, Monroe Price's book, Free Expression, Globalism and the New Strategic Communication, published by Cambridge University Press, exposes the anxieties of loss of control, on the one hand, and the missed opportunities for greater freedom, on the other. 

Gina Neff: Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries (new paperback edition)

January 19, 2015

In the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, employees of Internet startups took risks--left well-paying jobs for the chance of striking it rich through stock options (only to end up unemployed a year later), relocated to areas that were epicenters of a booming industry (that shortly went bust), chose the opportunity to be creative over the stability of a set schedule.

Anya Schiffrin: Global Muckraking - 100 Years of Investigative Journalism from Around the World

July 15, 2014

From Sinclair Lewis to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, crusading journalists have played a central role in American politics: checking abuses of power, revealing corporate misdeeds, and exposing government corruption. Muckraking journalism is part and parcel of American democracy.

Dean Starkman: The Watchdog That Didn't Bark

January 7, 2014

In this sweeping, incisive study, Dean Starkman exposes the critical shortcomings that softened coverage during the mortgage era and the years leading up to the financial collapse of 2008. He locates the roots of the problem in business news’s origin as a market messaging service geared toward investors in the early twentieth century. This access-dependent strain of journalism was opposed by the grand, sweeping work of the muckrakers.

State Power 2.0: Authoritarian Entrenchment and Political Engagement Worldwide

December 2, 2013

Digital media and online social networking applications have changed the way in which dissent is organized with social movement leaders using online applications and digital content systems to organize collective action, activate local protest groups, network with international social movements and share their political perspectives. In the past, authoritarian regimes could control broadcast media in times of political crisis by destroying newsprint supplies, seizing radio and television stations, and blocking phone calls.

Democracy’s Fourth Wave? Digital Media and the Arab Spring

March 29, 2013

Did digital media really “cause” the Arab Spring, or is it an important factor of the story behind what might become democracy’s fourth wave? An unlikely network of citizens used digital media to start a cascade of social protest that ultimately toppled four of the world’s most entrenched dictators.