The Medium is the Massage


Marshall McLuhan - 1967
    Using a layout style that was later copied by Wired, McLuhan and coauthor/designer Quentin Fiore combine word and image to illustrate and enact the ideas that were first put forward in the dense and poorly organized Understanding Media. McLuhan's ideas about the nature of media, the increasing speed of communication, and the technological basis for our understanding of who we are come to life in this slender volume. Although originally printed in 1967, the art and style in The Medium is the Massage seem as fresh today as in the summer of love, and the ideas are even more resonant now that computer interfaces are becoming gateways to the global village.

The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things


Barry Glassner - 1999
    He exposes the people and organizations that manipulate our perceptions and profit from our anxieties: politicians who win elections by heightening concerns about crime and drug use even as both are declining; advocacy groups that raise money by exaggerating the prevalence of particular diseases; TV news-magazines that monger a new scare every week to garner ratings.

No Logo


Naomi Klein - 2000
    First published before the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, this is an infuriating, inspiring, and altogether pioneering work of cultural criticism that investigates money, marketing, and the anti-corporate movement.As global corporations compete for the hearts and wallets of consumers who not only buy their products but willingly advertise them from head to toe—witness today's schoolbooks, superstores, sporting arenas, and brand-name synergy—a new generation has begun to battle consumerism with its own best weapons. In this provocative, well-written study, a front-line report on that battle, we learn how the Nike swoosh has changed from an athletic status-symbol to a metaphor for sweatshop labor, how teenaged McDonald's workers are risking their jobs to join the Teamsters, and how "culture jammers" utilize spray paint, computer-hacking acumen, and anti-propagandist wordplay to undercut the slogans and meanings of billboard ads (as in "Joe Chemo" for "Joe Camel").No Logo will challenge and enlighten students of sociology, economics, popular culture, international affairs, and marketing."This book is not another account of the power of the select group of corporate Goliaths that have gathered to form our de facto global government. Rather, it is an attempt to analyze and document the forces opposing corporate rule, and to lay out the particular set of cultural and economic conditions that made the emergence of that opposition inevitable." —Naomi Klein, from her Introduction

How to Watch TV News


Neil Postman - 1991
    Postman and Powers warn that anyone who relies exclusively on TV for a knowledge of the world is making a serious mistake and suggest ways to intelligently evaluate TV news shows.

Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials


Gillian Rose - 2001
    It explains which methods are available to the undergraduate student and shows exactly how to use them. The text begins with a discussion of general themes and recent debates.

An Intelligent Person's Guide to Education


Tony Little - 2015
    One of the most progressive and imaginative people in British education today he has hitherto kept a low profile. This book accompanies a three part television series to be screened on BBC 2 but differs from it significantly.There is a crisis in the British education system. Year on year GCSE and A Level pupils post better exam results, with more students achieving top grades. Yet business leaders and employers complain bitterly that our schools are not producing people fit for purpose. What we have become is a nation 'Over schooled and under educated'. Far from being locked in an ivory tower, a bastion of privilege, Mr Little has used his time as a teacher and headmaster to get to grips with fundamental questions concerning education. He wants to produce people fit to work in the modern world. How do children absorb information? What kind of people does society need? What is education for? Not only is the author one of the great reforming headmasters of our time but he has planted Academies in the East end of London, founded a state boarding school near Windsor and yet is a passionate advocate of single sex schools.This book is not a text book for colleges of education- it is a book to enlighten the teaching profession and just as much for anxious parents. The book is simply arranged under topics such as authority, expectations, progress, self-confidence, sex, crises and creativity.Tony Little thinks it is time to ask some fundamental questions, and to make brave decisions about how we make our schools and our schoolchildren fit for purpose.

Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media


Michael Parenti - 1986
    Taking a critical perspective on the economics and politics of "presenting" the news, this topical supplement argues that the media systematically distorts news coverage.

Health: The Basics


Rebecca J. Donatelle - 1993
    The text hold students' interest by covering health topics of primary concern to them.

It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap as News


Drew Curtis - 2007
    Curtis has noticed several distinct patterns that the media uses to turn the non-news into the news readers see each day. Exposing just how little reporting is actually going on, his book asks why we are overexposed to so much rubbish from news outlets.

Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle


Chris Hedges - 2009
    One - now the minority - functions in a print-based, literate world that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other - the majority - is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. To this majority - which crosses social class lines, though the poor are overwhelmingly affected - presidential debate and political rhetoric is pitched at a sixth-grade reading level. In this “other America,” serious film and theater, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins of society. In the tradition of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges navigates this culture - attending WWF contests, the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas, and Ivy League graduation ceremonies - to expose an age of terrifying decline and heightened self-delusion.

The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth


Joseph Turow - 2012
    That is the scenario media guru Nicholas Negroponte predicted in the 1990s, with his hypothetical online newspaper The Daily Me—and it is one we experience now in daily ways. But, as media expert Joseph Turow shows, the customized media environment we inhabit today reflects diminished consumer power. Not only ads and discounts but even news and entertainment are being customized by newly powerful media agencies on the basis of data we don’t know they are collecting and individualized profiles we don’t know we have. Little is known about this new industry: how is this data being collected and analyzed? And how are our profiles created and used? How do you know if you have been identified as a “target” or “waste” or placed in one of the industry’s finer-grained marketing niches? Are you, for example, a Socially Liberal Organic Eater, a Diabetic Individual in the Household, or Single City Struggler? And, if so, how does that affect what you see and do online?Drawing on groundbreaking research, including interviews with industry insiders, this important book shows how advertisers have come to wield such power over individuals and media outlets—and what can be done to stop it.

Epidemiology for Public Health Practice


Robert H. Friis - 1996
    With extensive treatment of the heart of epidemiology-from study designs to descriptive epidemiology to quantitative measures-this reader-friendly text is accessible and interesting to a wide range of beginning students in all health-related disciplines. A unique focus is given to real-world applications of epidemiology and the development of skills that students can apply in subsequent course work and in the field. The text is also accompanied by a complete package of instructor and student resources available through a companion Web site.

Ways of Seeing


John Berger - 1972
    First published in 1972, it was based on the BBC television series about which the (London) Sunday Times critic commented: "This is an eye-opener in more ways than one: by concentrating on how we look at paintings . . . he will almost certainly change the way you look at pictures." By now he has."Berger has the ability to cut right through the mystification of the professional art critics . . . He is a liberator of images: and once we have allowed the paintings to work on us directly, we are in a much better position to make a meaningful evaluation" —Peter Fuller, Arts Review"The influence of the series and the book . . . was enormous . . . It opened up for general attention to areas of cultural study that are now commonplace" —Geoff Dyer in Ways of TellingWinner of the 1972 Booker Prize for his novel, G., John Peter Berger (born November 5th, 1926) is an art critic, painter and author of many novels including A Painter of Our Time, From A to X and Bento’s Sketchbook.

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media


Edward S. Herman - 1988
    Herman and Noam Chomsky show that, contrary to the usual image of the news media as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in their search for truth and defense of justice, in their actual practice they defend the economic, social, and political agendas of the privileged groups that dominate domestic society, the state, and the global order.Based on a series of case studies—including the media’s dichotomous treatment of “worthy” versus “unworthy” victims, “legitimizing” and “meaningless” Third World elections, and devastating critiques of media coverage of the U.S. wars against Indochina—Herman and Chomsky draw on decades of criticism and research to propose a Propaganda Model to explain the media’s behavior and performance. Their new introduction updates the Propaganda Model and the earlier case studies, and it discusses several other applications. These include the manner in which the media covered the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement and subsequent Mexican financial meltdown of 1994-1995, the media’s handling of the protests against the World Trade Organization, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund in 1999 and 2000, and the media’s treatment of the chemical industry and its regulation. What emerges from this work is a powerful assessment of how propagandistic the U.S. mass media are, how they systematically fail to live up to their self-image as providers of the kind of information that people need to make sense of the world, and how we can understand their function in a radically new way.

Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free


Charles P. Pierce - 2008
    Wearing a saddle.... But worse than this was when the proprietor exclaimed to a cheering crowd, “We are taking the dinosaurs back from the evolutionists!” He knew then and there it was time to try and salvage the Land of the Enlightened, buried somewhere in this new Home of the Uninformed.With his razor-sharp wit and erudite reasoning, Pierce delivers a gut-wrenching, side-splitting lament about the glorification of ignorance in the United States, and how a country founded on intellectual curiosity has somehow deteriorated into a nation of simpletons more apt to vote for an American Idol contestant than a presidential candidate.With Idiot America, Pierce's thunderous denunciation is also a secret call to action, as he hopes that somehow, being intelligent will stop being a stigma, and that pinheads will once again be pitied, not celebrated.