Infinite Ripple The Social Media Revolution

Infinite Ripple is an essential read for anyone wishing to utilise the power of social media in their personal, academic and professional lives. With a strong focus on Irish examples, the book contextualises the key concepts of the growing global phenomenon with a focus on advice to harness this opportunity offered by social networking. The discussion and examples are relevant to modern marketers and businesses intent on keeping on top of developments in customer engagement and interaction, with a view to improving profitability by exploiting the massive potential offered by this relatively new medium. It further employs relevant theory to students, academics and researchers in Ireland and around the world in its desire to explain complex communications paradigms in a succinct manner, utilising laymans terms and topical examples to ease understanding. Whether you are new to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube (or any of the others) or an avid user already, there is advice for all readers in this book to effectively leverage social media for everyday success in all parts of your life.

This book documents hundreds of customs and traditions practiced in countries outside of the United States, showcasing the diversity of birth, coming-of-age, and death celebrations worldwide. From the beginning of our lives to the end, all of humanity celebrates life's milestones through traditions and unique customs. In the United States, we have specific events like baby showers, rites of passage such as Bat and Bar Mitzvahs and "sweet 16" birthday parties, and sober end-of-life traditions like obituaries and funeral services that honor those who have died. But what kinds of customs and traditions are practiced in other countries? How do people in other cultures welcome babies, prepare to enter into adulthood, and commemorate the end of the lives of loved ones? This three-volume encyclopedia covers more than 300 birth, life, and death customs, with the books' content organized chronologically by life stage. Volume 1 focuses on birth and childhood customs, Volume 2 documents adolescent and early-adulthood customs, and Volume 3 looks at aging and death customs. The entries in the first volume examine pre-birth traditions, such as baby showers and other gift-giving events, and post-birth customs, such as naming ceremonies, child-rearing practices, and traditions performed to ward off evil or promote good health. The second volume contains information about rites of passage as children become adults, including indigenous initiations, marriage customs, and religious ceremonies. The final volume concludes with coverage on customs associated with aging and death, such as retirement celebrations, elaborate funeral processions, and the creation of fantasy coffins. The set features beautiful color inserts that illustrate examples of celebrations and ceremonies and includes an appendix of excerpts from primary documents that include legislation on government-accepted names, wedding vows, and maternity/paternity leave regulations.

"Digital Vertigo provides an articulate, measured, contrarian voice against a sea of hype about social media. As an avowed technology optimist, I'm grateful for Keen who makes me stop and think before committing myself fully to the social revolution." —Larry Downes, author of The Killer App In Digital Vertigo, Andrew Keen presents today's social media revolution as the most wrenching cultural transformation since the Industrial Revolution. Fusing a fast-paced historical narrative with front-line stories from today's online networking revolution and critiques of "social" companies like Groupon, Zynga and LinkedIn, Keen argues that the social media transformation is weakening, disorienting and dividing us rather than establishing the dawn of a new egalitarian and communal age. The tragic paradox of life in the social media age, Keen says, is the incompatibility between our internet longings for community and friendship and our equally powerful desire for online individual freedom. By exposing the shallow core of social networks, Andrew Keen shows us that the more electronically connected we become, the lonelier and less powerful we seem to be.

Examines the impact of social media on three writing-related themes: publics and audiences, presentation of self and groups, and pedagogy at various levels of higher education.

The technology likely to have the greatest impact on the future of the world economy has arrived, and it’s not self-driving cars, solar energy, or artificial intelligence. It’s called the blockchain. The first generation of the digital revolution brought us the Internet of information. The second genera­tion—powered by blockchain technology—is bringing us the Internet of value: a new, distributed platform that can help us reshape the world of business and transform the old order of human affairs for the better. Blockchain is the ingeniously simple, revolution­ary protocol that allows transactions to be simul­taneously anonymous and secure by maintaining a tamperproof public ledger of value. Though it’s the technology that drives bitcoin and other digital cur­rencies, the underlying framework has the potential to go far beyond these and record virtually everything of value to humankind, from birth and death certifi­cates to insurance claims and even votes. Why should you care? Maybe you’re a music lover who wants artists to make a living off their art. Or a consumer who wants to know where that hamburger meat really came from. Perhaps you’re an immigrant who’s sick of paying big fees to send money home to loved ones. Or an entrepreneur looking for a new platform to build a business. And those examples are barely the tip of the ice­berg. This technology is public, encrypted, and readily available for anyone to use. It’s already seeing wide­spread adoption in a number of areas. For example, forty-two (and counting) of the world’s biggest finan­cial institutions, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Credit Suisse, have formed a consortium to investigate the blockchain for speedier and more secure transactions. As with major paradigm shifts that preceded it, the blockchain will create winners and losers. And while opportunities abound, the risks of disruption and dislocation must not be ignored. Don Tapscott, the bestselling author of Wikinomics, and his son, blockchain expert Alex Tapscott, bring us a brilliantly researched, highly readable, and utterly foundational book about the future of the modern economy. Blockchain Revolutionis the business leaders’ playbook for the next decade and beyond.

Originally published just months before the May 1968 upheavals in France, Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life offered a lyrical and aphoristic critique of the “society of the spectacle” from the point of view of individual experience. Whereas Debord’s masterful analysis of the new historical conditions that triggered the uprisings of the 1960s armed the revolutionaries of the time with theory, Vaneigem’s book described their feelings of desperation directly, and armed them with “formulations capable of firing point-blank on our enemies.” “I realise,” writes Vaneigem in his introduction, “that I have given subjective will an easy time in this book, but let no one reproach me for this without first considering the extent to which the objective conditions of the contemporary world advance the cause of subjectivity day after day.” Vaneigem names and defines the alienating features of everyday life in consumer society: survival rather than life, the call to sacrifice, the cultivation of false needs, the dictatorship of the commodity, subjection to social roles, and above all the replacement of God by the Economy. And in the second part of his book, “Reversal of Perspective,” he explores the countervailing impulses that, in true dialectical fashion, persist within the deepest alienation: creativity, spontaneity, poetry, and the path from isolation to communication and participation. For “To desire a different life is already that life in the making.” And “fulfillment is expressed in the singular but conjugated in the plural.” The present English translation was first published by Rebel Press of London in 1983. This new edition of The Revolution of Everyday Life has been reviewed and corrected by the translator and contains a new preface addressed to English-language readers by Raoul Vaneigem. The book is the first of several translations of works by Raoul Vaneigem that PM Press plans to publish in uniform volumes. Vaneigem’s classic work is to be followed by The Knight, the Lady, the Devil, and Death (2003) and The Inhumanity of Religion (2000).

A guide to successful community moderation exploring everything from the trenches of Reddit to your neighborhood Facebook page. Don’t read the comments. Old advice, yet more relevant than ever. The tools we once hailed for their power to connect people and spark creativity can also be hotbeds of hate, harassment, and political division. Platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are under fire for either too much or too little moderation. Creating and maintaining healthy online communities isn’t easy. Over the course of two years of graduate research at MIT, former tech journalist and current product manager Anika Gupta interviewed moderators who’d worked on the sidelines of gamer forums and in the quagmires of online news comments sections. She’s spoken with professional and volunteer moderators for communities like Pantsuit Nation, Nextdoor, World of Warcraft guilds, Reddit, and FetLife. In How to Handle a Crowd, she shares what makes successful communities tick – and what you can learn from them about the delicate balance of community moderation. Topics include: -Building creative communities in online spaces -Bridging political division—and creating new alliances -Encouraging freedom of speech -Defining and eliminating hate and trolling -Ensuring safety for all participants- -Motivating community members to action How to Handle a Crowd is the perfect book for anyone looking to take their small community group to the next level, start a career in online moderation, or tackle their own business’s comments section.

Three provocative exposés from a National Jewish Book Award–winning journalist address the CIA’s recruitment of Nazis and use of psychological warfare. The Splendid Blond Beast: This groundbreaking investigation into the CIA’s post–World War II liberation and recruitment of Nazi war criminals—including the pivotal role played by CIA director Allen Dulles—traces the roots not only of US government malfeasance, but of mass murder as an instrument of financial gain and state power, from the Armenian genocide during World War I to Hitler’s Holocaust through the practice of genocide today. “Revelatory and shocking.” —Kirkus Reviews Blowback: The true story of how US intelligence organizations employed Nazi war criminals in clandestine warfare and propaganda against the USSR, anticolonial revolutionaries, and progressive movements worldwide that were claimed to be Soviet pawns. “The story is one that needs to be told, and Blowback makes a major contribution to its telling, supplementing a thorough collation of known cases with ample new research.” —The New York Times Science of Coercion: Drawing on long-classified documents from the Pentagon, the CIA, and other national security agencies, Simpson exposes secret government-funded research into psychological warfare and reveals that many of the most respected pioneers in the field of communication science were knowingly complicit as their findings were employed for the purposes of propaganda, subversion, intimidation, and counterinsurgency during the Cold War era. “An intriguing picture of the relations between state power and the intellectual community.” —Noam Chomsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology