Unfriending Dystopia

Social media is shaping our lives, churches, communities, and culture in both positive and negative ways. How can we take the positive and leave the negative? This book aims to give you a practical understanding of the culture social media developed in, the culture it creates, and practical ways to engage with social media to keep the good and reduce the impact of the negative.

Social media is shaping our lives, churches, communities, and culture in both positive and negative ways. How can we take the positive and leave the negative? This book aims to give you a practical understanding of the culture social media developed in, the culture it creates, and practical ways to engage with social media to keep the good and reduce the impact of the negative.

New Authors and collections. Following the great success of 2015's Gothic Fantasy, deluxe edition short story compilations, this latest in the series is packed with tales set in bleak and paradisiacal worlds of boundless imagination from classic authors and exciting budding contemporary writers. Classic authors include Edward Bellamy, Samuel Butler, Robert W. Chambers, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Richard Jefferies, Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, Thomas More, William Morris, Mary Shelley, Voltaire.

This meticulously edited dark future collection includes the greatest dystopian novels and post-apocalyptic stories - for you to compare with your own prediction based on present events: George Orwell: 1984 Animal Farm Aldous Huxley: Brave New World Sinclair Lewis: It Can't Happen Here C. S. Lewis: That Hideous Strength Yevgeny Zamyatin: We Jack London: Iron Heel H. G. Wells: The Time Machine The First Men in the Moon When the Sleeper Wakes Jonathan Swift: Gulliver's Travels Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Coming Race Edgar Allan Poe: The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion Owen Gregory: Meccania the Super-State Hugh Benson: Lord of the World Edward Bellamy: Looking Backward: 2000–1887 Equality Mary Shelley: The Last Man William Hope Hodgson: The Night Land Stanley G. Weinbaum: The Black Flame Fred M. White: The Doom of London Series The Four White Days The Four Days' Night The Dust of Death A Bubble Burst The Invisible Force The River of Death Ignatius Donnelly: Caesar's Column Ernest Bramah: The Secret of the League Arthur Dudley Vinton: Looking Further Backward Richard Jefferies: After London Samuel Butler: Erewhon Edwin A. Abbott: Flatland Anthony Trollope: The Fixed Period Cleveland Moffett: The Conquest of America

Social media, shopping experiences, and mapping programs might not seem like they have much in common, but they are all built on neurodigital media. What is neurodigital media? It lives at the intersection of the Californian Ideology, the digital computing revolution, network ecosystems, the nudge, and a naturalistic view of the person. The Californian Ideology holds individuals should be reshaped, naturalism says individuals may be reshaped, and digital computing provides the tools, through network ecosystems theory and the nudge, that can reshape individuals. This book explores the history and impact of neurodigital media in the lives of everyday users.

Imagine living in a world where everything you do is controlled. In the distant future the United States has been split into two regions separated by a barren wasteland; this is the country of Dystopia. Here the individual is discouraged, freedom is an illusion, food is rationed, and everything you do is tracked by a chip implanted in your arm. This is Dana Ginary's world. At age seventeen, people receive their career assignments chosen for them by a government body. Forced to work at the Waste Management Plant because she was declared too individualistic, Dana finds herself surrounded by death and brutality. Knowing her days are numbered, she looks for a way to leave the plant before she, too, becomes one of its causalities. It is then she meets a man named George and soon finds herself caught up in a cat and mouse game between the resistance and the Dystopian government. Dana finds herself faced with an agonizing choice of whom she will betray and whom she will save: her friend George, her parents, or herself.

This book examines the recent popularity of the dystopian genre in literature and film, as well as connecting contemporary manifestations of dystopia to cultural trends and the implications of technological and social changes on the individual and society as a whole. Dystopia, as a genre, reflects our greatest fears of what the future might bring, based on analysis of the present. This book connects traditional dystopian works with their contexts and compares these with contemporary versions. It centers around two main questions: Why is dystopia so popular now? And, why is dystopia so popular with young adult audiences? Since dystopia reflects the fears of society as a whole, this book will have broad appeal for any reader, and will be particularly useful to teachers in a variety of settings, such as in a high school or college-level classroom to teach dystopian literature, or in a comparative literature classroom to show how the genre has appeared in multiple locales at different times. Indeed, the book’s interdisciplinary nature allows it to be of use in classes focussing on politics, bioethics, privacy issues, women’s studies, and any number of additional topics.

Set in a dystopian society in the not-too-distant future, this sci-fi novel follows the misadventures of a bar musician and army vet who's set up on terrorism charges and deported to a single-continent prison planet. After a fight in which he nearly kills a neo-Nazi, the antihero main character flees to the other end of the continent with a prisoner he knew from Earth—a Mexican anarchist and fellow musician—on a Gulliver's Travels–type journey through a number of political and religious cult compounds. With comical depictions of the various cults they encounter on the way, Free Radicals insightfully explores the often-failed attempts at utopia and the day-to-day life of two traveling musicians.