The Gentrification of the Internet: How to Reclaim Our Digital Freedom by Jessa Lingel
"There are plenty of metaphors to describe the Internet and its implications. have heard that "data are the new oil" and they are stored in the "cloud." Some say former US vice president Al Gore dubbed the Internet the "information highway." And it is not uncommon for one to say that social media is like a "town square.""
Reviewed by Kimberly Anastácio
Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing by John B. Thompson
" "What's that you're reading?" my server asked as she placed my drink down. I had an hour before the next train and a review deadline to meet, so I chose to sit and read in a local pub. Holding up the book so she could see its front cover, I explained to the server that I was reading about how digital technologies are changing the state of publishing."
Reviewed by Leah Henrickson
Technology and the Historian: Transformations in the Digital Age by Adam Crymble
"The field of digital history has been dominated since the early 2000s by a "technologically adept group of historians operating in an eternal present, both ignoring and being ignored by the histories of the field of which they should have been a part," writes Adam Crymble in Technology and the Historian."
Reviewed by Katharina Hering
Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work by Michelle Caswell
"When I sat down to read Michelle Caswell's newest book, Urgent Archives, I didn't expect her to call on archivists to participate in "mischief-making," but I'm here for it. Caswell says: "I wish more archivists would join me in . . . mischief-making, collectively and strategically" (101)."
Reviewed by Bethany Radcliff
Image Objects: An Archaeology of Computer Graphics by Jacob Gaboury
"Despite digital media's ubiquity, there has been little examination of the computer's history as a visual rather than procedural device. In Image Objects: An Archaeology of Computer Graphics, Jacob Gaboury remedies this by tracing the development of computer graphics during the thirty years before the technology's proliferation in popular visual culture."
Reviewed by Nabeel Siddiqui
Uncertain Archives: Critical Keywords for Big Data ed. by Nanna Bonde Thylstrup et al.
"The narrative around big data has been largely shaped by a quest for certainty built upon expectations of algorithmic efficiency, perfect predictive models, and strategic decision-making. However difficult to attain, these cyberutopian visions of objectivity, order, and control have directed countless technocultural experiments with the unprecedented mass of data, information, and content found online."
Reviewed by Giulia Taurino
Screen Love: Queer Intimacies in the Grindr Era by Tom Roach
"Anyone who has been single during the last decade will be at least cursorily familiar with the affective dimensions of dating apps (the excitement, disappointment, and inevitable miscommunication). Many have exclaimed over the negative impact of these technologies on romantic love."
Reviewed by Fredrika Thelandersson
The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope by Daniel Greene
"How are problems of poverty transmuted into problems of technology? How do we come to naturalize connections between technological advancement and greater societal equity? These questions are at the heart of The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope by Daniel Greene."
Reviewed by Christine T. Wolf