The story of how a chemical weapon went from the battlefield to the streetsMore than a hundred years ago, French troops fired the first tear gas grenades at the German enemy. Designed to force people out from cover, tear gas causes tearing and gagging, burning the eyes and skin. Its use has ended in miscarriages, permanent injuries, and death. While all but a few countries have agreed that it is illegal to manufacture, stockpile, or use chemical weapons of war, tea...

From tracking down information to symbolising human experiences, this book is your guide to telling more effective, empathetic and evidence-based data stories.Drawing on cross-disciplinary research and first-hand accounts of projects ranging from public health to housing justice, The Data Storytelling Workbook introduces key concepts, challenges and problem-solving strategies in the emerging field of data storytelling. Filled with practical exercises and activities, the wo...

From Tahrir Square to Occupy, from the Red Shirts in Thailand to the Teachers in Oaxaca, protest camps are a highly visible feature of social movements' activism across the world. They are spaces where people come together to imagine alternative worlds and articulate contentious politics, often in confrontation with the state. Drawing on over fifty different protest camps from around the world over the past fifty years, this book offers a ground-breaking and detailed investigation into pro...

One hundred years ago, French troops fired tear gas grenades into German trenches. Designed to force people out from behind barricades and trenches, tear gas causes burning of the eyes and skin, tearing, and gagging. Chemical weapons are now banned from war zones. But today, tear gas has become the most commonly used form of "less-lethal" police force. In 2011, the year that protests exploded from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, tear gas sales tripled. Most tear gas is produced in t...

From the squares of Spain to indigenous land in Canada, protest camps are a tactic used around the world. Since 2011 they have gained prominence in recent waves of contentious politics, deployed by movements with wide-ranging demands for social change. Through a series of international and interdisciplinary case studies from five continents, this topical collection is the first to focus on protest camps as unique organisational forms that transcend particular social movements’ contexts. Wh...

This definitive work on the perils and promise of the social- media revolution collects writings by today's best thinkers and cultural commentators, with an all-new introduction by Bauerlein.Twitter, Facebook, e-publishing, blogs, distance-learning and other social media raise some of the most divisive cultural questions of our time. Some see the technological breakthroughs we live with as hopeful and democratic new steps in education, information gathering, and hu...

'You see, if only they didn’t speak English in America, then we’d treat it as a foreign country – and probably understand it a lot better’**‘the sanest man in America’ – Bill Bryson‘Jon Sopel nails it’ – Emily Maitlis**With a brand new chapter, charting Trump's first year in power****As the BBC’s North America Editor, Jon Sopel has had a pretty busy time of it lately. In the time it’s taken for a reality star to go from laughing stock to leader of th...

Filling The Void is a book about how the cultures and psychology of social media use fit within a broader landscape of life under capitalism. It argues that social media use is often a psychological response to the need for pleasure and comfort that results from the stresses of life under postmodern capitalism, rather than being a driver of new behaviours as newer technologies are often said to be. Both the explosive growth of social media and the corresponding reconfiguration of the web f...

From the founding director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence comes a fascinating look at the remarkable capacity for intelligence exhibited by groups of people and computers working together.If you're like most people, you probably believe that humans are the most intelligent animals on our planet. But there's another kind of entity that can be far smarter: groups of people. In this groundbreaking book, Thomas Malone, the founding director of the MIT Ce...

The founders of FactCheck.org teach you how to identify and debunk spin, hype, and fake news in this essential guide to informed citizenship in an age of misinformation.Americans are bombarded daily with mixed messages, half-truths, misleading statements, and out-and-out fabrications masquerading as facts. The news media is often too intimidated, too partisan, or too overworked to keep up with these deceptions.unSpun is the secret decoder ring for ...

How do media platforms organise social life?How do media empower or disempower our identities?How do we understand the impact of algorithms?How are media audiences produced and managed?Media & Society introduces the role of the media in social, cultural, political and economic life, unpacking the increasing entanglement of digital media technology with our everyday lives.It explores the relationship between meaning and power in an age ...

Techno-utopianism is dead: Now is the time to pay attention to the inequality, marginalization, and biases woven into our technological systems.This book sounds an alarm: after decades of being lulled into complacency by narratives of technological utopianism and neutrality, people are waking up to the large-scale consequences of Silicon Valley-led technophilia. This book trains a spotlight on the inequality, marginalization, and biases in our technological systems...