Finalist for the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism From a New York Times investigative reporter, this “authoritative and devastating account of the impacts of social media” (New York Times Book Review) tracks the high-stakes inside story of how Big Tech’s breakneck race to drive engagement—and profits—at all costs fractured the world. The Chaos Machine is “an essential book for our times” (Ezra Klein). We all have a vague sense that social media is bad for our minds, for our children, and for our democracies. But the truth is that its reach and impact run far deeper than we have understood. Building on years of international reporting, Max Fisher tells the gripping and galling inside story of how Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social network preyed on psychological frailties to create the algorithms that drive everyday users to extreme opinions and, increasingly, extreme actions. As Fisher demonstrates, the companies’ founding tenets, combined with a blinkered focus on maximizing engagement, have led to a destabilized world for everyone. Traversing the planet, Fisher tracks the ubiquity of hate speech and its spillover into violence, ills that first festered in far-off locales, to their dark culmination in America during the pandemic, the 2020 election, and the Capitol Insurrection. Through it all, the social-media giants refused to intervene in any meaningful way, claiming to champion free speech when in fact what they most prized were limitless profits. The result, as Fisher shows, is a cultural shift toward a world in which people are polarized not by beliefs based on facts, but by misinformation, outrage, and fear. His narrative is about more than the villains, however. Fisher also weaves together the stories of the heroic outsiders and Silicon Valley defectors who raised the alarm and revealed what was happening behind the closed doors of Big Tech. Both panoramic and intimate, The Chaos Machine is the definitive account of the meteoric rise and troubled legacy of the tech titans, as well as a rousing and hopeful call to arrest the havoc wreaked on our minds and our world before it’s too late.

The contemporary media landscape might be described in simple terms as a digital terrain where real and virtual worlds collide. Stephen Kennedy investigates the concept of our digital space leading up to the digital turn of the 1990s to fully understand how our perceptions of orientation in space in time was altered. Chaos Media: A Sonic Economy of Digital Space re-thinks the five fundamental paths to our contemporary understanding of the digital age: cultural, political, economic, scientific, and aesthetic, and ties them together to form a coherent whole in order to demonstrate how critical thinking can be reconfigured using a methodological approach that uses 'chaos' and 'complexity' as systematic tools for studying contemporary mediated space. Kennedy introduces the concept of Sonic Economy, a methodology that allows for a critical engagement with the heterogeneous elements of an information society wherein the dispersion of discrete elements is manifest but not always clearly visible.

With examples drawn from media coverage of the War on Terror, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and the London underground bombings, Cultural Chaos explores the changing relationship between journalism and power in an increasingly globalised news culture. In this new text, Brian McNair examines the processes of cultural, geographic and political dissolution in the post-Cold War era and the rapid evolution of information and communication technologies. He investigates the impact of these trends on domestic and international journalism and on political processes in democratic and authoritarian societies across the world. Written in a lively and accessible style, Cultural Chaos provides students with an overview of the evolution of the sociology of journalism, a critical review of current thinking within media studies and an argument for a revision and renewal of the paradigms that have dominated the field since the early twentieth century. Separate chapters are devoted to new developments such as the rise of the blogosphere and satellite television news and their impact on journalism more generally. Cultural Chaos will be essential reading for all those interested in the emerging globalised news culture of the twenty-first century.

Navigate between myth and chaos in this “journey filled with peril, self-discovery, and terrifying moments” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Sixteen-year-old Scotch struggles to fit in—at home she’s the perfect daughter, at school she’s provocatively sassy, and thanks to her mixed heritage, she doesn’t feel she belongs with the Caribbeans, whites, or blacks. And even more troubling, lately her skin is becoming covered in a sticky black substance that can’t be removed. While trying to cope with this creepiness, she goes out with her brother—and he disappears. A mysterious bubble of light just swallows him up, and Scotch has no idea how to find him. Soon, the Chaos that has claimed her brother affects the city at large, until it seems like everyone is turning into crazy creatures. Scotch needs to get to the bottom of this supernatural situation ASAP before the Chaos consumes everything she’s ever known—and she knows that the black shadowy entity that’s begun trailing her every move is probably not going to help. A blend of fantasy and Caribbean folklore, at its heart this tale is about identity and self-acceptance—because only by acknowledging her imperfections can Scotch hope to save her brother.

This long-awaited revised second edition of the standard reference on the subject has been considerably expanded to include such recent developments as novel control schemes, control of chaotic space-time patterns, control of noisy nonlinear systems, and communication with chaos, as well as promising new directions in research. The contributions from leading international scientists active in the field provide a comprehensive overview of our current level of knowledge on chaos control and its applications in physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, and engineering. In addition, they show the overlap with the traditional field of control theory in the engineering community. An interdisciplinary approach of interest to scientists and engineers working in a number of areas.

Few organizations realize a return on their digital investment. They’re distracted by political infighting and technology-first solutions. To reach the next level, organizations must realign their assets—people, content, and technology—by practicing the discipline of digital governance. Managing Chaos inspires new and necessary conversations about digital governance and its transformative power to support creativity, real collaboration, digital quality, and online growth.

A journalist's twenty-year fascination with the Manson murders leads to "gobsmacking" (The Ringer) new revelations about the FBI's involvement in this "kaleidoscopic" (The New York Times) reassessment of an infamous case in American history. Over two grim nights in Los Angeles, the young followers of Charles Manson murdered seven people, including the actress Sharon Tate, then eight months pregnant. With no mercy and seemingly no motive, the Manson Family followed their leader's every order -- their crimes lit a flame of paranoia across the nation, spelling the end of the sixties. Manson became one of history's most infamous criminals, his name forever attached to an era when charlatans mixed with prodigies, free love was as possible as brainwashing, and utopia -- or dystopia -- was just an acid trip away. Twenty years ago, when journalist Tom O'Neill was reporting a magazine piece about the murders, he worried there was nothing new to say. Then he unearthed shocking evidence of a cover-up behind the "official" story, including police carelessness, legal misconduct, and potential surveillance by intelligence agents. When a tense interview with Vincent Bugliosi -- prosecutor of the Manson Family and author of Helter Skelter -- turned a friendly source into a nemesis, O'Neill knew he was onto something. But every discovery brought more questions: Who were Manson's real friends in Hollywood, and how far would they go to hide their ties? Why didn't law enforcement, including Manson's own parole officer, act on their many chances to stop him? And how did Manson -- an illiterate ex-con -- turn a group of peaceful hippies into remorseless killers? O'Neill's quest for the truth led him from reclusive celebrities to seasoned spies, from San Francisco's summer of love to the shadowy sites of the CIA's mind-control experiments, on a trail rife with shady cover-ups and suspicious coincidences. The product of two decades of reporting, hundreds of new interviews, and dozens of never-before-seen documents from the LAPD, the FBI, and the CIA, Chaos mounts an argument that could be, according to Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Steven Kay, strong enough to overturn the verdicts on the Manson murders. This is a book that overturns our understanding of a pivotal time in American history.

As more companies move toward microservices and other distributed technologies, the complexity of these systems increases. You can't remove the complexity, but through Chaos Engineering you can discover vulnerabilities and prevent outages before they impact your customers. This practical guide shows engineers how to navigate complex systems while optimizing to meet business goals. Two of the field's prominent figures, Casey Rosenthal and Nora Jones, pioneered the discipline while working together at Netflix. In this book, they expound on the what, how, and why of Chaos Engineering while facilitating a conversation from practitioners across industries. Many chapters are written by contributing authors to widen the perspective across verticals within (and beyond) the software industry. Learn how Chaos Engineering enables your organization to navigate complexity Explore a methodology to avoid failures within your application, network, and infrastructure Move from theory to practice through real-world stories from industry experts at Google, Microsoft, Slack, and LinkedIn, among others Establish a framework for thinking about complexity within software systems Design a Chaos Engineering program around game days and move toward highly targeted, automated experiments Learn how to design continuous collaborative chaos experiments

What happens when you apply old-school thinking to a new media world? Absolutely nothing! Media: From Chaos to Clarity strips away the bias of a bygone era and offers readers a compass to navigate an exciting and messy media world. The Five Global Truths were introduced in 2011. Today, we have more evidence that these Truths can guide us as we travel through Media Chaos. Franks takes us on a journey that celebrates bold pioneers and describes the bumpy ride as we learn to let go of outdated beliefs. Forget the battle of old vs. new media. Rather, Franks describes a media ecosystem where the media collaborate, consumers accelerate great content and where bold pioneers who break old rules realize exponential results.Author Judy Franks is a full-time clinical faculty member of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, Media, and Integrated Marketing Communications. Franks teaches Consumer Insight and Media courses in the IMC degree programs at Medill. She joined Northwestern in 2008 following a 23 year career in Chicago's top advertising and media services agencies. She also consults with marketers, agencies and the media through her firm, The Marketing Democracy.