Over a decade ago, tech companies began using algorithms to personalize our experience of the web. Using sophisticated technology and vast amounts of consumer data, companies began to predict our tastes better than we could ourselves. In response, ecommerce expanded, and journalism adapted itself to the personalized attention economy. However, there was a hidden side effect, which Eli Pariser termed "the filter bubble," which is the exclusion of other perspectives from our tech-assisted preferences. Raising many hard questions including data security, political propaganda, and the pervasiveness of digital "junk food," filter bubbles reveal the future challenges of a personalized, automated web. Features such as media literacy questions and terms enhance this collection, encouraging readers to analyze reporting styles and devices.

Over a decade ago, tech companies began using algorithms to personalize our experience of the web. Using sophisticated technology and vast amounts of consumer data, companies began to predict our tastes better than we could ourselves. In response, ecommerce expanded, and journalism adapted itself to the personalized attention economy. However, there was a hidden side effect, which Eli Pariser termed "the filter bubble," which is the exclusion of other perspectives from our tech-assisted preferences. Raising many hard questions including data security, political propaganda, and the pervasiveness of digital "junk food," filter bubbles reveal the future challenges of a personalized, automated web. Features such as media literacy questions and terms enhance this collection, encouraging readers to analyze reporting styles and devices.

Discover the essential thinking tools you’ve been missing with The Great Mental Models series by Shane Parrish, New York Times bestselling author and the mind behind the acclaimed Farnam Street blog and “The Knowledge Project” podcast. This first book in the series is your guide to learning the crucial thinking tools nobody ever taught you. Time and time again, great thinkers such as Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett have credited their success to mental models–representations of how something works that can scale onto other fields. Mastering a small number of mental models enables you to rapidly grasp new information, identify patterns others miss, and avoid the common mistakes that hold people back. The Great Mental Models: Volume 1, General Thinking Concepts shows you how making a few tiny changes in the way you think can deliver big results. Drawing on examples from history, business, art, and science, this book details nine of the most versatile, all-purpose mental models you can use right away to improve your decision making and productivity. This book will teach you how to: Avoid blind spots when looking at problems. Find non-obvious solutions. Anticipate and achieve desired outcomes. Play to your strengths, avoid your weaknesses, … and more. The Great Mental Models series demystifies once elusive concepts and illuminates rich knowledge that traditional education overlooks. This series is the most comprehensive and accessible guide on using mental models to better understand our world, solve problems, and gain an advantage.

This fascinating dictionary covers the whole realm of social media, providing accessible, authoritative, and concise entries centred primarily on websites and applications that enable users to create and share content, or to participate in social networking. From the authors of the popular Dictionary of Media and Communication, Daniel Chandler and Rod Munday, comes a title that complements and supplements their previous dictionary, and that will be of great use to social media marketing specialists, bloggers, and to any general internet user.

Every time we check our feeds we create safety bubbles around ourselves. Thanks to technological algorithms, we are living an increasingly narrow existence, one in which the news we read, the products we purchase, and the people we interact with are tailor-made for each of us. We might feel informed and comfortable, but we are isolating ourselves from anything outside our bubble. Are online filters just an efficient way to connect, or do they spell the end of democracy? Anyone who has read this book will understand the potential dangers of a society whose assumptions are never challenged.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Is social media destroying democracy? Are Russian propaganda or "Fake news" entrepreneurs on Facebook undermining our sense of a shared reality? A conventional wisdom has emerged since the election of Donald Trump in 2016 that new technologies and their manipulation by foreign actors played a decisive role in his victory and are responsible for the sense of a "post-truth" moment in which disinformation and propaganda thrives. Network Propaganda challenges that received wisdom through the most comprehensive study yet published on media coverage of American presidential politics from the start of the election cycle in April 2015 to the one year anniversary of the Trump presidency. Analysing millions of news stories together with Twitter and Facebook shares, broadcast television and YouTube, the book provides a comprehensive overview of the architecture of contemporary American political communications. Through data analysis and detailed qualitative case studies of coverage of immigration, Clinton scandals, and the Trump Russia investigation, the book finds that the right-wing media ecosystem operates fundamentally differently than the rest of the media environment. The authors argue that longstanding institutional, political, and cultural patterns in American politics interacted with technological change since the 1970s to create a propaganda feedback loop in American conservative media. This dynamic has marginalized centre-right media and politicians, radicalized the right wing ecosystem, and rendered it susceptible to propaganda efforts, foreign and domestic. For readers outside the United States, the book offers a new perspective and methods for diagnosing the sources of, and potential solutions for, the perceived global crisis of democratic politics.

A report on how internet personalization is controlling and limiting information to users reveals how sites like Google and Facebook only display search results that they believe people are most likely to select, raising a risk that users will become less informed, more biased and increasingly isolated. 50,000 first printing.

Allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election have brought the issue of election interference to the fore, but is it actually a significant issue in the United States? This volume explores the history of election interference in the United States and beyond, as well as the various methods of interference. It also discusses whether interference can be effectively combatted and what attempts are being made to do so. Election interference has been declared a threat to the electoral process and democracy as a whole, and it is more important than ever to understand the various factors at play.

This handbook is one of the first comprehensive research and teaching tools for the developing area of global media ethics. The advent of new media that is global in reach and impact has created the need for a journalism ethics that is global in principles and aims. For many scholars, teachers and journalists, the existing journalism ethics, e.g. existing codes of ethics, is too parochial and national. It fails to provide adequate normative guidance for a media that is digital, global and practiced by professional and citizen. A global media ethics is being constructed to define what responsible public journalism means for a new global media era. Currently, scholars write texts and codes for global media, teach global media ethics, analyse how global issues should be covered, and gather together at conferences, round tables and meetings. However, the field lacks an authoritative handbook that presents the views of leading thinkers on the most important issues for global media ethics. This handbook is a milestone in the field, and a major contribution to media ethics.