Drs. Messina and Gill discussed the concept of technoference, which refers to the interference of technology with human connection and its impact on personal interactions and relationships. They emphasized the importance of being present in the moment and not letting devices like smartphones and laptops distract us from connecting with others, highlighting the negative impact of constant distractions on relationships. Dr. Messina provided an example that focused on a family gathered around their...
May 07, 2025•23 min•Ep. 246
We're pleased to welcome Dr. Peter Krapp, the author of Computing Legacies: Digital Cultures of Simulation (MIT Press, 2024), to the New Books Network. In Computing Legacies, Peter Krapp explores a media history of simulation to excavate three salient aspects of digital culture. Firstly, he profiles simulation as cultural technique, enabling symbolic work and foregrounding hypothetical literacy. Secondly, he positions simulation as crucial for the preservation of cultural memory, where modeling,...
May 06, 2025•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 88
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Jessica Smith, Professor in the Engineering, Design, and Society Department and Dean’s Fellow for Earth and Society Programs of the Colorado School of Mines, about her work on engineering and public accountability in energy and mining industries. The pair discuss Smith’s long-held interests in mining and extractive industries, including her roots in coal country; her book, Extracting Accountability: Engineers and Corporate Social Responsibility (MIT Pr...
May 05, 2025•1 hr 10 min
With significant evolutions in digital technologies and media distribution in the past two decades, the business of storytelling through screens has shifted dramatically. In the past, blockbuster movies and TV shows like Friends aimed first for domestic mass audiences, although the biggest hits circulated globally. Now, transnational distribution plays a primary role and imagined audiences are global. At the same time, the once-mass audience has significantly fragmented to enable an expansion in...
May 02, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 153
Why has trust in the news media declined? How can we combat biased reporting and the spread of misinformation? And how do these challenges compare to the media landscape during America’s founding era? Join us as we explore these pressing questions with William English, a political economist and Associate Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. Professor English will discuss his long-standing research on the intersection...
May 01, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 148
We often think of reason as a fixed entity, as a definitive body of facts that do not change over time. But during the Enlightenment, reason also was seen as a process, as a set of skills enacted on a daily basis. How, why, and where were these skills learned? Concentrating on Scottish students living during the long eighteenth century, Media and the Mind: Art, Science, and Notebooks as Paper Machines, 1700-1830 (University of Chicago Press, 2023) by Dr. Matthew Daniel Eddy argues that notebooks...
Apr 30, 2025•57 min•Ep. 388
Today’s guest is Carolyn Birdsall, Associate Professor of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam. If you’re a scholar of sound or radio, you likely know her work, particularly her monograph Nazi Soundscapes (AUP, 2012) which was the recipient of the ASCA Book Award in 2013. Her new book, Radiophilia (Bloomsbury, 2023), examines the love of radio through history. It will be a great value to anyone–from novice to expert–who wants to understand radio studies and think about where it should go in th...
Apr 28, 2025•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 57
Uncle Sam is watching, whether you like it or not. And the surveillance program the United States is building has as its foundation immigrants who have crossed the nation's southern border. In Data Borders: How Silicon Valley is Builidng an Industry Around Immigrants (University of California Press, 2023), UCLA information studies professor Melissa Villa-Nicholas deftly explains how private corporations such as Amazon and Palantir, government agencies including ICE and the CBP, and even public l...
Apr 27, 2025•57 min•Ep. 185
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Lauren Bridges, Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia, about her work on the political, economic, and environmental politics of big data infrastructures. They focus on some of Bridges’ work on the disconnect between the promises made to localities around digital transformation and the realities of data center power demands and other material factors. They also discuss Bridges’ other projects, including “Geographies of Dig...
Apr 26, 2025•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 95
Video (television, film, the moving image generally) is today’s most popular information medium. Two-thirds of the world’s internet traffic is video. Americans get their news and information more often from screens and speakers than through any other means. The Moving Image: A User's Manual (MIT Press, 2025) is the first authoritative account of how we have arrived here, together with the first definitive manual to help writers, educators, and publishers use video more effectively. Drawing on de...
Apr 25, 2025•52 min•Ep. 231
Data and privacy have emerged as critical issues in our digitally interconnected era, profoundly influencing individual rights, societal norms, and democratic processes. In his book, On Privacy and Technology (Oxford UP, 2025), Daniel Solove provides a compelling exploration of the intersection between evolving technologies and privacy rights. Drawing on insights from law, philosophy, sociology, and communication studies, Solove unpacks the complex ways in which digital innovations challenge tra...
Apr 24, 2025•33 min
Howard Chiang’s new book is a masterful study of the relationship between sexual knowledge and Chinese modernity. After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2018) guides readers through the history of eunuchs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the techniques of visualization that helped establish the conditions that produced sex as an object of empirical knowledge, the rise of sexology in the 1920s, the discourse of “sex ch...
Apr 23, 2025•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 180
Drs. Messina and Gill talked about cognitive offloading in our digital age—how smartphones, AI, and other technologies are reshaping our mental habits, our memory, our capacity for attention, and ultimately, our emotional lives. Cognitive offloading refers to the process of using tools and technologies to take over mental functions we used to perform ourselves. Whether it's using GPS to navigate, storing phone numbers in our contacts, or asking ChatGPT for help organizing thoughts, we’re increas...
Apr 22, 2025•39 min•Ep. 244
It’s the UConn Popcast, and what impact will AI have on being human in the next decade? Elon University’s Center for Imagining the Digital Future just released a big report on this question, based on a survey of nearly 300 global tech experts. These insiders predict major changes in the very near future to the way we think about work, life, and ourselves. We talked with Lee Rainie, the director of the center and co-author of the report. We also discuss another center report, on the impact of AI ...
Apr 21, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 30
In 2018, the United States Supreme Court opened the floodgates for states to legalize betting on sports. Eager for revenue, almost forty states have done so. The result is the explosive growth of an industry dominated by companies like FanDuel and DraftKings. One out of every five American adults gambled on sports in 2023, amounting to $121 billion, more than they spent on movies and video games combined. The rise of online sports gambling—the immediacy of betting with your phone, the ability of...
Apr 20, 2025•59 min•Ep. 289
Every year, hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of farm machinery, fertilizer, seeds, and pesticides are sold to farmers around the world. Although agricultural inputs are a huge sector of the global economy, the lion's share of that market is controlled by a relatively small number of very large transnational corporations. The high degree of concentration among these agribusiness titans is striking, considering that just a few hundred years ago agricultural inputs were not even marketed good...
Apr 19, 2025•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 128
The recent coronavirus pandemic proved that the time-old notion seems now truer than ever: that science and politics represent a clash of cultures. But why should scientists simply “stick to the facts” and leave politics to the politicians when the world seems to be falling down around us? Drawing on his experience as both a research scientist and an expert advisor at the centre of government, Ian Boyd takes an empirical approach to examining the current state of the relationship between science...
Apr 18, 2025•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 207
In late nineteenth-century Latin America, governments used new scientific, technological, and geographical knowledge not only to consolidate power and protect borders but also to define the physical contours of their respective nations. Chilean and Argentine authorities in particular attempted to transform northern Patagonia, a space they perceived as "desert," through a myriad of nationalizing policies, from military campaigns to hotels. But beyond the urban governing halls of Chile and Argenti...
Apr 17, 2025•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 232
What makes one sentence easy to read and another a slog that demands re-reading? Where do you put information you want readers to recall? Drawing on cognitive neuroscience, psychology and psycholinguistics, Writing for the Reader’s Brain (Cambridge University Press, 2025) provides a practical, how-to guide on how to write for your reader. It introduces the five 'Cs' of writing - clarity, continuity, coherence, concision, and cadence - and demonstrates how to use these to bring your writing to li...
Apr 16, 2025•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 387
It’s a common refrain: AI is neither good nor bad because that depends on how its used. Professor Anita Say Chan begs to differ. Chan is the author of Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future (U California Press, 2025). Chan is Associate Professor in the School of Information Sciences and Department of Media and Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as well as the author of a prior book Networking Peripheries on tech movements among...
Apr 15, 2025•46 min•Ep. 84
How do young people use digital platforms? In The Kids are Online: Confronting the Myths and Realities of Young Digital Life (U California Press, 2025), Ysabel Gerrard, a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media and Society at the University of Sheffield explores the understandings and experience of young people as they navigate both the online and offline world. Drawing on a range of sociological, digital and creative methods, the book punctures many myths around young people’s digital lives, showing b...
Apr 13, 2025•41 min•Ep. 524
Game streamers and live commentators are producing increasingly comprehensive analyses of gameplay, yet scholarship still tends to flatten the experiential media of video games into text for close reading. By shifting focus toward the immersiveness of video games, Playthrough Poetics: Gameplay as Research Method (Amherst, 2024) makes the case for gameplay as a necessary, alternate method. Contributors to this volume engage widely with the activity of play through autoethnographies, meta-analyses...
Apr 12, 2025•33 min
In episode 5 Dr. Karyne Messina and Dr. Harry Gill talked about what can happen when middle-age and older adults watch screens too much as opposed to engaging in other important tasks in life during Erik Eriksson’s last two stages of development. In the “Generativity versus Stagnation” stage (ages 40-65), productive individuals focus on contributing to society by raising families, engaging in meaningful work, and connecting with their communities. This can’t be done in optimal ways when people s...
Apr 10, 2025•48 min•Ep. 241
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Jeremy Braddock, Associate Professor of Literatures in English and Coordinator of the Media Studies Initiative at Cornell University, about his book, Firesign: The Electromagnetic History of Everything as Told on Nine Comedy Albums. The book explores themes of media and technology through nine albums made by Firesign Theatre, an experimental, surrealistic comedy troupe formed in the mid-1960s that created art across several media forms. The theme of ...
Apr 09, 2025•1 hr 10 min
In Flight Paths (HarperCollins, 2023), Rebecca Heisman illuminates the stories and methods of the scientists who unlocked the secrets of bird migration. How and why birds navigate the skies has continually fascinated the human imagination, but only recently have we been able to fully understand these amazing journeys. Flight Paths is the never-before-told saga of how a group of passionate scientists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries engaged nearly every branch of science to understand ...
Apr 08, 2025•42 min•Ep. 386
Amid the fanfare around AI and autonomous weapons, decision-makers - both military and political - are imagining an augmented future for warfare that minimises human influence and connection. But in their rush for speed and lethality, leaders have failed to understand the behavioural and technical challenges that accompany these new weapon types, as well as the detail of their operation and the practicalities involved in deploying these assets on tomorrow's battlefields. Indeed, as autonomy star...
Apr 07, 2025•1 hr 36 min•Ep. 264
Contemporary developments in communications technologies have overturned key aspects of the global political system and transformed the media landscape. Yet interlocking technological, informational, and political revolutions have occurred many times in the past. In Seeking News, Making China: Information, Technology, and the Emergence of Mass Society (Stanford UP, 2024), John Alekna traces the history of news in twentieth century China to demonstrate how large structural changes in technology a...
Apr 06, 2025•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 109
It’s the UConn Popcast, and we spoke with Duke Law Professor James Boyle about his new book The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood (MIT Press, 2024). We spoke with Boyle about how our legal and moral understandings of personhood are being challenged by advances in AI. We discussed the role of the law, popular culture, tests of sentience, and our capacity for empathy in shaping this urgent debate. James Boyle is William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law at Duke Law School and founder of the Cente...
Apr 05, 2025•54 min•Ep. 28
Climate scientist and policy expert Anna Farro Henderson embarks on a remarkable narrative journey in Core Samples: A Climate Scientist's Experiments in Politics and Motherhood (U Minnesota Press, 2025), exploring how science is done, discussed, legislated, and imagined. Through stories both raucous and poignant--of far-flung expeditions, finding artistic inspiration in research, and traversing the systemic barriers women and mothers face in science and politics--she brings readers into the dail...
Apr 03, 2025•47 min•Ep. 207
In the latest episode of Unlocking Academia, host Raja Aderdor sits down with Marc Owen Jones, associate professor at Northwestern University in Qatar, to explore the complex world of digital deception in the Middle East, as outlined in his book Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Deception, Disinformation and Social Media (Hurst/Oxford UP, 2021). Marc draws on years of experience growing up in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, as well as living and working in Sudan, Syria, Germany, and the UK....
Apr 02, 2025•27 min•Ep. 6
