Our next book club reading has been decided! After a furious polling, the winner is…
…Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. This 2017 book is a thoughtful account of how we now use technologies to politically protest and organize, and is therefore quite germane to the future of education.
There are several ways to get a copy. You can buy one directly from the publisher. You could support my work by buying it through my bookstore. You could seek a library copy through WorldCat.There is also an official, free, Creative-Commons-licensed pdf (more about there here).
How our reading will proceed: in a few days I’ll blog up a reading schedule, assigning certain chapters to a weekly timeline. Then, once enough time has passed for everyone to get an analog or digital copy, we’ll dig in. All posts will be tagged https://bryanalexander.org/tag/tufekci/, and so will be available in that one spot for any reader now and in the future.
From the author’s bio (and it’s pronounced /too-FEK-chee/):
Zeynep’s work explores the interactions between technology and society. She started her career as a programmer, and switched to social science after getting interested in social impacts of technology. Zeynep, who grew up in Istanbul, Turkey, and came to the United States for graduate school, is now an associate professor at the University of North Carolina and a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times. She’s currently also a faculty associate at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Previously, she was an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, a fellow at Princeton University Center for Information Technology, and an assistant professor of sociology at UMBC.
Appropriately, she is active on Twitter.
How I decided this one: actually, we had a three-way tie for favorite book, between Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, The Race between Education and Technology, Hans Rosling, Factfulness, and Twitter and Teargas. I picked the latter because it seemed well timed to the moment (political unrest, questions around social media and mobile devices), and also because I want to keep supporting the work of women.
There is a good amount of information about the book online. It has its own Wikipedia page. You can also find it on Goodreads and its official site.
Stay tuned for the next post!
And a big shoutout to Kyle Johnson for nominating the book.
