An often riveting, disturbing examination of the social media labyrinth and the companies that created it.
A veteran journalist examines the rise of the social media giants and the dangers they have created for our society.
Fisher, a columnist and international reporter for the New York Times, dives into the chaotic social media landscape, synthesizing dozens of interviews from a wide range of sources. Focusing primarily on Facebook, the author walks through the key steps in the progress of the technology, seeing the advent of algorithms as a turning point. By tracking the sites that consumers visit, algorithms allowed for precise targeting for future contact. The best-performing sites gave users a sense of belonging, usually by denigrating “outsiders.” Over time, the result was increasing social and political polarization, with debate and discourse replaced by attacks that could easily spill into the offline world. Fisher is spot-on when he describes how the promotion and manufacture of moral outrage were not glitches in the system but inherent features. Senior leaders at Facebook received countless warnings about potential problem areas; claiming that they would address them, they never did. The company had rules to exclude certain posts, but they were inconsistent, vague, and overly complex (more than 1,400 pages). The author capably explains the many complex elements involved, but his liberal perspective is occasionally too evident. The mere mention of Donald Trump often makes him splutter with indignation. He has much to say about right-wing groups but little about those on the left. Nonetheless, Fisher is a diligent reporter, and when he maintains his focus on the mechanics of social media, he makes numerous important points. He even suggests that social media has become so counterproductive that we should consider shutting down the big firms—he aptly cites the murderous computer HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey—or at least forcing a thorough restructuring process. It’s a sensible idea worth discussing, but given the power of big tech, it’s unlikely to happen.
An often riveting, disturbing examination of the social media labyrinth and the companies that created it.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-316-70332-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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