An insightful but prolix analysis of how social movements take advantage of media technology.
According to this precise academic study, advances in communication drive progressive social movements.
“Changes in the ability to communicate seem to create an environment in which social movements can emerge, embrace the new technology, and use it to advance the change they wish to see in the world.” So writes Brescia (Law and Technology/Albany Law School; How Cities Will Save the World: Urban Innovation in the Face of Population Flows, Climate Change and Economic Inequality, 2016) early on, emphasizing that successful movements accomplish three things. First, they harness the latest means of communications to further their goals. The postal service and the steam-powered printing press, which reduced newspaper printing costs from 6 cents to 1 during the 1830s, allowed the abolitionist movement to flood the nation with its literature. In the 1950s and ’60s, TV spread support of the civil rights movement, delivering vivid scenes of violence to a white America largely neutral at the beginning. Second, movements form “trans-local, grassroots networks” connected to larger, often nationwide organizations. Local bonds facilitate the coordination of action at the local, state, and national levels to promote social change. Brescia describes the passage of the GI Bill of 1944, the result of a massive nationwide campaign. Third, they unite members through positive, inclusive, optimistic “messages” that stress common interests. The author works hard, with some success, to find a silver lining in the explosive communications revolution that began with computer-generated mailing lists in the 1960s and continues with the pervasive internet, mobile devices, and social media, which both unite and isolate individuals and vastly increase the exchange of information, not all of it accurate. Most readers will agree that Brescia is on to something, but he lays out his ideas in dense prose more acceptable to a scholarly audience.
An insightful but prolix analysis of how social movements take advantage of media technology.Pub Date: April 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5017-4811-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Cornell Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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