Download or read book Causes and Symptoms of Socio Cultural Polarization written by Israr Qureshi and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-03-22 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores cultural polarization resultant decline in social cohesion in society and how information and communication technologies exacerbate the cultural polarization through phenomenon such as “echo chambers” of information that damage the quality of online discourse. This book examines the nature of the information that is shared. Further this book identifies how the quality of online discourse and polarization induced through it leads to offline harm and negative outcomes in our society. This book discusses how wide-ranging information exchange on digital media can lead to two scenarios, namely, the formation of the public sphere or the formation of echo chambers. While the public sphere, which promotes greater diversity, is a well-researched domain, substantially less research has been conducted on echo chambers in relation to sociocultural activities, products or services. This book states that polarization induced by the formation and evolution of echo chambers in sociocultural realm such as around epidemic outbreaks, vaccination, healthcare, education, and climate change is an emerging avenue of research due to its enormous impact in the shaping of our society. Therefore, this book argues that understanding the characteristics of sociocultural products related controversies is critical and valuable in developing interventions to reduce unhealthy societal and organizational polarisations. The development of systematic knowledge is required to understand and address such a large scale and complex societal challenge so as to facilitate a deeper understanding and offer solutions to the growing issue of polarization in sociocultural context driven primarily through echo chambers. This book examines how technology enabled social media usage increases, and the complex structural outcomes such as echo chambers are likely to have an increasingly important role in shaping public opinion. This book appeals to readers with interest in developing a deeper and broader understanding of issues and initiatives related to the polarization of opinions on cultural products. These include readers and scholars from various disciplines, along with engaged organizational leaders, activists, policy makers, and common citizens.

Download or read book Love Your Enemies written by Arthur C. Brooks and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-03-12 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER To get ahead today, you have to be a jerk, right? Divisive politicians. Screaming heads on television. Angry campus activists. Twitter trolls. Today in America, there is an “outrage industrial complex” that prospers by setting American against American, creating a “culture of contempt”—the habit of seeing people who disagree with us not as merely incorrect, but as worthless and defective. Maybe, like more than nine out of ten Americans, you dislike it. But hey, either you play along, or you’ll be left behind, right? Wrong. In Love Your Enemies, social scientist and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller From Strength to Strength Arthur C. Brooks shows that abuse and outrage are not the right formula for lasting success. Brooks blends cutting-edge behavioral research, ancient wisdom, and a decade of experience leading one of America’s top policy think tanks in a work that offers a better way to lead based on bridging divides and mending relationships. Brooks’ prescriptions are unconventional. To bring America together, we shouldn’t try to agree more. There is no need for mushy moderation, because disagreement is the secret to excellence. Civility and tolerance shouldn’t be our goals, because they are hopelessly low standards. And our feelings toward our foes are irrelevant; what matters is how we choose to act. Love Your Enemies offers a clear strategy for victory for a new generation of leaders. It is a rallying cry for people hoping for a new era of American progress. Most of all, it is a roadmap to arrive at the happiness that comes when we choose to love one another, despite our differences.

Download or read book Why We re Polarized written by Ezra Klein and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-01-28 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2022 One of Bill Gates’s “5 books to read this summer,” this New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller shows us that America’s political system isn’t broken. The truth is scarier: it’s working exactly as designed. In this “superbly researched” (The Washington Post) and timely book, journalist Ezra Klein reveals how that system is polarizing us—and how we are polarizing it—with disastrous results. “The American political system—which includes everyone from voters to journalists to the president—is full of rational actors making rational decisions given the incentives they face,” writes political analyst Ezra Klein. “We are a collection of functional parts whose efforts combine into a dysfunctional whole.” “A thoughtful, clear and persuasive analysis” (The New York Times Book Review), Why We’re Polarized reveals the structural and psychological forces behind America’s descent into division and dysfunction. Neither a polemic nor a lament, this book offers a clear framework for understanding everything from Trump’s rise to the Democratic Party’s leftward shift to the politicization of everyday culture. America is polarized, first and foremost, by identity. Everyone engaged in American politics is engaged, at some level, in identity politics. Over the past fifty years in America, our partisan identities have merged with our racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities. These merged identities have attained a weight that is breaking much in our politics and tearing at the bonds that hold this country together. Klein shows how and why American politics polarized around identity in the 20th century, and what that polarization did to the way we see the world and one another. And he traces the feedback loops between polarized political identities and polarized political institutions that are driving our system toward crisis. “Well worth reading” (New York magazine), this is an “eye-opening” (O, The Oprah Magazine) book that will change how you look at politics—and perhaps at yourself.

Download or read book The Authoritarian Dynamic written by Karen Stenner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-08-01 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the root causes of intolerance? This book addresses that question by developing a universal theory of what determines intolerance of difference in general, which includes racism, political intolerance, moral intolerance and punitiveness. It demonstrates that all these seemingly disparate attitudes are principally caused by just two factors: individuals' innate psychological predispositions to intolerance ("authoritarianism") interacting with changing conditions of societal threat. The threatening conditions, particularly resonant in the present political climate, that exacerbate authoritarian attitudes include, most critically, great dissension in public opinion and general loss of confidence in political leaders. Using purpose-built experimental manipulations, cross-national survey data and in-depth personal interviews with extreme authoritarians and libertarians, the book shows that this simple model provides the most complete account of political conflict across the ostensibly distinct domains of race and immigration, civil liberties, morality, crime and punishment, and of when and why those battles will be most heated.

Download or read book Breaking the Social Media Prism written by Chris Bail and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-27 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revealing look at how user behavior is powering deep social divisions online—and how we might yet defeat political tribalism on social media In an era of increasing social isolation, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are among the most important tools we have to understand each other. We use social media as a mirror to decipher our place in society but, as Chris Bail explains, it functions more like a prism that distorts our identities, empowers status-seeking extremists, and renders moderates all but invisible. Breaking the Social Media Prism challenges common myths about echo chambers, foreign misinformation campaigns, and radicalizing algorithms, revealing that the solution to political tribalism lies deep inside ourselves. Drawing on innovative online experiments and in-depth interviews with social media users from across the political spectrum, this book explains why stepping outside of our echo chambers can make us more polarized, not less. Bail takes you inside the minds of online extremists through vivid narratives that trace their lives on the platforms and off—detailing how they dominate public discourse at the expense of the moderate majority. Wherever you stand on the spectrum of user behavior and political opinion, he offers fresh solutions to counter political tribalism from the bottom up and the top down. He introduces new apps and bots to help readers avoid misperceptions and engage in better conversations with the other side. Finally, he explores what the virtual public square might look like if we could hit "reset" and redesign social media from scratch through a first-of-its-kind experiment on a new social media platform built for scientific research. Providing data-driven recommendations for strengthening our social media connections, Breaking the Social Media Prism shows how to combat online polarization without deleting our accounts.

Download or read book Social Computing and Social Media written by Adela Coman and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-07-08 with total page 655 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This two-volume set LNCS 14025 and 14026 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Social Computing and Social Media, SCSM 2023, held as part of the 25th International Conference, HCI International 2023, held in Copenhagen, Denmark in July 2023. The total of 1578 papers and 396 posters included in the HCII 2023 proceedings was carefully reviewed and selected from 7472 submissions. The SCSM 2023 conference offers a wide range of topics related to the design, development, assessment, use, and impact of social media.

Download or read book Democracies Divided written by Thomas Carothers and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A must-read for anyone concerned about the fate of contemporary democracies.”—Steven Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die 2020 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Why divisions have deepened and what can be done to heal them As one part of the global democratic recession, severe political polarization is increasingly afflicting old and new democracies alike, producing the erosion of democratic norms and rising societal anger. This volume is the first book-length comparative analysis of this troubling global phenomenon, offering in-depth case studies of countries as wide-ranging and important as Brazil, India, Kenya, Poland, Turkey, and the United States. The case study authors are a diverse group of country and regional experts, each with deep local knowledge and experience. Democracies Divided identifies and examines the fissures that are dividing societies and the factors bringing polarization to a boil. In nearly every case under study, political entrepreneurs have exploited and exacerbated long-simmering divisions for their own purposes—in the process undermining the prospects for democratic consensus and productive governance. But this book is not simply a diagnosis of what has gone wrong. Each case study discusses actions that concerned citizens and organizations are taking to counter polarizing forces, whether through reforms to political parties, institutions, or the media. The book’s editors distill from the case studies a range of possible ways for restoring consensus and defeating polarization in the world’s democracies. Timely, rigorous, and accessible, this book is of compelling interest to civic activists, political actors, scholars, and ordinary citizens in societies beset by increasingly rancorous partisanship.

Download or read book Social Entrepreneurship and Gandhian Thoughts in the Post COVID World written by Babita Bhatt and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-08-21 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this edited book, we provide foundational tenets of Gandhian perspective, and present examples of social organizations that are aiming to insulate themselves by adopting community and village-centered approaches to restructuring socially-embedded economic activities that align with Gandhian principles. These cases highlight the relevance of Gandhi's thoughts in the field of social entrepreneurship. We examine key principles such as Sarvodaya (the welfare of all), Antodaya (the upliftment of the weakest), self-sufficiency, self-reliance, Nai Talim (holistic education), and Trusteeship. We explore how social organizations implement these principles to promote resilience and well-being at the community level. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed unsustainable practices in the world, including disrupted supply chains, contagious effects of integrated global economy that ignore the local self-reliance, and unsustainable internal displacement that make cities dependent on rural labor and rural population dependent on urban areas for jobs. These issues show that there are systemic problems with how our society and market are structured. The traditional way of development that focuses on profit maximization and unlimited wants has caused problems like inequality, resource depletion, and disproportionate wealth accumulation. Unlimited growth in a limited world has led us to social, economic, and ecological crises. However, degrowth, as an approach has been criticized for wanting to go back to pre-industrial times. In this context, Gandhi's ideas offer alternatives. Gandhi promotes moderation in how market activities are structured and how individual consumption practices are followed. This can help reduce the negative impact of economic activities on people and the planet, and move towards a more structured and inclusive economy.

Download or read book Uncivil Agreement written by Lilliana Mason and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-04-16 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The psychology behind political partisanship: “The kind of research that will change not just how you think about the world but how you think about yourself.” —Ezra Klein, Vox Political polarization in America has moved beyond disagreements about matters of policy. For the first time in decades, research has shown that members of both parties hold strongly unfavorable views of their opponents. This is polarization rooted in social identity, and it is growing. The campaign and election of Donald Trump laid bare this fact of the American electorate, its successful rhetoric of “us versus them” tapping into a powerful current of anger and resentment. With Uncivil Agreement, Lilliana Mason looks at the growing social gulf across racial, religious, and cultural lines, which have recently come to divide neatly between the two major political parties. She argues that group identifications have changed the way we think and feel about ourselves and our opponents. Even when Democrats and Republicans can agree on policy outcomes, they tend to view one other with distrust and to work for party victory over all else. Although the polarizing effects of social divisions have simplified our electoral choices and increased political engagement, they have not been a force that is, on balance, helpful for American democracy. Bringing together theory from political science and social psychology, Uncivil Agreement clearly describes this increasingly “social” type of polarization, and adds much to our understanding of contemporary politics.

Download or read book Pandemics in the Age of Social Media written by Vikas Kumar and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-09-15 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers insights into social media practices and challenges in developing nations during the COVID-19 pandemic. Covering different aspects of social media during the pandemic, the book offers new frameworks, concepts, tools and techniques for integrating social media to support national development. Thematically organized chapters from a global team of scholars address the different aspects of social media during the pandemic. The book begins by looking at ICT for development and how development agencies have used social media platforms, before looking at engagement with these social media campaigns and the spread of misinformation. Further chapters cover the practical uses of social media in healthcare and virtual medicine, mental health issues and challenges, remote education and government policies. This timely volume will be of interest to scholars and students of social media, health communication, global development studies and NGO communication.

Download or read book Inequalities Youth Democracy and the Pandemic written by Simone Maddanu and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-03-29 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together studies from various locations to examine the growing social problems that have been brought to the fore by the COVID-19 outbreak. Employing both qualitative, theoretical and quantitative methods, it presents the impact of the pandemic in different settings, shedding light on political and cultural realities around the world. With attention to inequalities rooted in race and ethnicity, economic conditions, gender, disability, and age, it considers different forms of marginalization and examines the ongoing disjunctions that increasingly characterize contemporary democracies from a multilevel perspective. The book addresses original analyses and approaches from a global perspective on the COVID-19 pandemic, its governance, and its effects in different geographies. These analyses are organized around three main axes: 1) how COVID-19 pandemic worsened social, racial/ethnic, and economic inequalities, including variables such as migration status, gender, and disability; 2) how the pandemic impacted youth and how younger generations cope with public health alarms, and containment measures; 3) how the pandemic posed a challenge to democracy, reshaped the political agenda, and the debate in the public sphere. Contributions from around the world show how local and national issues may overlap on a global scale, laying the foundation for connected sociologies. Based on qualitative as well as quantitative empirical analysis on various categories of individuals and groups, this edited volume reflects on the sociological aspects of current planetary crises which will continue to be at the core of our societies. A wide-ranging, international volume that focuses on both unexpected social changes and new forms of agency in response to a period of crisis, Inequalities, Youth, Democracy and the Pandemic will appeal to scholars with interests in the sociology of health, social problems and inequalities.

Download or read book HCI in Business Government and Organizations written by Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Global Heating and the Australian Far Right written by Imogen Richards and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-12-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Global Heating and the Australian Far Right examines the environmental politics of far-right actors and movements in Australia, exploring their broader political context and responses to climate change. The book traces the development of far-right pseudo-environmentalism and territorial politics, from colonial genocide and Australian nationalism to extreme-right political violence. Through a critical analysis of news and social media, it reveals how denialist and resignatory attitudes towards climate change operate alongside extreme right accelerationism, in a wider Australian political context characterised by reactionary fossil fuel politics and neoliberal New Right climate change agendas. The authors scrutinise the manipulation of environmental politics by contemporary Australian far- and extreme-right actors in cross-national online media. They also assess the political-ideological context of the contemporary far right, addressing intergovernmental approaches to security threats connected to the far right and climate change, and the emergence of radical environmentalist traditions in ‘New Catastrophism’ literature. The conclusion synthesises key insights, analysing the mainstreaming of ethnonationalist and authoritarian responses to global heating, and potential future trajectories of far-right movements exploiting the climate crisis. It also emphasises the necessity for radical political alternatives to counter the far right’s exploitation of climate change. This book will be of interest to researchers of climate change, the far right, neoliberal capitalism, extremism and Australian politics.

Download or read book Television and Its Viewers written by James Shanahan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999-09-09 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Television and its Viewers reviews 'cultivation' research, which investigates the relationship between exposure to television and beliefs about the world. James Shanahan and Michael Morgan, both distinguished researchers in this field, scrutinize cultivation through detailed theoretical and historical explication, critical assessments of methodology, and a comprehensive 'meta-analysis' of twenty years of empirical results. They present a sweeping historical view of television as a technology and as an institution. Shanahan and Morgan's study looks forward as well as back, to the development of cultivation research in a new media environment. They argue that cultivation theory offers a unique and valuable perspective on the role of television in twentieth-century social life. Television and its Viewers, the first book-length study of its type, will be of interest to students and scholars in communication, sociology, political science and psychology and contains an introduction by the seminal figure in this field, George Gerbner.

Download or read book The Enigma of Clarence Thomas written by Corey Robin and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Enigma of Clarence Thomas is a groundbreaking revisionist take on the Supreme Court justice everyone knows about but no one knows. Most people can tell you two things about Clarence Thomas: Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment, and he almost never speaks from the bench. Here are some things they don’t know: Thomas is a black nationalist. In college he memorized the speeches of Malcolm X. He believes white people are incurably racist. In the first examination of its kind, Corey Robin – one of the foremost analysts of the right – delves deeply into both Thomas’s biography and his jurisprudence, masterfully reading his Supreme Court opinions against the backdrop of his autobiographical and political writings and speeches. The hidden source of Thomas’s conservative views, Robin shows, is a profound skepticism that racism can be overcome. Thomas is convinced that any government action on behalf of African-Americans will be tainted by racism; the most African-Americans can hope for is that white people will get out of their way. There’s a reason, Robin concludes, why liberals often complain that Thomas doesn’t speak but seldom pay attention when he does. Were they to listen, they’d hear a racial pessimism that often sounds similar to their own. Cutting across the ideological spectrum, this unacknowledged consensus about the impossibility of progress is key to understanding today’s political stalemate.

Download or read book Disrupting Mainstream Journalism in India written by Kalyani Chadha and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-05-29 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disrupting Mainstream Journalism in India offers a comprehensive and empirically-grounded analysis of the production of digital journalism by marginalized groups within Indian society. Drawing on in-depth interviews with practitioners as well as samples of news content, the author critically examines the way in which varied forms of digital alternative journalism provide socially, economically and politically disadvantaged groups with new and unprecedented opportunities to express their own perspectives, as well as offering alternatives to the hegemony of mainstream news narratives. These marginalized groups include women, Dalits and Muslims whose voices tend to be erased or misrepresented within the public sphere. By exploring these disruptions, Chadha offers insight into not only into the new media landscape of India but also its implications for journalism and democracy at large. Disrupting Mainstream Journalism in India is a valuable empirical resource for students and scholars interested in Indian media, journalism and democracy.

Download or read book Cultural Maturity A Guidebook for the Future with an Introduction to the Ideas of Creative Systems Theory written by Charles M. Johnston MD and published by ICD Press. This book was released on 2015-05-29 with total page 638 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cultural Maturity: A Guidebook for the Futureis the most detailed of three new future-related works by the author. It looks deeply at how the most important challenges ahead for the species will require not just better ideas, but new human capacities; in the end, an essential "growing up" as a species-a new Cultural Maturity. It is written for those inter- ested in acquiring the newly sophisticated leadership abilities that we will more and more need in all parts of our lives in times ahead. The concept of Cultural Maturity makes understandable how institutional structures and beliefs that in modern times have served us well can't be the ideals and end points that we have assumed them to be. It goes on to articulate a new guiding story for our time, one able to take us equally beyond denial, cynicism, and naïve wishful thinking. This book looks deeply at the changes the concept of Cultural Maturity describes-both how they make needed new capacities possible, and how we see their beginnings in many parts of our personal and collective lives. The concept of Cultural Maturity is based on the ideas of Creative Systems Theory, a comprehensive framework for understanding change, purpose, and interrelationship in human systems. Creative Systems Theory describes how Cultural Maturity's changes are as, or more, significant than those that brought us modern democratic governance 250 years ago. It also argues that if the concept of Cultural Maturity is not basically correct, it is hard to imagine a healthy and vital human future. In addition to introducing the concept of Cultural Maturity, Cultural Maturity: A Guidebook for the Future presents important related ideas from Creative Systems Theory. Creative Systems Theory represents an example of culturally mature conception and offers a rich array of conceptual tools able to guide us in making the future's increasingly complex choices.