Social Media Sociology

Since the original publication of Nudge more than a decade ago, the title has entered the vocabulary of businesspeople, policy makers, engaged citizens, and consumers everywhere. The book has given rise to more than 200 "nudge units" in governments around the world and countless groups of behavioral scientists in every part of the economy. It has taught us how to use thoughtful "choice architecture" - a concept the authors invented - to help us make better decisions for ourselves, our families, and our society.

Every day, we make decisions on topics ranging from personal investments to schools for our children to the meals we eat to the causes we champion. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. The reason, the authors explain, is that, being human, we are all susceptible to various biases that can lead us to blunder. Our mistakes make us poorer and less healthy; we often make bad decisions involving education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, the family, and even the planet itself.

Every day, we make decisions on topics ranging from personal investments to schools for our children to the meals we eat to the causes we champion. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. The reason, the authors explain, is that, being human, we are all susceptible to various biases that can lead us to blunder. Our mistakes can make us poor and unhealthy. We often make bad decisions about education, personal finance, health care, family, and the environment.

Exploring the sometimes hilarious, sometimes devastating impact of crowd behavior and trading trickery on the financial markets, this book brilliantly combines two all-time investment classics. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and Confusión de Confusiones take us from Tulipmania in 1634-when tulips actually traded at a higher price than gold - to the South Sea "bubble" of 1720, and beyond. Securities analyst and author Martin Fridson guides you on a quirky, entertaining, and intriguing journey back through time.

Silicon Valley technology is transforming the way we work, and Uber is leading the charge. Upending our understanding of work in the digital age, Uberland paints a future where any of us might be managed by a faceless boss. Based on award-winning technology ethnographer Alex Rosenblat's experience of riding over 5,000 miles with Uber drivers, daily visits to online forums, and face-to-face discussions with senior Uber employees, Uberland goes beyond the headlines to reveal the complicated politics of popular technologies that are manipulating both workers and consumers.

Drawing on his highly successful sales background and decades of research, he lays out a simple, repeatable, predictable, and ethical process that will enable you to lead others to discover for themselves what and why they need to change. Whether you hope to make a sale or improve a relationship, Jolles’ wise advice will help you ensure that changing someone’s mind is never an act of coercion but rather one of caring and compassion.

Identity Economics bridges a critical gap in the social sciences. It brings identity and norms to economics. People’s notions of what is proper, and what is forbidden, and for whom, are fundamental to how hard they work, and how they learn, spend, and save. Thus people’s identity—their conception of who they are, and of who they choose to be—may be the most important factor affecting their economic lives.

Freakonomics showed how economic calculations can explain seemingly counterintuitive decision-making. Thinking, Fast and Slow helped listeners identify a host of small cognitive errors that can lead to miscalculations and irrational thought. In What the Luck?, statistician and author Gary Smith sets himself a similar goal, and explains - in clear, understandable, and witty prose - how a statistical understanding of luck can change the way we see just about every aspect of our lives.

Contrary to most conventional management wisdom, The 7 Non-Negotiables of Winning looks beyond employee skills and background and to identify the true game-changing character traits for creating a winning culture. Based on the author's methodology for what abilities drive decisions and actions within his own company, The 7 Non-Negotiables of Winning details how respect, belief, loyalty, commitment, trust, courage, and gratitude play an integral part to multiple key business outcomes.

We've all seen it before: the ambitious leader who enjoys great success and then, inexplicably, crashes and burns. Perhaps this leader has been you. Leaders can't sustain effectiveness if they can't sustain themselves. Resonant Leadership offers inspiration, dozens of exercises, and other tools to help listeners become and remain successful leaders in their work and in their lives.

Here is your map to guide you in this new life phase. You can use the powerful practices and insights - enhanced with online tools and exercises at AARP’s Life Reimagined.org website - to help you uncover your own special gifts, connect with people who can support you, and explore new directions.You’ll be inspired by meeting ordinary people who have reimagined their lives in extraordinary ways.

In this audiobook, Limor Shifman investigates Internet memes and what they tell us about digital culture. Shifman discusses a series of well-known Internet memes - including "Leave Britney Alone", the pepper-spraying cop, LOLCats, Scumbag Steve, and Occupy Wall Street's "We Are the 99 Percent". She offers a novel definition of Internet memes: digital content units with common characteristics, created with awareness of each other, and circulated, imitated, and transformed via the Internet by many users.

An astonishing work of cultural criticism, this book is widely recognized as a brilliant and devastating challenge to conventional views of literature, anthropology, religion, and psychoanalysis. In its scope and interest it can be compared with Freud's Totem and Taboo, the subtext Girard refutes with polemic daring, vast erudition, and a persuasiveness that leaves the listener compelled to respond, one way or another. This is the single fullest summation of Girard's ideas to date, the book by which they will stand or fall.

Madness, sexuality, power, knowledge—are these facts of life or simply parts of speech? In a series of works of astonishing brilliance, historian Michel Foucault excavated the hidden assumptions that govern the way we live and the way we think. The Archaeology of Knowledge begins at the level of things aid and moves quickly to illuminate the connections between knowledge, language, and action in a style at once profound and personal. A summing up of Foucault's own methodological assumptions, this book is also a first step toward a genealogy of the way we live now.

We are all guilty of it. We call people terrible names in conversation or online. We vilify those with whom we disagree and make bolder claims than we could defend. We want to be seen as taking the moral high ground not just to make a point, or move a debate forward, but to look a certain way - incensed, or compassionate, or committed to a cause. We exaggerate. In other words, we grandstand. Nowhere is this more evident than in public discourse today, and especially as it plays out across the internet.

Over the past 10 years, urban planners, technology companies, and governments have promoted smart cities with a somewhat utopian vision of urban life made knowable and manageable through data collection and analysis. Emerging smart cities have become both crucibles and showrooms for the practical application of the Internet of Things, cloud computing, and the integration of big data into everyday life. Are smart cities optimized, sustainable, digitally networked solutions to urban problems? Or are they neoliberal, corporate-controlled, undemocratic non-places?

Award-winning author and researcher Dan Buettner has traveled the world to meet the planet’s longest-lived people, and learned nine powerful yet simple lessons that could put you on the path to longer life. Where did he find them? In the Blue Zones....

This helpful, plain-English guide provides need-to-know information on how to choose the right system, assure patients of the security of their records, and implement an EHR in such a way that it causes minimal disruption to the daily demands of a hospital or clinic.

Renowned media scholar Sherry Turkle investigates how a flight from conversation undermines our relationships, creativity, and productivity - and why reclaiming face-to-face conversation can help us regain lost ground. We live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection. Preeminent author and researcher Sherry Turkle has been studying digital culture for over 30 years. Long an enthusiast for its possibilities, here she investigates a troubling consequence.

A neurological trait that creates vividly felt cross-sensory couplings, synesthesia is examined in this illuminating audiobook by pioneering researcher Richard Cytowic who reminds us that each individual's perspective on the world is thoroughly subjective.