New Books in Technology

As common as it is today to speak of the relative “height” of musical pitches or of the sense of “vocal space” as it opened up by particular recording techniques, we did not always understand sound to be spatial. How did it become so? In Stereophonica: Sound and Space in Science, Technology, and the Arts (MIT Press, 2021), Gascia Ouzounian (Associate Professor of Music, Oxford University; Fellow and Tutor, Lady Margaret Hall) explores the answer, drawing on episodes drawn from the history of stereo technologies in the nineteenth century through to visual representations of and in sonic environments today. Ouzounian takes the reader from early innovations in the laboratory study of stereophony to the mobilization of the human hearing sense during World War I. Her account covers spectacular demonstrations of new sound-reproducing technologies in the inter-war period, the applications of new psychoacoustic theories of spatial hearing in both peacetime and in war, and right up to the 21st century, as the relation between sound and space are interrogated in contemporary sound installation art and radical interventions in the urban soundscapes of modern-day Beirut, Lebanon. This entry into sound studies and the history of technology deals with an array of historical, instrumental, and artistic cases in the long history of spatial sound. The reward of following its broad purview is a rich web of connections that disclose sound and listening as a long-fruitful site not only of aesthetics but also of the ethics of space and place, thereby opening up further study in the intersection between sound studies and sonic urbanism.Eamonn Bell (@_eamonnbell) is a postdoctoral Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin in the Department of Music. His current research project examines the story of the compact disc from a viewpoint between musicology and media studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Today on New Books in History, Dr. Evan Friss, associate professor of history at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia in the US to talk about The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s (University of Chicago Press, 2015). This book was originally released in 2015 by the University of Chicago press and we are chatting on the occasion of its paperback release in January.Cycling has experienced a renaissance in the United States, as cities around the country promote the bicycle as an alternative means of transportation. In the process, debates about the nature of bicycles—where they belong, how they should be ridden, how cities should or should not accommodate them—have played out in the media, on city streets, and in city halls. Very few people recognize, however, that these questions are more than a century old.The Cycling City is a sharp history of the bicycle’s rise and fall in the late nineteenth century. In the 1890s, American cities were home to more cyclists, more cycling infrastructure, more bicycle friendly legislation, and a richer cycling culture than anywhere else in the world. Evan Friss unearths the hidden history of the cycling city, demonstrating that diverse groups of cyclists managed to remap cities with new roads, paths, and laws, challenge social conventions, and even dream up a new urban ideal inspired by the bicycle. When cities were chaotic and filthy, bicycle advocates imagined an improved landscape in which pollution was negligible, transportation was silent and rapid, leisure spaces were democratic, and the divisions between city and country were blurred. Friss argues that when the utopian vision of a cycling city faded by the turn of the century, its death paved the way for today’s car-centric cities—and ended the prospect of a true American cycling city ever being built. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Today I talked to Ming-Hui Huang about her book (coauthored with Roland T. Rust), The Feeling Economy: How Artificial Intelligence Is Creating the Era of Empathy (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021)This episode covers the movement of the economy from brawn to brains to hearts. Put another way, the focus here is on the movement from the Physical Economy (farming, factories, etc.) to the Thinking Economy to now the dawning of the Feeling Economy. In the near-term future, artificial intelligence (AI) will handle the thinking tasks and humans on the job will focus on adding value through empathy and their interpersonal skills. The episode explores everything from workers re-skilling, cross-skilling and up-skilling to handle this change, to the impact of this change to being feeling-centric on our politics, educational practices, and the expectations of consumers. Of special note is that the new economic era may privilege female “soft” skills over the “hard” skills men are known by and often more comfortable with.Ming-Hui Huang holds a number of posts. She’s a Distinguished Professor at National Taiwan University; a fellow of the European Marketing Academy (EMAC); an International Research Fellow of the Centre for Corporate Reputation, University of Oxford, UK; and a Distinguished Research Fellow of the Center for Excellence in Service, University of Maryland, USA. She is also the incoming Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Service Research.Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Digital dualism, or a sharp division between online and offline activity as "virtual" or "real" has long been a feature of liturgical studies and discussions around worship gatherings for theorists and practitioners alike. Teresa Berger's new book @Worship: Liturgical Practices in Digital Worlds (Routledge, 2017) provides a manifesto for more nuanced thinking about digital mediation, materiality, ecclesial gathering, and sacramental presence in our digitally suffused world. While this book was published several years before the COVID-19 pandemic, the careful thinking Berger presents here can certainly guide church leaders and participants in present and future conversations as worshiping communities find themselves facing prolonged seasons of online gatherings and digital devotion.  Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Ronald Deibert is a professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto and the Director of The Citizen Lab, a public interest research organization that uncovers privacy and human rights abuses on the internet.In his latest book, Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society (House of Anansi Press, 2020), Deibert unites a growing corpus of academic literature on the perils of surveillance capitalism to show how today’s data-hungry communications technologies have poisoned our political institutions, our minds, and even our environment. Deibert believes that it is not too late to rescue our politics from our technology, and he argues that the answer lies not in silicon or code but age-old political principles. Look to Montesquieu, not Zuckerberg, Deibert tells us, if you want to find a stable framework for digital governance in the 21st century.On this episode, in addition to all the above, Professor Deibert and I explore the economic engines of surveillance capitalism, the dangers of ritualistic privacy policies, the internet’s immense carbon footprint, and the importance of data privacy law, among other topics.John Sakellariadis is a 2020-2021 Fulbright US Student Research Grantee. He holds a Master’s degree in public policy from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia and a Bachelor’s degree in History & Literature from Harvard University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

It’s hard to avoid innovation these days. Nearly every product gets marketed as being disruptive, whether it’s genuinely a new invention or just a new toothbrush. But in this manifesto on the state of American work, historians of technology Lee Vinsel and Andrew L. Russell argue that our way of thinking about and pursuing innovation has made us poorer, less safe, and—ironically—less innovative.Drawing on years of original research and reporting, The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most (Currency, 2020) shows how the ideology of change for its own sake has proved a disaster. Corporations have spent millions hiring chief innovation officers while their core businesses tank. Computer science programs have drilled their students on programming and design, even though the overwhelming majority of jobs are in IT and maintenance. In countless cities, suburban sprawl has left local governments with loads of deferred repairs that they can’t afford to fix.For anyone concerned by the crumbling state of our roads and bridges or the direction our economy is headed, The Innovation Delusion is a deeply necessary reevaluation of a trend we can still disrupt.Mathew Jordan is a university instructor, funk musician, and clear writing enthusiast. I study science and its history, in the hope that understanding the past can help us make sense of the present and build a better future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

For years, cybersecurity experts have debated whether cyber-weapons represent a destabilizing new military technology or merely the newest tool in the spies’ arsenal. In This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends (Bloomsbury, 2021), Nicole Perlroth makes a compelling case that cyber-conflict is quickly spiraling out of control. Worse, the United States set us down the precarious path we’re now on.A cybersecurity reporter at the The New York Times, Nicole makes her case by taking us on a journey from the shadowy underworld of the cyber-arms market, to Silicon Valley, the White House, and the NSA’s elite offensive hacking unit, Tailored Access Operations. On this episode, I talk to Nicole about the nature of the cyber-arms underground, why the NSA has traditionally favored offense over defense, and why no one—not Congress and not the public—seems to understand the gravity of the cyber-threat.We wrap up with a story likely to be of interest to the NBN community: someone—were not sure who yet—is hacking authors’ email accounts and stealing their manuscripts.John Sakellariadis is a 2020-2021 Fulbright US Student Research Grantee. He holds a Master’s degree in public policy from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia and a Bachelor’s degree in History & Literature from Harvard University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

The period of the "second slavery" was marked by geographic expansion of zones of slavery into the Upper US South, Cuba, and Brazil and chronological expansion into the industrial age. As The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean (Oxford UP, 2020) shows, ambitious planters throughout the Greater Caribbean hired a transnational group of chemists, engineers, and other "plantation experts" to assist them in adapting industrial technologies to suit their "tropical" needs and increase profitability. Not only were technologies reinvented so as to keep manufacturing processes local but slaveholders' adaptation of new racial ideologies also shaped their particular usage of new machines. Finally, these businessmen forged a new set of relationships with one another in order to sidestep the financial dominance of Great Britain and the northeastern United States.In addition to promoting new forms of mechanization, the technical experts depended on the know-how of slaves alongside whom they worked. Bondspeople with industrial craft skills played key roles in the development of new production processes and technologies like sugar mills. While the very existence of such skilled slaves contradicted prevailing racial ideologies and allowed black people to wield power in their own interest, their contributions grew the slave economies of Cuba, Brazil, and the Upper South. Together reform-minded planters, technical experts, and enslaved people modernized sugar plantations in Louisiana and Cuba; brought together rural Virginia wheat planters and industrial flour-millers in Richmond with the coffee-planting system of southeastern Brazil; and enabled engineers and iron-makers in Virginia to collaborate with railroad and sugar entrepreneurs in Cuba.Through his examination of the creation of these industrial bodies of knowledge, Daniel B. Rood demonstrates the deepening dependence of the Atlantic economy on forced labor after a few revolutionary decades in which it seemed the institution of slavery might be destroyed. The reinvention of this plantation world in the 1840s and 1850s brought a renewed movement in the 1860s, especially from enslaved people themselves in the United States and Cuba, to end chattel slavery.This account of capitalism, technology, and slavery offers new perspectives on the nineteenth-century Americas.Alejandra Bronfman is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies Latin American, Caribbean & U.S. Latino Studies at SUNY, Albany. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

From facial recognition to online shopping, artificial intelligence has become the backbone of the internet and has led to an unprecedented extraction and utilization of personal data. As a result, AI has rapidly outpaced existing free speech, privacy, and national security law.In The Centaur’s Dilemma: National Security Law for the Coming AI Revolution (Brookings Institute Press, 2020), Judge James E. Baker deploys his extensive experience in national security law to argue for AI regulation through legislation. By first tackling the creation of a precise definition of artificial intelligence, Judge Baker then vividly explains the national security applications and implications of AI. In part two, he goes about suggesting a purposeful, legal framework for addressing those national security applications and implications while exploring legal arguments in the absence of clear laws. This timely and insightful work provides an accessible primer of AI for legal generalists while demonstrating how technologists can thoroughly think about the safety and ethics of artificial intelligence.Kyle Beadle is a recent graduate of Louisiana State University, where he studied International Studies and Spanish. He is now seeking a master’s in International Relations and Security. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

With its infamously packed cars and disciplined commuters, Tokyo’s commuter train network is one of the most complex technical infrastructures on Earth. In An Anthropology of the Machine: Tokyo's Commuter Train Network (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Michael Fisch provides a nuanced perspective on how Tokyo’s commuter train network embodies the lived realities of technology in our modern world. Drawing on his fine-grained knowledge of transportation, work, and everyday life in Tokyo, Fisch shows how fitting into a system that operates on the extreme edge of sustainability can take a physical and emotional toll on a community while also creating a collective way of life—one with unique limitations and possibilities. An Anthropology of the Machine is a creative ethnographic study of the culture, history, and experience of commuting in Tokyo. At the same time, it is a theoretically ambitious attempt to think through our very relationship with technology and our possible ecological futures. Fisch provides an unblinking glimpse into what it might be like to inhabit a future in which more and more of our infrastructure—and the planet itself—will have to operate beyond capacity to accommodate our ever-growing population. John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology