New Books in Technology

By New Books NetworkNews Technology Tech News

New Books in Technology episodes

August 23 Seth C. Lewis, Rodrigo Zamith, and Tomás Dodds, "Journalism in the Age of AI: From Acceleration to Reimagination" (Polity, 2027)
What if AI’s biggest impact on journalism isn’t replacing journalists, but forcing us to rethink what journalism is for?
In this episode, Joanne Kuai speaks with Seth C. Lewis, Rodrigo Zamith, and Tomás Dodds, authors of Journalism in the Age of AI: From Acceleration to Reimagination (Polity, 2027).
For decades, journalism has been caught on a “hamster wheel” of
acceleration: producing more stories, for more platforms, with fewer
resources. AI promises even greater efficiency, but is doing more with
less really what journalism needs?
Lewis, Zamith, and Dodds argue
that the current AI moment offers something more consequential: an
opportunity to reimagine journalism itself. The conversation explores
what remains distinctly human about journalism when machines can
increasingly perform creative and cognitive tasks; how dependence on AI
companies and digital infrastructure is reshaping media power; what AI
means for journalism education and human judgement; and whether
journalism can harness these technologies in ways that strengthen,
rather than erode, its democratic purpose.
The conversation also raises a more fundamental question: is preserving journalism as an institution the goal, or should we rethink how society meets its information needs altogether?
Journalism in the Age of AI is available open access. Learn more and access the book here.
About the authors
Seth C. Lewis is the
inaugural Elcan Jefferson Scholars Foundation Distinguished Professor of
Artificial Intelligence and Media Studies at the University of
Virginia. Previously, he was the founding holder of the Shirley Papé
Chair in Emerging Media and Director of Journalism at the University of
Oregon. In his research, Lewis examines the social implications of
emerging technologies and their consequences for news and public life.
Rodrigo Zamith is an
Associate Professor and former Chair of the Journalism Department at the
University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research and teaching
interests lie at the intersection of journalism and technology, with a
focus on understanding the social implications of emerging technologies
for how news is produced, distributed, and consumed. He is a recipient
of UMass’ Distinguished Teaching Award.
Tomás Dodds is an Assistant Professor in Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Director of its Public Tech Media Lab.
His research examines the evolving relationship between journalism and
technology, with a focus on how journalists and media organizations can
develop open-source tools and artificial intelligence systems that serve
the public interest.
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1 hr 14 min
August 20 Jeff Jarvis, "Hot Type: The Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad" (Bloomsbury, 2026)
Hot Type: The Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad (Bloomsbury, 2026) is the epic story of the magnificent 19th-century machine that rendered Gutenberg's movable type obsolete and opened the portal to the long century of mass media. The Linotype mechanized the 400-year-old process of setting type one laborious letter at a time, and thus ignited an explosion of newspaper, book, and magazine empires.
This is a tale populated with wondrous characters: tragic inventors, malign media moguls, hand-typesetters called the Swifts who turned their craft into a spectator sport, and authors and journalists who chronicled the turmoil of their time, their every word molded into metal type by what some viewed as a thinking machine. This revolution in media technology helped to propel Mark Twain into literary celebrity, but it also cost him his fortune – as well as his sense of humor and optimism.
The era of the Linotype was a bridge between Twain's Gilded Age with its tycoons of steam, steel, and wire and today's Gilded Age with its barons of bits and AI. Its history provides an opportunity to reflect on how technology changes culture just as new technologies – the internet and artificial intelligence –manufacture their endless streams of words today.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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57 min
August 17 Jehnie Burns on Mixtape Culture
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with writer and researcher, Jehnie I. Burns about her book, Mixtape Nostalgia: Culture, Memory, and Representation (Lexington, 2023). This conversation builds on earlier ones on music and technology, especially our earlier episode with Anthony Kwame Harrison about the ethnography of hiphop. Vinsel and Burns chat about the rise of mixtape culture, how it played out in different subcultures, and how it was wrapped up in and transformed by technological change. We also announce some big news at the beginning of the episode.
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53 min
August 15 Aarthi Vadde, "We the Platform: How the Internet Changed Twenty-First-Century Literature (Columbia UP, 2026)
We the Platform: How the Internet Changed Twenty-First-Century Literature (Columbia University Press 2026) by Aarthi Vadde is a groundbreaking account of mass writing in the twenty-first century, identifying rarely recognized forms of literary possibility amid the profound upheavals in traditional publishing. Aarthi Vadde examines the explosion of textuality across digital platforms: countless writers, diverse publishing formats, and vast communities of readers responding to stories publicly and instantly. Countering ubiquitous decline narratives, she offers powerful examples of literary innovation, adaptation, and survival. Among them are Jonathan Lethem and Lauren Oyler’s challenges to individualist ideas of authorship, the Twitter fiction of Jennifer Egan and Teju Cole, Margaret Atwood and Naomi Alderman’s collaborative writing on Wattpad, conceptual projects like Book from the Ground, and the experimental use of chatbots by authors including Sheila Heti. Through nuanced and illuminating readings, We the Platform shows how platform-based writing has altered cornerstone concepts of authorship, aesthetic form, and craft, delivering a bold new understanding of literature now.
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34 min
August 09 Beyond Free Speech: Why AI Governance Demands Freedom of Thought
Are we driving our technology, or is it starting to drive us? In this thought-provoking conversation, Eli Karetny sits down with researcher and author Eduardo Albrecht to explore the invisible, rapidly encroaching frontier of AI governance and data surveillance.Moving far beyond traditional debates about data privacy, Albrecht warns of a near future where the state and corporate partners bypass human speech entirely, relying instead on "sentiment detection" to ascribe thoughts and make decisions that impact our physical lives. Together, they trace the historical trajectory of control—from early fingerprinting and eugenics to modern biometrics and neural implants—and challenge the modern illusion of state efficiency at the expense of human agency.Tune in for a deep dive into the two fundamental rights required to safeguard the future of democracy: absolute transparency over our data, and an evolving, radical defense of our collective freedom of thought.
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57 min
August 08 Leopoldina Fortunati, "The Arcana of Reproduction: Housewives, Prostitutes, Workers and Capital" (Verso, 2025)
The definitive feminist analysis of reproductive and ‘caring’ labor to emerge from Italian feminism of the 1970s.
Emerging from the great social upheavals that contested the sexual and racial divisions of labor globally in the 1970s, Leopoldina Fortunati’s classic work expands and transforms how we analyze the sphere of reproduction, redefining the value of the individual’s life and the labor performed in the home.
Released here for the first time in its unabridged form with historical notation and contemporary commentary, The Arcana of Reproduction: Housewives, Prostitutes, Workers and Capital (Verso, 2025) is a foundational text and essential contribution to today’s discussions of social reproduction and the history of Italian feminism. Fortunati’s work provides some of the earliest theorizations of ‘immaterial,’ ‘affective,’ and ‘caring’ labor, and of the role of technology in reproduction, articulated decades before their popular reception in English academic literature. Reading this work some 50 years after its original publication gives us the tools to analyze the contemporary state of capitalist development and of women’s lives today. The text remains prefigurative and essential in our era of digital labor.
Leopoldina Fortunati was a core member of Lotta Femminsta and the Wages for Housework Movement internationally. Along with Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James and Silvia Federici, she composed many of the group’s core theoretical and political texts. Her early work continues to inform movements concerned with struggles over reproduction globally and in subsequent work as a theorist of media and technology, Fortunati has been at the vanguard of contemporary theory addressing the relation between gendered labor and technology.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.
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1 hr 18 min
August 03 James W. Cortada, "Beyond the Facts: Tacit Knowledge and the Hidden Infrastructure of Our Informed Times" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
Beyond the Facts: Tacit Knowledge and the Hidden Infrastructure of Our Informed Times (Bloomsbury, 2025) describes tacit knowledge, what it is, how it used
and its role in our current data driven world. Author James Cortada
argues that fuzzy, hard-to describe information is greater and more, important than just hard
facts. What is tacit knowledge? It is what we might consider knowledge
that is unable to be fully communicated; knowledge that we understand
implicitly, but it is a bit hard to explain. For example, it is the kind
of knowledge one needs to ride a bicycle, but that cannot be described
precisely on paper in the way one might be able to explain how to cook a
dish. Tacit knowledge is the least understood type of information and
one of the most difficult to communicate. Yet there is more tacit
knowledge in our lives than the specific facts one can find in a book,
on the Internet or in the simple form of a fact. This book is designed
to introduce the reader to the concept of tacit knowledge and how to
recognize and use it. This book offers definitions of tacit knowledge
and compares the topic to explicit knowledge, then describes how the
former is used today. The author argues that both types are used today
and explains how one can use both types of knowledge in their lives.
This book is essential primer to understanding tacit knowledge and learning how to use it to your advantage.
Guest: James
(Jim) Cortada is a senior research fellow at the University of
Minnesota. He is a leading authority on the role of modern information.
He holds a PhD in modern history but worked at IBM Corporation for
nearly 40 years in sales and consulting. He has written
several books on the business history of the computer industry and just
over a dozen on the history and use of information over the past two
centuries. So, he straddles the subject between historical evolution and
its current uses.
Host: Dr. Michael LaMagna
is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator
and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College.
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51 min
July 31 Devin Kennedy, "Coding Capitalism: Computers and the Remaking of the Postwar US Economy" (Columbia UP, 2026)
Long before Google, Amazon, or Microsoft, computer technology shaped how people worked, how markets operated,
and how businesses became big. After World War II, military officials
and their partners in industry looked to the newly invented electronic
computer as they sought to cut costs, speed up labor,
manage supply chains, and—they hoped—bring stability to the postwar
economy. Their efforts would shape early computer science and the first
applications of computer technology in manufacturing and business, with
profound consequences for workers and managers alike. By the 1960s,
practices originally developed to improve industrial efficiency were
being used by Wall Street, influencing how markets worked and even how
traders thought. Digital technology became central to finance, tying
together far-flung trading floors and automating decision making—with
alarming consequences, including the 1987 Black Monday crash.
In Coding Capitalism: Computers and the Remaking of the Postwar US Economy
(Columbia University Press, 2026), Dr. Devin Kennedy offers a new
history of the digital economy, showing how the computer emerged
from—and transformed—capitalism in the United States. He traces how
computer science and technology were made by industry, which molded
computation to manage factories, financial markets, and entire firms.
Drawing on the archives of businesses, computer researchers, regulators,
and financial institutions, Coding Capitalism retells the story of the postwar economy and the computer, revealing how mid-century
business laid the foundations of the digital world. Bridging business
and economic history with the history of science and technology, this
book uncovers the prehistory of big tech and demonstrates how capitalism has shaped computing since its invention.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book
focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty
negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative
analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find
Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

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59 min
July 30 Re-Evaluating CX in the AI Era
Michael Brand is a CX strategist and trainer, based in Switzerland, who has been named a Thinkers 360 Top 50 Global Thought Leader on Customer Loyalty. Dr. Vincent Covello directs the Center for Risk Communications, and is a nationally and internationally recognized trainer, researcher, consultant, and expert in emergency, crisis, risk, and change communications. Deanna Leonard is a futurist, executive coach, and AI transformation leader. Her career has spanned senior leadership posts across a wide range of Fortune 500 companies.
In this freewheeling, one-hour roundtable discussion, the focus is on the Customer Experience through the lens of both the opportunities and misuses that AI involves. The topics addressed include the following: 1) the importance of active listening, 2) the 20 words that can make or break an exchange with a customer, 3) how front-line CX employees can be enabled to do their jobs better, and 4) the need for training budgets to be protected, if not increased. In emotional terms, two feelings rise to prominence in this session: fear (of not being heard and responded to) and trust (rooted in the demonstration of caring before knowledge gets shared or an action-step taken). The answers as to who people trust, and why, when experiencing stress will be sure to surprise you.
Real Transformations: Business Change That Works from the Inside Out is co-hosted by Julie Anixter and Dan Hill, PhD, entrepreneurs with deep experience as corporate change agents, devoted to helping companies make continuous change work for everyone through clarity and connection. To learn about their keynote talks, workshops and labs, check out Real-Transformation.com.
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42 min
July 30 The Long Reach of the Strong Arm: Evolving Forms of Transnational Authoritarianism in Asia and Beyond
How do authoritarian regimes silence critics across borders? And what are the repressive tools and strategies that authoritarian regimes use transnationally? In this episode we are joined by Arild Engelsen Ruud, Mubashar Hasan and Karin Zackari to discuss the role of digital surveillance, emotional blackmail, enforced family isolation, psychological harassment, and the imprisonment of relatives on fabricated charges by Asian authoritarian regimes seeking to control populations and narratives across borders.
You can read more about the research discussed in this episode in the book The Long Reach of the Strong Arm: Evolving Forms of Transnational Authoritarianism, published by Springer.
Arild Engelsen Ruud is Professor of South Asian Studies at the University of Oslo.
Mubashar Hasan is an Adjunct Research Fellow at Western Sydney University.
Karin Zackari Associate Senior Researcher at the School of Global Studies at the University of Gothenburg.
Kenneth Bo Nielsen, your host, is an Associate Professor of Social Anthropology and the Director of the Centre for South Asian Democracy at the University of Oslo.
The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners: Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia), Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland), Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania), Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland), Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden) and Centre for South Asian Democracy, University of Oslo (Norway).
We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.
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32 min

About New Books in Technology

From the publisher's feed

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.