Antisocial : online extremists, techno-utopians, and the hijacking of the American conversation / Andrew Marantz.

Antisocial : online extremists, techno-utopians, and the hijacking of the American conversation / Andrew Marantz.

By
Marantz, Andrew.

Publication Date
2019

Publication Information
[New York] : Viking,

Physical Description
380 p.

Subject Term
Social media -- Political aspects.
 
Online social networks -- Political aspects.
 
Right-wing extremists.
 
White supremacy movements -- United States.

Bibliography Note
Includes bibliographical references (pages 371-380).

Summary
For several years, Andrew Marantz, a New Yorker staff writer, has been embedded in two worlds. The first is the world of social-media entrepreneurs, who, acting out of naÞivete and reckless ambition, upended all traditional means of receiving and transmitting information. The second is the world of the people he calls "the gate crashers"--the conspiracists, white supremacists, and nihilist trolls who have become experts at using social media to advance their corrosive agenda. Antisocial ranges broadly--from the first mass-printed books to the trending hashtags of the present; from secret gatherings of neo-Fascists to the White House press briefing room--and traces how the unthinkable becomes thinkable, and then how it becomes reality. Combining the keen narrative detail of Bill Buford's Among the Thugs and the sweep of George Packer's The Unwinding, Antisocial reveals how the boundaries between technology, media, and politics have been erased, resulting in a deeply broken informational landscape--the landscape in which we all now live. Marantz shows how alienated young people are led down the rabbit hole of online radicalization, and how fringe ideas spread--from anonymous corners of social media to cable TV to the President's Twitter feed. Marantz also sits with the creators of social media as they start to reckon with the forces they've unleashed. Will they be able to solve the communication crisis they helped bring about, or are their interventions too little too late?

Language
English

ISBN
9780525522263


LibraryCollectionCollectionCall NumberStatus
Mount Pearl (AMP) R. KingAdult NFicAdult Non-Fiction303.484 M32Checked In