New Books in Technology

Around 2016, buoyed by so-called data kranti  ("data revolution"), an aspirational neo-middle class of users in India accessed internet for the first time on their mobile phones. Unlimited: Aspirational Politics and Mobile Media Distribution (MIT Press, 2026) tells the story of digital infrastructures that are being created by state-corporations for content and money to move and reach such users. It interrogates how their design impact the forms of inclusions and exclusions enacted as well as the horizon of social behaviors and expectations in "Digital India." The book contends that to
understand the possibilities and limits of India's aspirational
politics, media studies scholars should attend to infrastructures of
aspiration: the distributional logistics of streaming content and mobile money are the infrastructural backbone that recalibrate thresholds of
aspirational goals. 

Digital content media distribution is also shaped by how user
practices get entangled with particular affordances of platforms, and
hence the need to study both participatory cultures of circulation and
logistics
of distribution together. Drawing on in-depth interviews, ethnographic
fieldwork, critical discourse analysis and participant observation, the
book traces the supply chains of content delivery networks enabling
streaming video-on-demand services and informal ways of circulating "vernacular" music videos through memory cards. Unlimited does not restrict itself to formal media infrastructures, but also researches online phishing and lending scam assemblages to understand how such scams perform critical boundary work to reveal the cracks in and workings of financial distribution networks. This book offers a systematic examination of distribution considerations—including localization strategies—required for imagining mobile phone users across the varied regional geographies of "Digital India."

Rahul Mukherjee is Associate Professor of TV & New Media and graduate
chair in the Department of Cinema & Media Studies at University of
Pennsylvania. His teaching and research focus on the logistical and environmental dimensions of digital infrastructures and platforms. Rahul is the author of the monograph Radiant Infrastructures, and his work has been published in Critical Inquiry, SM+S, New Media & Society, and Science, Technology & Human Values. He has co-edited a special issue on "Media Power in Digital Asia" for Media, Culture & Society journal.  

Priyam Sinha is an Alexander Von Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University in Berlin. Her research interests lie at the intersection of critical media industry studies, disability studies, gender studies, affect studies, production culture studies, and anthropology of the body, and her work has been published in the European Journal of Cultural Studies, Media, Culture and Society; Communication, Culture and Critique; South Asian Diaspora, among others. She is also a regular podcast host at the New Books Network and has been published in public writing forums like the Economic and Political Weekly, FemAsia, Asian Film Archive, among others. More information on her ongoing projects can be found on her website and you can follow her on X.
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In the world's top research labs and universities, the race is on to invent the ultimate learning algorithm: one capable of discovering any knowledge from data, and doing anything we want, before we even ask. In The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Basic Books, 2018), Pedro Domingos lifts the veil to give us a peek inside the learning machines that power Google, Amazon, and your smartphone. He assembles a blueprint for the future universal learner--the Master Algorithm--and discusses what it will mean for business, science, and society. If data-ism is today's philosophy, this book is its bible.

Pedro Domingos is a professor emeritus of computer science at the
University of Washington. He is a winner of the SIGKDD Innovation Award, the highest honor in data science. A fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, he lives near Seattle.

Gregory McNiff is a Managing Director in the New York office of the
Blueshirt Group, an IR firm focused on technology; he has a strong interest in literature, culture, religion, science and philosophy (translation: he's an eclectic reader who is constantly missing deadlines for book review).
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In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Brynn Quick speaks with Dr. Yeong Ju Lee about her new book Social Media and Language Learning: Using TikTok and Instagram (Routledge, 2025).

Lee, Y. J. (2025). Social Media and Language Learning: Using TikTok and Instagram. Taylor & Francis.

This book explores creative uses of social media for informal language learning. It focuses on the underexplored area of how informal language learning adapts to technological innovations in two multimodal media-sharing platforms: TikTok and Instagram.

Drawing on ecological perspectives of language learning and spatial understandings of digital technology and learning, the research reported in this book unpacks how social media technologies are used for language learning. It presents insights from a dual-level qualitative methodological design: a comparative study of public online data of social media posts collected from TikTok and Instagram, and a multiple case study based on ethnographic narrative data gathered from participants’ journal entries, stimulated recall interviews, and social media posts. This book reveals the dynamic landscape of digital language learning that is being integrated into learners’ everyday lives through multimodal content creation and networking.

This book enriches readers’ understanding of social media’s role in language learning, and offers pedagogical strategies for teachers to integrate newer technologies and multimodal materials into language classrooms to enhance students’ learning experiences.

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here
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Information and communication technologies have fundamentally altered the markets for capital, labor, supplies, and distribution in ways that undermine the basic categories we use to understand the economy. Nationality, industry, firm, size, employee, and other fundamental terms are increasingly detached from the operations of the economy. If we want to understand and tame the new sources of economic power, we need a new diagnosis and a new set of tools. The broad consensus across the political spectrum in the US that monopolistic corporations – particularly Big Tech companies -- have grown too powerful, and that we need to revive antitrust to take on the 'curse of bigness' is mistaken. But both the diagnosis and the cure are rooted in an outdated understanding of how the American economy is organized. Listen to this interview about Taming Corporate Power in the 21st Century (Cambridge UP, 2022)
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Can producing stories and developing platforms to support people who have been harmed by multiple, intersecting systems heal those systems? In Reparative Media: Cultivating Stories and Platforms to Heal Our Culture (MIT Press, 2025), Aymar Jèan Escoffery argues that this is exactly how we repair our culture and heal harms from racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and religious discrimination: by reconsidering how we make media, how we connect through technology, and how we generate knowledge.Based on five years of deep, complex work cocreating an independent alternative to platforms like Netflix and YouTube, the author reveals the process behind developing OTV | Open Television to stream stories by diverse creators. The book shows that planting seeds for a more community-based media and tech ecosystem can also reform corporate systems better than so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, as the platform helped elevate creators on social media and in Hollywood at companies like HBO, Netflix, and more. Combining theory and practice, local production and global distribution, Chicago and Hollywood, the book paints a portrait of what a healing media ecosystem looks like—and shows how communal ways of knowing can cultivate reparative media, technology, and research that benefit everyone no matter how they identify.
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