Faculty Books

Disconnect explores the challenges users face when they try to deactivate their Facebook accounts, and how efforts by social media companies to keep users logging in may be giving us less control over our digital lives.

Social media companies, not surprisingly, see user disconnection as an existential threat and take wide-ranging efforts to fight it, Karppi says. For example, there are messages with photos saying, “This person will miss you if you leave,” he says. “When it comes right down to it, “leaving is hard or practically impossible for some.

Karpi says people who do disconnect often find themselves returning to Facebook because the company makes it easy, letting them pick up their accounts right where they left off.

A combination of factors makes the platform irresistible, he says. That includes engaging content that captures users’ attention and the fact that they are surrounded by a network of friends and followers.

Media for diasporic communities have emerged in major cities, such as Vancouver and Los Angeles, and reflect a multicultural, multiethnic, and multilingual reality. Both conventional media and increasingly prevalent digital spaces link migrants locally in their new homes and globally with their old homes. But do these media serve their respective communities exclusively, or are they available and accessible to members of greater society at large? Using case studies of Korean media in Vancouver and Los Angeles, Sherry Yu examines the potential of an intercultural media system for culturally, ethnically, and linguistically diverse societies.

Writers’ Rights provides context for freelancers’ struggles and identifies the points of contention between journalists and big business. Through interviews and a survey of freelancers, Cohen highlights the paradoxes of freelancing, which can be simultaneously precarious and satisfying, risky and rewarding.

Communication has often been understood as a realm of immaterial, insubstantial phenomena—images, messages, thoughts, languages, cultures, and ideologies—mediating our embodied experience of the concrete world. Communication Matters challenges this view, assembling leading scholars in the fields of Communication, Rhetoric, and English to focus on the materiality of communication.

Social Modeling for Requirements Engineering offers a new modeling approach (called the i* framework) that conceives of software-based information systems as being situated in environments in which social actors relate to each other in terms of goals to be achieved, tasks to be performed, and resources to be furnished.

The Internet Tree. The State of Telecom Policy in Canada 3.0 presents primers on provocative digital policy issues: broadband access, copyright, net neutrality, privacy, and security, along with a consideration of structures of participation in policy-making and communication rights.

Media Divides: Communication Rights and the Right to Communicate in Canada offers a comprehensive, up-to-date audit of communications law and policy. Using the concept of communications rights as a framework for analysis, scholars reveal the nation’s democratic deficits in five key domains – media, access, the Internet, privacy, and copyright.

Mediascapes: New Patterns in Canadian Communication provides a comprehensive introduction to mass communication in Canada with an issues-oriented approach and includes history and theory; audiences and the cultural marketplace; media ownership; and new media.

DIY Citizenship: Critical Making and Social Media examines the usefulness and limits of DIY citizenship. Since social media enables DIY citizens to organize and protest in new ways (as in Egypt’s “Twitter revolution” of 2011) and to repurpose corporate content (or create new user-generated content) in order to offer political counternarratives, these authors explore the diverse forms of political participation and “critical making” that have emerged.