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Robert Gehl's timely critique, Reverse Engineering Social Media, rigorously analyzes the ideas of social media and software engineers, using these ideas to find contradictions and fissures beneath the surfaces of glossy sites such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter. 

Gehl adeptly uses a mix of software studies, science and technology studies, and political economy to reveal the histories and contexts of these social media sites. Looking backward at divisions of labor and the process of user labor, he provides case studies that illustrate how binary "Like" consumer choices hide surveillance systems that rely on users to build content for site owners who make money selling user data, and that promote a culture of anxiety and immediacy over depth.

Reverse Engineering Social Media also presents ways out of this paradox, illustrating how activists, academics, and users change social media for the better by building alternatives to the dominant social media sites.

Viewed as both unhealthy and unattractive, fat people are widely represented in popular culture and in interpersonal interactions as revolting—as agents of abhorrence and disgust. Yet if we think about “revolting” in a different way, Kathleen LeBesco argues, we can recognize fatness as not simply an aesthetic state or a medical condition, but a political one. If we think of revolting in terms of overthrowing authority, rebelling, protesting, and rejecting, then corpulence carries a whole new weight as a subversive cultural practice that calls into question received notions about health, beauty, and nature. 

Revolting Bodies examines a number of sites of struggle over the cultural meaning of fatness. The book is grounded in scholarship on identity politics, the social construction of beauty, and the subversion of hegemonic medical ideas about the dangers of fatness. It explains how the redefinition of fat identities has been undertaken by people who challenge conventional understandings of nature, health, and beauty and, in so doing, alter their individual and collective relationships to power. 

LeBesco explores how the bearer of a fat body is marked as a failed citizen, inasmuch as her powers as a worker, shopper, and sexually “desirable” subject are called into question. At the same time, she highlights fat fashion, relations among fat, queer, and disability politics and activism, and online communities as opportunities for transforming these pejorative stereotypes of fatness. Her discussion of the long-term ramifications of denying bodily agency—in effect, letting biological determinism run rampant—has implications not only for our understanding of fatness but also for future political practice.

Exposing the politics of seeing: how documentary photographs confront inequality and reshape public understanding.

In Rhetorical Exposures, Christopher Carter explores social documentary photography from the nineteenth century to the present in order to illuminate the political dimensions and consequences of photographs taken and selected to highlight social injustice. Documentary photography aims to capture the material reality of life. Carter demonstrates how the creation and display of documentary photographs—often now called “imagetexts”—both invite analysis and raise persistent questions about the political and social causes for the bleak scenes of poverty and distress captured on film.

Carter’s carefully reasoned monograph examines both formal qualities of composition and the historical contexts of the production and display of documentary photographs. In Rhetorical Exposures, Carter explores Jacob Riis’s heartrending photos of Manhattan’s poor in late nineteenth-century New York, Walker Evans’s iconic images of tenant farmers in west Alabama, Ted Streshinsky’s images of 1960s social movements, Camilo José Vergara’s photographic landscapes of urban dereliction in the 1970s, and Chandra McCormick’s portraits of New Orleans’s Ninth Ward scarred by Hurricane Katrina.

While not ascribing specifically political or Marxist intentions to the photographers discussed, Carter frames his arguments in a class-based dialectic that addresses material want as an ineluctable result of social inequality. Carter argues that social documentary photography has the powerful capacity to disrupt complacent habits of viewing and to prompt viewers to confront injustice. Though photography may induce socially disruptive experiences, it remains vulnerable to the same power dynamics it subverts. Therefore, Carter offers a “rhetoric of exposure” that outlines how such social documentary images can be treated as highly tensioned rhetorical objects. His framework enables the analysis of photographs as heterogeneous records of the interaction of social classes and expressions of specific built environments. Rhetorical Exposures also discusses how photographs interact with oral and print media and relate to creations as diverse as public memorials, murals, and graphic novels.

As the creation and dissemination of new media continues to evolve in an environment of increasing anxiety about growing financial inequality, Rhetorical Exposures offers a very apt and timely discussion of the ways social documentary photography is created, employed, and understood.

The first comprehensive study of the artist Robert Heinecken and his critical views on the culture of mass media

This is the first book-length study dedicated to the artist Robert Heinecken, whose innovative photographic practices sought to interrogate how mass media imagery facilitated the construction of individual and collective identities. Appropriating, rephotographing, and layering pictures culled from newspapers, advertisements, pornography, and television, Heinecken recombined and transformed the ubiquitous images of mass culture to encourage viewers to critically reflect on their sense of self. 

From the 1960s through the late 1990s, Heinecken’s controversial art continually challenged inherited ideas around consumerism, the facticity of reportage, and visual culture’s relationship to gender and identity politics. Embodying the evolution of contemporary art toward increasingly hybrid and conceptual approaches, his oeuvre includes examples of painting, sculpture, photomontage, performance, installation, time-based media, and artist’s books, all of which collectively exploit photography’s reproducibility to subvert society’s dominant ideologies and stereotypical modes of representation.

Author Matthew Biro presents an exhaustive look at Heinecken’s life and art, locating him within a lineage that encompasses the activities of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes and the postmodern strategies of the Pictures Generation artists. Assessing his career within the specific political and historical contexts from which he gleaned his material, and illustrated throughout with vibrant full-color reproductions of his art, this in-depth examination demonstrates Robert Heinecken’s significance as a key figure of twentieth-century art and an incisive commentator on modern life in America.