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Citizens in democracies complain that political parties’ positions on major issues are too ambiguous for them to confidently understand. Why is party position ambiguity so common? Are party positions ambiguous because political parties fail in forming clear policies or because they deliberately blur their positions? Rationality of Irrationality argues that political parties are motivated to strategically blur their position on an issue when they struggle with a certain disadvantage in the issue. Specifically, political parties present an ambiguous position when their own supporters are divided in their stances on the issue. A political party also blurs position stances when voters do not acknowledge that the party has the ability and integrity to solve problems related to the issue. Political parties blur their position in these cases because ambiguous party positions divert voters’ attention from the issue. Voters support a political party whose policy positions on major issues are close to their own stances. However, voters cannot confidently and exactly estimate party positions on an issue when they are only ambiguous.

Justin Bieber launched his music career on YouTube in 2007, Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” exploded on TikTok in 2019, and Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” soared to the top of the Billboard charts just two weeks after its YouTube debut in 2023. These viral successes inspire countless artists to upload music online, fueled by the promise that technology can democratize opportunity, but does this promise hold true?

The Myth of Opportunity: Music, Labor, and Platforms in the Twenty-First Century critically examines the myth of technology as a great equalizer in the music industry. While platforms like Spotify claim to empower artists, the reality is that rewards remain highly unequal. Through macroeconomic analysis and time series methodology, this book investigates how streaming services have reshaped opportunity from a labor perspective across professions, industries, and regions, offering a comprehensive, empirical view on the true impact of digital platforms on cultural production with a focus on music.

The Selfie Machine offers novel insight into personalized communication practices in the digital age through the medium of the selfie. While the selfie has achieved notoriety due to pop-psychology accounts of Narcissism-related selfie "disorders," this book examines the selfie as a mode of meaning making and self-presentation that includes not just still images, but also short videos, hashtag practices and economies of liking and following. In taking India as the starting point of its investigation, The Selfie Machine inverts the "West-then-the-rest" model of understanding global digital media practices. The book considers selfie culture’s impact on personal and public digital practices and trends—ranging from cellphone markets, to influencer entrepreneurship and microcelebrity, to the conduct of politics and protest. In doing so, it not only offers an expanded definition of selfies in digital media culture, but also demonstrates how “global” digital media (including selfies) cannot be understood as a monolith.