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Notable: Digital life

 
Tampa Bay Times
Published July 26, 2017

Notable

Digital life

Three new books, one fiction and two factual, look at how technology affects us.

The Dark Net (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) by Benjamin Percy is a fictional techno-thriller about a journalist, a hacker and a former child evangelist teaming up to fight human evil on the Web — and maybe something worse.

The Emoji Code: The Linguistics Behind Smiley Faces and Scaredy Cats (Picador) by Vyvyan Evans employs several sciences to argue that emoji can aid communication by replacing the nonverbal cues that express tone and emotion when we talk face to face.

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (Yale University Press) by Zeynep Tufekci, a "techno-sociologist," looks at how protest movements have changed as tweets and texts replace bullhorns and fliers.

Colette Bancroft, Times book editor