📚 7 Books mentioned in "The New Age of Media Manipulation | Renée DiResta" of The Daily Stoic

I saw you wrote a lot about um, about Alinsky and Rules for Radicals, also, which is a thing that I think about constantly; like that book is always in my head.

The guest discusses the host's writings on Alinsky's 'Rules for Radicals' and reflects on how the ideas from the book frequently occupy their thoughts.

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And then I read this book—did you read Upton Sinclair’s book, The Brass Check?

The guest inquires whether the host has read 'The Brass Check' by Upton Sinclair, which explores the media landscape of the early 20th century.

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And in the Upton Sinclair book, he’s talking about basically it’s like journalism was considered a low profession, so it didn’t have like a social structure, it didn’t have ethics, it didn’t have like institutions that gave awards to it; it was just like it was kind of a low-ass profession and so people just did whatever they could to get ahead in that position.

The guest discusses Upton Sinclair's book, which explores how journalism was viewed as a lowly profession lacking a clear social structure and ethics.

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What I was struck by and thinking about when I was reading your book is like what I got wrong or what I was talking about this sort of corruption of sort of money and attention flooding into journalism, but what’s interesting to me about where we are now is that in many cases, I guess I was overestimating the financial incentive as a problem—like I was going, like people are doing this to get page views because they put a little ad unit there and they make a certain amount of money per pages.

The guest reflects on their thoughts while reading a book by the podcast host, discussing issues such as the corruption in media and journalism, and how financial incentives may be overestimated as a problem.

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There was that term like slacktivism, and I feel like that was around the time that you were writing your book, actually it was; I don’t think you hear it mentioned quite so much anymore.

The guest discusses how the term 'slacktivism' emerged around the same time the host was writing their book.

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So after he wrote The Jungle, he wrote this like similar book; it’s non-fiction instead of fiction, I guess, but he basically writes an expose of early 20th Century media.

The guest discusses Upton Sinclair's impactful work 'The Jungle', mentioning that after this novel, Sinclair wrote a non-fiction book that serves as an expose on early 20th century media, comparing the two works.

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I was—I’d be curious your thoughts on podcasting as a medium because I had such high hopes for it as a medium, and like it wasn’t—uh, like sort of per—it seemed to be, um, when I was writing, uh, the updated version of Trust Me, I’m Lying, I was talking about podcasting as a positive medium in that it’s subscriber-based, like instead of just like random viral things, like audio is not super viral, or it wasn’t then.

The guest discusses their thoughts on podcasting while referencing their work on the updated version of 'Trust Me, I’m Lying', highlighting the positive attributes of podcasting as a medium that relies on subscriber engagement.

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