Books like Facebook by Steven Levy

Shoshana Zuboff explains how digital data is turned into a new market form—surveillance capitalism—where corporations predict and shape behavior for profit, reshaping power, privacy, and democracy in the digital age.

Jaron Lanier argues that social media erodes autonomy, truth, and dignity, urging readers to delete their accounts and imagine a more humane digital future.

Hatching Twitter chronicles the launch and rise of the social media platform Twitter and the stories of its founders.

An in‑depth account of how Facebook grew from a dorm‑room experiment to a global social network with 500 million users, examining its rapid expansion, cultural impact, and the leadership of Mark Zuckerberg.

Eli Pariser explains how the rise of personalization on the Web limits the information we consume, turning search engines into invisible filters that shape our news, opinions, and online experiences.

The Accidental Billionaires tells how Harvard undergraduates Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook while chasing social status, transforming a campus project into a global social network and enduring friendship—and business—conflict.

Exploring the physical infrastructure of the Internet and its historical figures and keepers of data.

Freeman Dyson explores how solar energy, genetic engineering, and the Internet can reshape society, ethics, and global wealth distribution.

A landmark tour of the new science of "idea flow" outlines revolutionary insights into the mysteries of collective intelligence and social influence, explaining the virtually unlimited data sets of today's digital technologies and the considerable accuracy of information from social networks.

We live in an age of perfectionism. Every day, we're bombarded with the beautiful, successful, slim, socially-conscious and extroverted individual that our culture has decided is the perfect self. We see this person constantly in shop windows, in newspapers, on the television, at the movies and all over our social media. We berate ourselves when we don't match up to them--when we're too fat, too old, too poor, or too sad. This cycle can be extremely bad for us. In recent years, psychologists have even begun to think that many people take their own lives because of the impossible standards that are set for who they ought to be. Will Storr began to wonder about this perfect self that torments so many of us. Who, actually, is this person? Why does it hold such power over us? Could it be humanity's deadliest idea? And, if so, is there any way we can break its spell? To find out, Storr takes us on a journey from the shores of Ancient Greece, through the Christian Middle Ages, the encounter groups of 1960s California and self-esteem evangelists of the late twentieth century to modern-day America, where research suggests today's young people are in the grip of an epidemic of narcissism. He'll tell the strange story of the individualist Western self from its birth on the Aegean to the era of hyper-individualistic neoliberalism in which we find ourselves today. "Selfie" reveals, for the first time, the epic tale of the person we all know so intimately...because it's us.

"A century after the outbreak of the First World War, a powerful explanation of why the war's legacy continues to shape our world. The war would make a celebrity out of Woodrow Wilson and would ratify the emergence of the US as the dominant force in the world economy"--

In this groundbreaking "cultural history of psychotherapy," historian and psychologist Philip Cushman shows how the development of modern psychotherapy is inextricably intertwined with that of the United States and how it has fundamentally changed the way Americans view events and themselves. Using an interpretive historical approach, Cushman shows how and why psychotherapy was created, what its functions are, and how it has come to play such an enormous role in American life. Asserting that each era develops a different conception of "what it means to be human," Cushman traces the evolution of the self throughout history to contemporary times, naming its current configuration in our consumerist society the "empty self," one that needs constant filling. In Constructing the Self, Constructing America, he places psychotherapy in its social and historical context, and examines its origins in the nineteenth century to its preeminence in American life today, arguing that its establishment as a social institution may in fact reproduce some of the very ills that it is meant to heal. Finally, in an unusual move, Cushman suggests a way to use interpretive methods in the everyday practice of psychotherapy. By doing so, he hopes to dissuade both patient and therapist from colluding with the empty self or the rampant consumerism of our time.