Breaking the Social Media Prism, with Professor Chris Bail

06/11/21 • 42 min

This episode is lifted from The Booking Club's first live-streamed conversation. It features The Booking Club's host and producer Jack Aldane talking to Professor Chris Bail about Chris's new book: 'Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing'.

In an era of increasing social isolation, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are among the most important tools we have to understand each other. We use social media as a mirror to decipher our place in society but, as Chris Bail explains, it functions more like a prism that distorts our identities, empowers status-seeking extremists, and renders moderates all but invisible. Breaking the Social Media Prism challenges common myths about echo chambers, foreign misinformation campaigns, and radicalizing algorithms, revealing that the solution to political tribalism lies deep inside ourselves. - Princeton University Press

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Previous Episode

The Costs of the Sexual Revolution, with Louise Perry

Writer and campaigner Louise Perry will publish a book in 2022 that'll make you question everything you thought you knew about the sexual revolution and its gift to women.

In it, Perry mounts a counterfactual challenge to the story we often tell ourselves in the West about this epoch of the 20th century. We often assume that the social and cultural changes of the 1960s transformed women from a sexually repressed class into a class freed from biology, commitment and stigma. Moreover, we assume based on the prevailing progress narrative of our time that the more explicitly sexualised our culture has become, the more sexually liberated women have become also.

But there is ample evidence today suggesting the costs of the sexual revolution have been dear for women. Perry shows how, so often, the barriers that were removed to make way for women's sexual liberation were in fact guardrails that protected them from extortion, humiliation and acts of violence perpetrated by men.

She and Jack Aldane, the host and producer of The Booking Club, met at The Bingham Riverhouse in Richmond to discuss.

Perry writes a weekly column for the New Statesman and is also the Press Officer for the campaign group We Can’t Consent To This, which documents cases in which UK women have been killed and defendants have claimed in court that they died as a result of ‘rough sex’.

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Next Episode

How the Left Lost Me, with Geoff Norcott

Comedian Geoff Norcott should have been Labour through and through. He grew up on a council estate, both of his parents were disabled, and his Dad was a Union man. So, how was it that he grew up to vote Tory?

In this courageously honest and provocative memoir, Geoff unpicks his working-class upbringing and his political journey from left to right. Raised by a fierce matriarch and a maverick father on a South London council estate where they filmed scenes for The Bill, Geoff spends his youth attempting to put out kitchen fires with aerosols and leaping in and out of industrial skips. But as he reaches adolescence, his political views begin to be influenced by major events including the early 90s recession, the credit crunch, and a chance encounter with Conservative PM John Major.

As an adult, Geoff begins to have the gnawing feeling that the values and traditions he grew up with no longer match Labour’s. And, as Brexit appears, he feels even more like a double agent operating behind enemy lines.

Written with warmth, wit and often laugh-out-loud humour, Where Did I Go Right? is Geoff’s attempt to understand why he ended up voting ‘for the bad guys’, and why blue-collared conservatism could be here to stay. (Hachette)

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