[Commlist] New book: Social Engineering: How Crowdmasters, Phreaks, Hackers, and Trolls Created a New Form of Manipulative Communication

# BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT: Social Engineering: How Crowdmasters, Phreaks, 
Hackers, and Trolls Created a New Form of Manipulative Communication 
(MIT Press)

On behalf of my co-author, Sean Lawson, I'm excited to announce the 
publication of my latest book, which is relevant to communication and 
media studies scholars interested in digital media and disinformation.

# LINK
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/social-engineering

# DESCRIPTION
The United States is awash in manipulated information about everything 
from election results to the effectiveness of medical treatments. 
Corporate social media is an especially good channel for manipulative 
communication, with Facebook a particularly willing vehicle for it. In 
Social Engineering, Robert Gehl and Sean Lawson show that online 
misinformation has its roots in earlier techniques: mass social 
engineering of the early twentieth century and interpersonal hacker 
social engineering of the 1970s, converging today into what they call 
“masspersonal social engineering.” As Gehl and Lawson trace contemporary 
manipulative communication back to earlier forms of social engineering, 
possibilities for amelioration become clearer.

The authors show how specific manipulative communication practices are a 
mixture of information gathering, deception, and truth-indifferent 
statements, all with the instrumental goal of getting people to take 
actions the social engineer wants them to. Yet the term “fake news,” 
they claim, reduces everything to a true/false binary that fails to 
encompass the complexity of manipulative communication or to map onto 
many of its practices. They pay special attention to concepts and terms 
used by hacker social engineers, including the hacker concept of 
“bullshitting,” which the authors describe as a truth-indifferent mix of 
deception, accuracy, and sociability. They conclude with recommendations 
for how society can undermine masspersonal social engineering and move 
toward healthier democratic deliberation.

# TABLE OF CONTENTS
1: Crowdmasters: The Rise and Fall of Mass Social Engineering, 1920–1976
2: Phreaks and Hackers: The Rise of Interpersonal Social Engineering, 
1976–Present
3: Trashing: From Dumpster Diving to Data Dumps
4: Pretexting: Recognizing the Mitnick Mythology
5: Bullshitting: Deception, Friendliness, and Accuracy
6: Penetrating: The Desire to Control Media and Minds
7: Contemporary Masspersonal Social Engineering
8: Conclusion: Ameliorating Masspersonal Social Engineering

See https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/social-engineering for more information.

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