5 Upcoming Academic Books on AI, Social Media, and Misinformation

Spring's most hotly anticipated books

Posted on February 24, 2025 in Blog Posts

Punxsutawney Phil, America’s favorite groundhog, inaugurated this month by predicting another six weeks of winter. We wanted to close February at LibTech Insights by looking forward to spring and summer. Of course, books are our business at Choice, so we wanted to take a glance at some of the academic titles coming our way. We selected five tech books we have on our radar. These selections represent a range of topics, but we gave priority to books that center students and their interests. In better understanding their technological backgrounds and environments, we can better reach them and cultivate their intellectual curiosity.

Without further ado, here are our picks!

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💯 Observed Correction: How We Can All Respond to Misinformation on Social Media, by Leticia Bode and Emily K. Vraga (Oxford)

Though it isn’t without controversy, information literacy is a cornerstone of tech librarianship. Misinformation, in particular, has become a growing concern in recent years. Meta’s recent decision to remove fact-checking has caused further alarm that misinformation may be on the uptick. While discussions of information literacy often prioritize how to identify misinformation, we also need to consider how we should respond to it. Observed Correction seeks to answer this need by highlighting how users react to corrected information on social media and how we can encourage users to become more willing to correct misinformation they see online. The authors hold that observed correction is “an effective and scalable tool in the fight against bad content on the Internet,” and we’re eager to see it in action.

👾 Streaming by the Rest of Us: Microstreaming Videogames on Twitch, by Mia Consalvo, Marc Lajeunesse, and Andrei Zanescu (MIT)

Twitch is a large streaming platform that allows users to watch livestreams of professional gamers, political commentators, internet personalities, and more. Twitch exists in its own ecosystem, so you’re forgiven if you’re unfamiliar with it, but it is incredibly popular among boys and young men. Streaming by the Rest of Us studies Twitch streamers with small audiences to understand their motives, goals, and experiences. While this book may feel a bit niche, we included it on this list because it has the potential to intrigue many students who use this platform. One way to reverse falling male engagement with education is to offer them a starting point for translating their interests into scholarly inquiry. This book offers a foothold into studying a vast territory they’re familiar with.

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📕 Digital Social Reading: Sharing Fiction in the Twenty-First Century, by Federico Pianzola (MIT)

A bit of a complement to the previous title, Digital Social Reading draws on case studies from a number of understudied platforms, such as Goodreads, Archive of Our Own (a fan-fiction repository), and Wattpad (an amateur self-publishing platform), that are very popular with young people, particularly girls and young women. Digital Social Reading interrogates the social practices embedded within online reading: commenting, reviewing, recommending, sharing, reimagining, and so on. Pianzola uses these case studies to explore how digital social reading provides an encouraging environment for readers and how these communities are shaping reading practices. This book pivots us away from a books-or-technology dichotomy and explores how technology and books shape each other.

🦄 The Kids Are Online: Confronting the Myths and Realities of Young Digital Life, by Ysabel Gerrard (California)

Our last pick centered on young people is The Kids Are Online, a book that will hopefully offer a counterbalance to discourse about young people and technology. Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation set off waves of discourse last year about the mental health effects of technology on children. Opinion was divided: some felt that Haidt accurately diagnosed a problem, and others felt that he was stirring up a moral panic. Gerrard shifts the scholarly perspective from that of a concerned parent to that of the young people actually using this technology. Through more than a hundred interviews with teens, she examines their conflicting emotions and encounters with digital technology. The book promises to include recommendations for building safer social media ecosystems and is sure to spark agreement and debate among college students.

🤥 The Opposite of Cheating: Teaching for Integrity in the Age of AI, by Tricia Bertram Gallant and David A. Rettinger (Oklahoma)

Our final selection is for educators. Generative AI has caused a lot of strains in education; one of the most significant strains is the trust between instructors and students. The ease with which students can cheat using generative AI has stoked paranoia. “AI detectors,” with their false positives, have come under fire, but we hurt ourselves and our students if we try to sidestep the problems with academic integrity AI presents. This volume intends to provide practical and research-backed analysis of why students cheat, how to prevent it, how to change the conversation around integrity, and how to better meet the needs of students. With any luck, these discussions around integrity will allow instructors an opportunity to revisit fundamental questions about the purpose of education and deepen their commitment to student growth.

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