Here’s a preview of Reza Aslan (founder of Aslan Media) and Jessica Jackley’s (co-founder of KIVA) new talk, The Promise and Perils of Social Media:

Reza Aslan and Jessica Jackley know all about the social web’s remarkable ability to build communities and incite social change. As the founder of Aslan Media, which is altering perceptions of the Arab world through traditional and online entertainment, Aslan has traced the impact of social media in the Middle East. As the co-founder of KIVA, the world’s largest microlending website, Jackley has harnessed the power of one-to-one relationships to triumph over bureaucratic lending models. Together, this husband and wife team explains how social media has irrevocably changed the world, and explores the future of online collaboration. How has social media gone from simple news gathering to revolutionizing the concept of community? What changes must our institutions make—from government to business to education—in order to catch up to our new web-based society? And what can an individual do to ensure that social media reaches its full potential as a force for global change?

We love getting new books from our speakers. Here are a bunch we’ve been sent in the last few weeks: Chuck Klosterman’s The Visible Man, Randall Kennedy’s The Persistence of the Color Line, Dreaming in Chinese by Deborah Fallows, Tina Rosenberg’s Join the Club, No god but God, from Reza Aslan, and Susan Cain’s Quiet.