The Arab Spring did not arise out of nowhere. It was the physical manifestation of more than a decade of new media diffusion, use, and experimentation that empowered ordinary people during their everyday lives. In this book, Billie Jeanne Brownlee offers a refreshing insight into the way new media can facilitate a culture of resistance and dissent in authoritarian states. Investigating the root causes of the Syrian uprising of 2011, New Media and Revolution shows how acts of online resistance prepared the ground for better-organised street mobilisation. The book interprets the uprising not as the start of Syria's social mobilisation but as a shift from online to offline contestation, and from localised and hidden practices of digital dissent to tangible mass street protests. Brownlee goes beyond the common dichotomy that frames new media as either a deus ex machina or a means of expression to demonstrate that, in Syria, media was a nontraditional institution that enabled resistance to digitally manifest and gestate below, within, and parallel to formal institutions of power. To refute the idea that the population of Syria was largely apathetic and apolitical prior to the uprising, Brownlee explains that social media and technology created camouflaged geographies and spaces where individuals could protest without being detected. Challenging the myth of authoritarian stability, New Media and Revolution uncovers the dynamics of grassroots resistance blossoming under the radar of ordinary politics.

Social media shapes the ways in which we communicate, think about friends, and hear about news and current events. It also affects how users think of themselves, their communities, and their place in the world. This book examines the tremendous impact of social media on daily life. When the Internet became mainstream in the early 2000s, everything changed. Now that social media is fully entrenched in daily life, contemporary society has shifted again in how we communicate, behave as consumers, seek out and enjoy entertainment, and express ourselves. Every one of the new applications of social media presents us with a new way of thinking about the economy that supports technological development and communication content and offers new models that challenge us to think about the economic impact of communication in the 21st century. The Social Media Revolution examines the tremendous influence of social media on how we make meaning of our place in the world. The book emphasizes the economic impacts of how we use the Internet and World Wide Web to exchange information, enabling readers to see how social media has taken root and challenged previous media industries, laws, policies, and social practices. Each entry in this useful reference serves to document the history, impact, and criticism of every subject and shows how social media has become a primary tool of the 21st-century world—one that not only contributes to our everyday life and social practices but also affects the future of business. The coverage of topics is extremely broad, ranging from economic models and concepts relevant to social media, such as e-commerce, crowdfunding, the use of cyber currency, and the impact of freeware; to key technologies and devices like Android and Apple iOS, apps, the cloud, streaming, and smartphones and tablets; to major entrepreneurs, inventors, and subjects of social media, such as Julian Assange, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Marissa Mayer, Edward Snowden, Steve Wozniak, and Mark Zuckerberg.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom, taking the opposite view, argues that the extensive attention paid to the effects of worldwide television coverage of the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square masks the fact that the Chinese students were essentially reworking protest rituals rooted in their country's history and culture long before the modern media era. Owen Johnson, in his essay on the Czechoslovak press during the "Velvet Revolution," likewise downplays the role of the media. The remaining contributors - Jeffrey Brooks, Jack R. Censer, Tim Harris, Thomas C. Leonard, Stephen R. Mackinnon, Michael Mendle, Jeffery A. Smith, Jonathan Sperber, Mark W. Summers - focus on pamphlet literature, newspapers, political cartoons, and the modern electronic media. Together, their wide-ranging views form a balanced and perceptive examination of the impact of the media on the making of history.

Daily newspapers are closing across America. Washington bureaus are shuttering; whole areas of the federal government are now operating with no press coverage. International bureaus are going, going, gone. Journalism, the counterbalance to corporate and political power, the lifeblood of American democracy, is not just threatened. It is in meltdown. In The Death and Life of American Journalism, Robert W. McChesney, an academic, and John Nichols, a journalist, who together founded the nation's leading media reform network, Free Press, investigate the crisis. They propose a bold strategy for saving journalism and saving democracy, one that looks back to how the Founding Fathers ensured free press protection with the First Amendment and provided subsidies to the burgeoning print press of the young nation.

Using theory and data, Gainous and Wagner illustrate how online social media is bypassing traditional media and creating new forums for the exchange of political information and campaigning.

Egypt's January 25 revolution was triggered by a Facebook page and played out both in virtual spaces and the streets. Social media serves as a space of liberation, but it also functions as an arena where competing forces vie over the minds of the young as they battle over ideas as important as the nature of freedom and the place of the rising generation in the political order. This book provides piercing insights into the ongoing struggles between people and power in the digital age.

Social media has become an integral part of life in the 21st century. Nearly every young adult has one or more social media accounts, making it imperative that they learn the best ways to protect themselves and their private information. It is equally important to highlight the good that young adults can do with social media. Readers take an in-depth look this topic with the help of sidebars, full-color photographs, and discussion questions that encourage conversations among young adults about the best ways they can use social media, both for themselves and for society.