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.

This book is the essential guide for understanding how state power and politics are contested and exercised on social media. It brings together contributions by social media scholars who explore the connection of social media with revolutions, uprising, protests, power and counter-power, hacktivism, the state, policing and surveillance. It shows how collective action and state power are related and conflict as two dialectical sides of social media power, and how power and counter-power are distributed in this dialectic. Theoretically focused and empirically rigorous research considers the two-sided contradictory nature of power in relation to social media and politics. Chapters cover social media in the context of phenomena such as contemporary revolutions in Egypt and other countries, populism 2.0, anti-austerity protests, the fascist movement in Greece's crisis, Anonymous and police surveillance.

"Thirty-nine authors from around the world explore the phenomena of citizen journalism, collective action, 'smart mobs,' iconography, and even the revolutionary music of the Arab Spring in Social Media goes to War: rage, rebellion, and revolution in the age of Twitter. Twenty-eight chapters from senior and junior social media scholars cover war, insurrections, revolutions, and quests for social justice through case studies of Cuba, Georgia, Egypt, India, Iran, Jordan, Thailand, Tunisia, and the United States, where President Obama's social media usage is scrutinized by a former campaign insider. The U.S. Department of Defence's social media policies in time of conflict are reviewed, and social media usage in Wisconsin's budget battle of 2011 is analyzed."--Cover, p. [4]

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.

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.

"Digital Vertigo provides an articulate, measured, contrarian voice against a sea of hype about social media. As an avowed technology optimist, I'm grateful for Keen who makes me stop and think before committing myself fully to the social revolution." —Larry Downes, author of The Killer App In Digital Vertigo, Andrew Keen presents today's social media revolution as the most wrenching cultural transformation since the Industrial Revolution. Fusing a fast-paced historical narrative with front-line stories from today's online networking revolution and critiques of "social" companies like Groupon, Zynga and LinkedIn, Keen argues that the social media transformation is weakening, disorienting and dividing us rather than establishing the dawn of a new egalitarian and communal age. The tragic paradox of life in the social media age, Keen says, is the incompatibility between our internet longings for community and friendship and our equally powerful desire for online individual freedom. By exposing the shallow core of social networks, Andrew Keen shows us that the more electronically connected we become, the lonelier and less powerful we seem to be.

During the Arab uprisings of early 2011, which saw the overthrow of Zine el-Abadine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, the role of digital media and social networking tools was widely reported. With tens of thousands publicly committed to public protest through their online social networks, and with calls to protest circulating through email networks, Facebook groups, and street organizing, the activists had set in motion a staged confrontation with the Egyptian regime, of the sort that had previously been unthinkable. The potentially subversive nature of social networks was also recognized by the very authorities fighting against popular pressure for change, and the Egyptian government's attempt to block internet and mobile phone access in January 2011 demonstrated this. What is yet to be examined is the local context that allowed digital media to play this role: in Egypt, for example, a history of online activism has laid important ground work. Here, David Faris argues that it was circumstances particular to Egypt, more than the 'spark' from Tunisia, that allowed the revolution to take off: namely blogging and digital activism stretching back into the 1990s, combined with sustained and numerous protest movements and an independent press. During the Mubarak era, where voicing a political opinion was - to say the least - risky, and registering as a political party was onerous and precarious undertaking, it was online avenues of discussion and debate that flourished. Over the course of those years, digital activists - bloggers and later, users of other forms of social media like Twitter, Facebook and Youtube - scored a number of important victories over the regime, over issues largely revolving around human rights. Faris analyses these activists and their online activities and campaigns, examining how the internet was used as a space in which to create identities and spur action. Dissent and Revolution in a Digital Age tracks the rocky path taken by Egyptian bloggers operating in Mubarak's authoritarian regime to illustrate how the state monopoly on information was eroded, making space for dissent and for those previously without a voice.