The availability of various technological platforms enables individuals to feel a deeper sense of connectivity and contribution to their social circles and the world around them. This growing dependence on social networking platforms has altered the ways in which society functions and communicates. Social Media and the Transformation of Interaction in Society is a definitive reference source for timely scholarly research evaluating the impact of social networking platforms on a variety of relationships, including those between individuals, governments, citizens, businesses, and consumers. Featuring expansive coverage on a range of topics relating to social media applications and uses across industries, this publication is a critical reference source for professionals, educators, students, and academicians seeking current research on the role and impact of new media on modern society. This publication features authoritative, research-based chapters across a range of relevant topics including, but not limited to, computer-mediated communication, nonprofit projects, disaster response management, education, cyberbullying, microblogging, digital paranoia, user interaction augmentation, and viral messaging.

"This book is a definitive reference source for timely scholarly research evaluating the impact of social networking platforms on a variety of relationships by featuring expansive coverage on a range of topics relating to social media applications and uses across industries"--

This book examines the increased utilization of social media in daily life and its impact on social movements. The contributors analyze “social media revolutions” such as the Arab Spring, the 15-M movement in Spain, the Occupy Nigeria movement, and the Occupy Gezi movement in Turkey. The contributors to this collection—academics, researchers, and activists—implement diverse methodological approaches, both descriptive and quantitative, to cut across various disciplines, including communication and media studies, cultural studies, politics, sociology, and education.

Once celebrated for connecting people and circulating ideas, social media are facing mounting criticisms about their anticompetitive reach, addictive design, and toxicity to democracy. Known cumulatively as the “techlash,” journalists, users, and politicians are asking social media platforms to account for being too big, too engaging, and too unruly. In the age of the techlash, strategies to regulate how platforms operate technically, economically, and legally, are often stacked against individual tactics to manage the effects of social media by disconnecting from them. These disconnection practices—from restricting screen time and detoxing from device use to deleting apps and accounts—often reinforce rather than confront the ways social media organize attention, everyday life, and society. Reckoning with Social Media challenges the prevailing critique of social media that pits small gestures against big changes, that either celebrates personal transformation or champions structural reformation. This edited volume reframes evaluative claims about disconnection practices as either restorative or reformative of current social media systems by beginning where other studies conclude: the ambivalence, commodification, and complicity of separating from social media.

This book offers a comprehensive new analysis of the contemporary media landscape, looking at the central theories of the digital society, and the hot topics and key research methods in the field.

This book explores how digital communication generates new intimacies and meanings of friendship in a networked society, developing a theory of mediated intimacies to explain how social media contributes to dramatic changes in our ideas about personal relationships, through themes of self, youth, families, digital dating and online social capital.

How the World Changed Social Media is the first book in Why We Post, a book series that investigates the findings of anthropologists who each spent 15 months living in communities across the world. This book offers a comparative analysis summarising the results of the research and explores the impact of social media on politics and gender, education and commerce. What is the result of the increased emphasis on visual communication? Are we becoming more individual or more social? Why is public social media so conservative? Why does equality online fail to shift inequality offline? How did memes become the moral police of the internet? Supported by an introduction to the project’s academic framework and theoretical terms that help to account for the findings, the book argues that the only way to appreciate and understand something as intimate and ubiquitous as social media is to be immersed in the lives of the people who post. Only then can we discover how people all around the world have already transformed social media in such unexpected ways and assess the consequences