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]

"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 like Facebook, Andrew Keen shows us that the more electronically connected we become, the lonelier and less powerful we seem to be.

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.

The former Google executive and political activist tells the story of the Egyptian revolution he helped ignite through the power of social media. In the summer of 2010, thirty-year-old Google executive Wael Ghonim anonymously launched a Facebook page to protest the death of an Egyptian man at the hands of security forces. The page’s following expanded quickly and moved from online protests to a nonconfrontational movement. On January 25, 2011, Tahrir Square resounded with calls for change. Yet just as the revolution began in earnest, Ghonim was captured and held for twelve days of brutal interrogation. After he was released, he gave a tearful speech on national television, and the protests grew more intense. Four days later, the president of Egypt was gone. In this riveting story, Ghonim takes us inside the movement and shares the keys to unleashing the power of crowds in the age of social networking. “A gripping chronicle of how a fear-frozen society finally topples its oppressors with the help of social media.” —San Francisco Chronicle “Revolution 2.0 excels in chronicling the roiling tension in the months before the uprising, the careful organization required and the momentum it unleashed.” —NPR.org