Exploring social media's integration with modern society, this text empowers students as social media consumers and creators. The thoroughly updated second edition includes a new chapter on AI technologies. Features include full color visuals; glossary; chapter questions and activities; and theory, ethics, and diversity and inclusion boxes.

What does it mean to live in a digital society? Does social media empower political activism? How do we form and express our identity in a digital age? Do algorithms and search engine results have a social role? How have software and hardware transformed how we interact with each other? In the early 21st century, digital media and the social have become irreversibly intertwined. In this cutting-edge introduction, Simon Lindgren explores what it means to live in a digital society. With succinct explanations of the key concepts, debates and theories you need to know, this is a must-have resource for students exploring digital media, social media, media and society, data and society, and the internet. “An engaging story of the meaning digital media have in societies. The writing is relatable, with diverse and comprehensive references to theories. Above all, this is a fun book on what a contemporary digital society looks like!” - Professor Zizi Papacharissi, University of Illinois at Chicago Simon Lindgren is Professor of Sociology at Umeå University in Sweden. He is also the director of DIGSUM, an interdisciplinary academic research centre studying the social dimensions of digital technology.

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.

The reference will discuss mass media around the world in their varied forms—newspapers, magazines, radio, television, film, books, music, websites, and social media—and will describe the role of each in both mirroring and shaping society.

A landmark insider’s tour of how social media affects our decision-making and shapes our world in ways both useful and dangerous, with critical insights into the social media trends of the 2020 election and beyond “The book might be described as prophetic. . . . At least two of Aral’s three predictions have come to fruition.”—New York NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY WIRED • LONGLISTED FOR THE PORCHLIGHT BUSINESS BOOK AWARD Social media connected the world—and gave rise to fake news and increasing polarization. It is paramount, MIT professor Sinan Aral says, that we recognize the outsize effect social media has on us—on our politics, our economy, and even our personal health—in order to steer today’s social technology toward its great promise while avoiding the ways it can pull us apart. Drawing on decades of his own research and business experience, Aral goes under the hood of the most powerful social networks to tackle the critical question of just how much social media actually shapes our choices, for better or worse. He shows how the tech behind social media offers the same set of behavior influencing levers to everyone who hopes to change the way we think and act—from Russian hackers to brand marketers—which is why its consequences affect everything from elections to business, dating to health. Along the way, he covers a wide array of topics, including how network effects fuel Twitter’s and Facebook’s massive growth, the neuroscience of how social media affects our brains, the real consequences of fake news, the power of social ratings, and the impact of social media on our kids. In mapping out strategies for being more thoughtful consumers of social media, The Hype Machine offers the definitive guide to understanding and harnessing for good the technology that has redefined our world overnight.

In times of global capitalist crisis we are witnessing a return of critique in the form of a surging interest in critical theories (such as the critical political economy of Karl Marx) and social rebellions as a reaction to the commodification and instrumentalization of everything. On one hand, there are overdrawn claims that social media (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc) have caused uproars in countries like Tunisia and Egypt. On the other hand, the question arises as to what actual role social media play in contemporary capitalism, crisis, rebellions, the strengthening of the commons, and the potential creation of participatory democracy. The commodification of everything has resulted also in a commodification of the communication commons, including Internet communication that is today largely commercial in character. This book deals with the questions of what kind of society and what kind of Internet are desirable, how capitalism, power structures and social media are connected, how political struggles are connected to social media, what current developments of the Internet and society tell us about potential futures, how an alternative Internet can look like, and how a participatory, commons-based Internet and a co-operative, participatory, sustainable information society can be achieved.

Media are fundamental to our sense of living in a social world. Since the beginning of modernity, media have transformed the scale on which we act as social beings. And now in the era of digital media, media themselves are being transformed as platforms, content, and producers multiply. Yet the implications of social theory for understanding media and of media for rethinking social theory have been neglected; never before has it been more important to understand those implications. This book takes on this challenge. Drawing on Couldry's fifteen years of work on media and social theory, this book explores how questions of power and ritual, capital and social order, and the conduct of political struggle, professional competition, and everyday life, are all transformed by today's complex combinations of traditional and 'new' media. In the concluding chapters Couldry develops a framework for global comparative research into media and for thinking collectively about the ethics and justice of our lives with media. The result is a book that is both a major intervention in the field and required reading for all students of media and sociology.