Book and Media Studies

Sarah T. Roberts, an award-winning social media scholar, offers the first extensive ethnographic study of the commercial content moderation industry. Based on interviews with workers from Silicon Valley to the Philippines, at boutique firms and at major social media companies, she contextualizes this hidden industry and examines the emotional toll it takes on its workers.

Social media, once heralded as revolutionary and democratic, have instead proved exclusionary and elitist Social media technologies such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook promised a new participatory online culture. Yet, technology insider Alice Marwick contends "Web 2.0" only encouraged a preoccupation with status and attention.

Youth culture and technology expert danah boyd uncovers some of the major myths regarding teens' use of social media. She explores tropes about identity, privacy, safety, danger, and bullying. Ultimately, boyd argues that society fails young people when paternalism and protectionism hinder teenagers' ability to become informed, thoughtful, and engaged citizens through their online interactions. Yet despite an environment of rampant fear-mongering, boyd finds that teens often find ways to engage and to develop a sense of identity.

Although choices seems endless, public attention is not. How do digital media find the audiences they need in an era of infinite choice? James Webster explains how audiences take shape in the digital age. Webster describes the factors that create audiences, including the preferences and habits of media users, the role of social networks, the resources and strategies of media providers, and the growing impact of media measures. Webster shows that the marketplace works in ways that belie our greatest hopes and fears about digital media.

Selfies, blogs and lifelogging devices help us understand ourselves, building on long histories of written, visual and quantitative modes of self-representations. This book uses examples to explore the balance between using technology to see ourselves and allowing our machines to tell us who we are.

Social media has come to deeply penetrate our lives: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and many other platforms define many of our daily habits of communication and creative production. The Culture of Connectivity studies the rise of social media in the first decade of the twenty-first century providing both a historical and a critical analysis of the emergence of major platforms in the context of a rapidly changing ecosystem of connective media.

This volume explores how the development and widespread use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) have a radical impact on the human condition: the blurring of the distinction between reality and virtuality; the blurring of the distinction between human, machine and nature; the reversal from information scarcity to information abundance; and the shift from the primacy of stand-alone things, properties, and binary relations, to the primacy of interactions, processes and networks.

Bullets and Bulletins: Media and Politics in the Wake of the Arab Uprisings takes a sobering and holistic look at the intersections between media and politics before, during, and in the reverberations of the Arab uprisings.

The internet and the mobile phone have disrupted many of our conventional understandings of ourselves and our relationships, raising anxieties and hopes about their effects on our lives. Nancy Baym provides frameworks for thinking critically about the roles of digital media in personal relationships.

Internet trolls live to upset as many people as possible, using all the technical and psychological tools at their disposal. Trolls take pleasure in ruining a complete stranger's day and find amusement in their victim's anguish. In short, trolling is the obstacle to a kinder, gentler Internet. In this provocative book, Whitney Phillips argues that trolling, widely condemned as obscene and deviant, actually fits comfortably within the contemporary media landscape. Trolling may be obscene, but, Phillips argues, it isn't all that deviant.

To understand a thwarted Turkish coup, an anti-Wall Street encampment, and a packed Tahrir Square, we must first comprehend the power and the weaknesses of using new technologies to mobilize large numbers of people. An incisive observer, writer, and participant in today's social movements, Zeynep Tufekci explains in this accessible and compelling book the nuanced trajectories of modern protests--how they form, how they operate differently from past protests, and why they have difficulty persisting in their long-term quests for change.

This book examines self-presentation and social connection in the digital age. The focus of the volume rests on the construction of the self, and what happens to self-identity when it is presented through networks of social connections in new media environments. Contributors address the implications of many aspects of online social networks including self-presentation, behavioral norms, patterns and routines, social impact, privacy, class/gender/race divides, and taste cultures online.

This book explores how social media adoption by terrorists interacts with privacy law, freedom of expression, data protection and surveillance legislation through an exploration of the fascinating primary resources themselves, covering everything from the Snowden Leaks, the rise of ISIS to Charlie Hebdo.

Social media is popularly seen as an important media for people with disability in terms of communication, exchange and activism. Similarly, while social media and disability are often both observed through a focus on the Western, developed and English-speaking world, different global perspectives are often overlooked. This collection explores the opportunities and challenges social media represents for the social inclusion of people with disabilities from a variety of different global perspectives.

This book presents a wide-scale, interdisciplinary analysis and guide to social media. Examining platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Youtube and Vine, the book explores and analyzes journalism, broadcasting, public relations, advertising and marketing.

We fall in love every day, with others, with ideas, with ourselves. This volume is about love and the networked self. It focuses on how love forms, grows, or dissolves. Chapters address how relationships of love develop, are sustained or broken up through technologies of expression and connection. Every love story has a beginning and an end. Technology does not give love the kiss of eternity; but it can afford love new meaning.

The search for meaning is an essential human activity. It is not just about agreeing on some definitions about the world, objects, and people; it is an ethical process of opening up to find new possibilities. Langlois uses case studies of social media platforms (including Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon) to revisit traditional conceptions of meaning.

This book provides an insightful and comprehensive look at the issues regarding the use of the Internet and social media by activists in more than 30 countries--and how many governments in these countries are trying to blunt these efforts to promote freedom. The innovators who created social media might never have imagined the possibility: that activists living in countries where oppressive conditions are the norm would use social media to call for changes to bring greater freedom, opportunity, and justice to the masses.

This book traces the practices that are evolving as young people come to see news increasingly as something shared via social networks and social media rather than produced and circulated solely by professional news organizations. The book introduces the concept of connective journalism, clarifying the role of creating and sharing stories online as a key precursor to collective and connective political action.