danah boyd- Social Media: A Phenomenon to be Analyzed: “…As a buzzword, “social media” was far from being precise….For the entrepreneurs and geeks who had watched the Internet rise into a dot-com bubble and burst into flames, Web 2.0 and its first offering—social media—provided a chance to start anew….the geekier crowds wanted to go back to their roots, building technologies that mattered to people…”  Read the rest here

Mirca Madianou- Polymedia and Ethnography: Understanding the Social in Social Media:  “…Defining social media and assessing their social uses can be challenging given they become so many things to different people…As social media proliferate, each acquires its own niche in people’s communicative repertoires. What emerges then is a complex environment of multiple, evolving social media that combine with other platforms, older and newer…”  Read the rest here

Daren Brabham- Studying Normal, Everyday Social Media:  “…the vast majority of what happens on social media is unremarkable, desperately and dreadfully corporate, and thus understandably ignored by scholars and analysts…new social media research ought to: Study normal, everyday topics…Remember that relatively few people are on social media…Complicate what engagement means…” Read the reset here

Mia Consalvo and Casey O’Donnell- Games Are Social/Media(ted)/Technology Too : “Mia: …Game studies scholars have begun staking claims to spaces for their work in specialized journals, conferences, organizations and book series, associational divisions, interest groups…” Casey: “Other fields stepped in with their own methods and theories and frequently ignored the work that made the study of games, gamers, and the host of political–economic, social, technological, and cultural elements a reasonable realm of scholarly inquiry..”  Read the reset here