As I write this in June 2015, a United Nations committee in Bonn is occupied in the massive task of editing a document overviewing global climate change. The effort to reduce 90 pages into a short(er), sensible, and readable set of facts and positions is not just a matter of editing but a battle among […]
The undergrads in my Social Media and the Self class laugh on cue whenever MySpace surfaces in the scholarly literature that we’re discussing. And MySpace appears all the time—as does Dodgeball, Flickr, and Orkut. Even the nods to Digg strike the students as hilarious—a whole fall-and-rise cycle later. I understand. It is a little ridiculous, […]
The academic way to introduce the topic of politically-motivated unfriending on Facebook would be to talk about the gap in the literature that the study of it fills. And it does fill a gap: despite an enormous body of literature that endeavors to explain what the internet has done and is doing to politics (and, […]
Daniel Kreiss-The Networked Democratic Spectator: “…Social media afford “active spectatorship” around media events…political elites who produce media events cannot ignore these active audiences exercising performative scrutiny…At rare but significant moments, social media afford and even make possible collective identification, participation, and social action…” Read the rest here Tamara Shepherd- Mapped, Measured, and Mined: The Social […]
We Have Always Been Social . . . And we will always be social. … “To term some media social implies that there are other media that are perhaps anti-social, or even not social at all—asocial. It also invites comparisons between media based on how social each medium is. But each medium is social in […]