95 books match the query 'Social media' and 18 start with s

cover of School Yearbook: The Untold Story of a Cringey Tradition and Its Digital Afterlife

School Yearbook

The Untold Story of a Cringey Tradition and Its Digital Afterlife

Kate Eichhorn

University of Chicago Press, 2025

Why school yearbooks—as frivolous and cringey as they are—are far more than just objects of nostalgia.
 
We’re all familiar with the embarrassment that washes over us when recalling our high school yearbooks. Questionable fashion choices, gravity-defying hair, a melodramatic quote—what were we thinking? Even as school yearbooks decline in popularity among contemporary teens, they continue to impact our lives in shocking ways. Collected, digitized, aggregated, and recombined in ways that would have been impossible to imagine just a few decades ago, yearbooks are no longer bound personal archives of adolescent memories. In the twenty-first century, they are shaping our lives in surprising and sometimes disturbing ways. And what could be a more fitting afterlife for these cringey books?
 
In School Yearbook, cultural critic Kate Eichhorn investigates this ubiquitous object. On the surface, school yearbooks are easily dismissed as innocuous collections of embarrassing photographs and cheesy affirmations, but as Eichhorn reveals, there has never been anything innocent about the school yearbook tradition. Since the early twentieth century, yearbooks have circulated as forms of public relations, propaganda, and hate speech. They have been routinely used by police detectives, private investigators, and even the FBI to identify and profile suspects.  With over half a million yearbooks now available online, these books have also acquired the power to continue shaping our lives long after graduation. Would-be landlords, employers, and even creditors can now turn to data culled from their embarrassing pages to make judgments about who we are and what we merit.
 
In a digital era, school yearbooks have acquired the ability to keep judging us in perpetuity.   Both timely and insightful, School Yearbook explores how these books have always been used to rank and judge us.
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cover of Semantic Web Technologies and Social Searching for Librarians

Semantic Web Technologies and Social Searching for Librarians

Robin M. American Library Association

American Library Association, 2012

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cover of Shareveillance: The Dangers of Openly Sharing and Covertly Collecting Data

Shareveillance

The Dangers of Openly Sharing and Covertly Collecting Data

Clare Birchall

University of Minnesota Press, 2017

Cracking open the politics of transparency and secrecy

In an era of open data and ubiquitous dataveillance, what does it mean to “share”? This book argues that we are all “shareveillant” subjects, called upon to be transparent and render data open at the same time as the security state invests in practices to keep data closed. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s “distribution of the sensible,” Clare Birchall reimagines sharing in terms of a collective political relationality beyond the veillant expectations of the state.

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cover of Social Capital Online: Alienation and Accumulation

Social Capital Online

Alienation and Accumulation

Kane X. Faucher

University of Westminster Press, 2018

What is ‘social capital’? The enormous positivity surrounding it conceals the instrumental economic rationality underpinning the notion as corporations silently sell consumer data for profit. Status chasing is just one aspect of a process of transforming qualitative aspects of social interactions into quantifiable metrics for easier processing, prediction, and behavioural shaping.

A work of critical media studies, Social Capital Online examines the idea within the new ‘network spectacle’ of digital capitalism via the ideas of Marx, Veblen, Debord, Baudrillard and Deleuze. Explaining how such phenomena as online narcissism and aggression arise, Faucher offers a new theoretical understanding of how the spectacularisation of online activity perfectly aligns with the value system of neoliberalism and its data worship. Even so, at the centre of all, lie familiar ideas – alienation and accumulation – new conceptions of which he argues are vital for understanding today’s digital society.

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cover of Social Knowledge Creation in the Humanities: Volume 1

Social Knowledge Creation in the Humanities

Volume 1

Edited by Alyssa Arbuckle, Aaron Mauro, and Daniel Powell

Iter Press, 2017

The ubiquity of social media has transformed the scope and scale of scholarly communication in the arts and humanities. The consequences of this new participatory and collaborative environment for humanities research has allowed for fresh approaches to communicating research. Social Knowledge Creation takes up the norms and customs of online life to reorient, redistribute, and oftentimes flatten traditional academic hierarchies. This book discusses the implications of how humanists communicate with the world and looks to how social media shapes research methods. This volume addresses peer-review, open access publishing, tenure and promotion, mentorship, teaching, collaboration, and interdisciplinarity as a comprehensive introduction to these rapidly changing trends in scholarly communication, digital pedagogy, and educational technology. Collaborative structures are rapidly augmenting disciplinary focus of humanities curriculum and the public impact of humanities research teams with new organizational and disciplinary thinking. Social Knowledge Creation represents a particularly dynamic and growing field in which the humanities seeks to find new ways to communicate the legacy and traditions of humanities based inquiry in a 21st century context.

New Technologies in Medieval and Renaissance Studies Volume 7.

Edited by Alyssa Arbuckle, Aaron Mauro, and Daniel Powell

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cover of Social Knowledge Creation in the Humanities: Volume 2

Social Knowledge Creation in the Humanities

Volume 2

Edited by Aaron Mauro

Iter Press, 2022

In the humanities, the field of “social knowledge creation” has helped define how social media platforms and other collaborative spaces have shaped humanistic critique in the twenty-first century. The ability to access and organize information and people has been profoundly liberating in some online contexts, but social media also presents many issues which come to light in the often-overlapping domains of politics, media studies, and disinformation.

While these countervailing influences are all around us, the essays collected in this volume represent a humanistic ethics of generosity, compassion, and care. Social knowledge creation refreshingly returns to humanist values, emphasizing that people matter more than networks, facts matter more than opinion, and ideas matter more than influence. As a result, the speed and scale of digital culture has challenged humanists from many disciplines to more clearly define the values of education, collaboration, and new knowledge in pursuit of human justice and equality. In short, online culture has presented a new opportunity to define how and why the humanities matter in the age of social media.
 
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cover of Social Media in Emergent Brazil: How the Internet Affects Social Mobility

Social Media in Emergent Brazil

How the Internet Affects Social Mobility

Juliano Spyer

University College London, 2017

Since the birth of the internet, low-income Brazilians have received little government support to help them access it. In response, they have largely self-financed their digital migration, which can be seen in the rise of internet cafés in working-class neighborhoods and families purchasing their own computers through special agreements. Juliano Spyer argues that social media is the way for low-income Brazilians to stay connected, despite systematic ridicule from the more affluent, thus suggesting that social media serves a crucial function in strengthening traditional social relations.
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cover of Social Media in Industrial China

Social Media in Industrial China

Xinyuan Wang

University College London, 2016

‘Life outside the mobile phone is unbearable.’ Lily, 19, factory worker Described as the biggest migration in human history, an estimated 250 million Chinese people have left their villages in recent decades to live and work in urban areas. Xinyuan Wang spent 15 months living among a community of these migrants in a small factory town in southeast China to track their use of social media. It was here she witnessed a second migration taking place: a movement from offline to online. As Wang argues, this is not simply a convenient analogy but represents the convergence of two phenomena as profound and consequential as each other, where the online world now provides a home for the migrant workers who feel otherwise ‘homeless’. Wang’s fascinating study explores the full range of preconceptions commonly held about Chinese people – their relationship with education, with family, with politics, with ‘home’ – and argues why, for this vast population, it is time to reassess what we think we know about contemporary China and the evolving role of social media.
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cover of Social Media in Northern Chile: Posting the Extraordinarily Ordinary

Social Media in Northern Chile

Posting the Extraordinarily Ordinary

Nell Haynes

University College London, 2016

Based on 15 months of ethnographic research in the city of Alto Hospicio in northern Chile, this book describes how the residents use social media, and the consequences of this use in their daily lives. Nell Haynes argues that social media is a place where Alto Hospicio’s residents – or Hospiceños – express their feelings of marginalisation that result from living in city far from the national capital, and with a notoriously low quality of life compared to other urban areas in Chile. In actively distancing themselves from residents in cities such as Santiago, Hospiceños identify as marginalised citizens, and express a new kind of social norm. Yet Haynes finds that by contrasting their own lived experiences with those of people in metropolitan areas, Hospiceños are strengthening their own sense of community and the sense of normativity that shapes their daily lives. This exciting conclusion is illustrated by the range of social media posts about personal relationships, politics and national citizenship, particularly on Facebook.
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cover of Social Media in Rural China: Social Networks and Moral Frameworks

Social Media in Rural China

Social Networks and Moral Frameworks

Tom McDonald

University College London, 2016

China’s distinctive social media platforms have gained notable popularity among the nation’s vast number of internet users, but has China’s countryside been ‘left behind’ in this communication revolution? Tom McDonald spent 15 months living in a small rural Chinese community researching how the residents use social media in their daily lives. His ethnographic findings suggest that, far from being left behind, many rural Chinese people have already integrated social media into their everyday experience. Throughout his ground-breaking study, McDonald argues that social media allows rural people to extend and transform their social relationships by deepening already existing connections with friends known through their school, work or village, while also experimenting with completely new forms of relationships through online interactions with strangers, particularly when looking for love and romance. By juxtaposing these seemingly opposed relations, rural social media users are able to use these technologies to understand, capitalise on and challenge the notions of morality that underlie rural life.
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cover of Social Media in South India

Social Media in South India

Shriram Venkatraman

University College London, 2017

This book is one of the first ethnographic studies to explore the use of social media in the everyday lives of people in Tamil Nadu, a region of South India experiencing rapid change. In the past decade, there has been an influx of IT companies into a space once dominated by agriculture, resulting in a complex juxtaposition between an evolving knowledge economy and the traditions of rural life. This study suggests there is a blurring of boundaries and asserts that the use of various social media platforms in the region, while seeming to induce societal change, also remain bound by local practices influenced by class, age, gender, and caste.
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cover of Social Media in Southeast Italy: Crafting Ideals

Social Media in Southeast Italy

Crafting Ideals

Razvan Nicolescu

University College London, 2016

Why is social media in southeast Italy so predictable when it is used by such a range of different people?

This book describes the impact of social media on the population of a town in the southern region of Puglia, Italy. Razvan Nicolescu spent 15 months living among the town’s residents, exploring what it means to be an individual on social media. Why do people from this region conform on platforms that are designed for personal expression?

Nicolescu argues that social media use in this region of the world is related to how people want to portray themselves. He pays special attention to the ability of users to craft their appearance in relation to collective ideals, values, and social positions, and how this feature of social media has, for the residents of the town, become a moral obligation: they are expected to be willing to adapt their appearance to suit their different audiences at the same time, which is crucial in a town where religion and family are at the heart of daily life.  

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cover of Social Media in Southeast Turkey: Love, Kinship and Politics

Social Media in Southeast Turkey

Love, Kinship and Politics

Elisabetta Costa

University College London, 2016

This book presents an ethnographic study of social media in Mardin, a medium-sized town located in the Kurdish region of Turkey. The town is inhabited mainly by Sunni Muslim Arabs and Kurds, and has been transformed in recent years by urbanisation, neoliberalism and political events. Elisabetta Costa uses her 15 months of ethnographic research to explain why public-facing social media is more conservative than offline life. Yet, at the same time, social media has opened up unprecedented possibilities for private communications between genders and in relationships among young people – Costa reveals new worlds of intimacy, love and romance. She also discovers that, when viewed from the perspective of people’s everyday lives, political participation on social media looks very different to how it is portrayed in studies of political postings separated from their original complex, and highly socialised, context.
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cover of Social Media in Trinidad: Values and Visibility

Social Media in Trinidad

Values and Visibility

Jolynna Sinanan

University College London, 2017

Drawing on fifteen months of ethnographic research in one of the most under-developed towns on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, this book describes the uses and consequences of social media for the town’s residents. Jolynna Sinanan argues that this semi-urban region is a place in between: somewhere city dwellers look down on but that other villagers look up to. The town’s chief core value asserts that one should not elevate oneself over others, and Sinanan explores how residents carefully navigate social media as a tool for visibility while still advocating against more cosmopolitan values.      
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cover of Social Media in an English Village: (Or how to keep people at just the right distance)

Social Media in an English Village

(Or how to keep people at just the right distance)

Daniel Miller

University College London, 2016

Daniel Miller spent 18 months undertaking an ethnographic study with the residents of an English village, tracking their use of the different social media platforms. Following his study, he argues that a focus on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram does little to explain what we post on social media. Instead, the key to understanding how people in an English village use social media is to appreciate just how ‘English’ their usage has become. He introduces the ‘Goldilocks Strategy’: how villagers use social media to calibrate precise levels of interaction ensuring that each relationship is neither too cold nor too hot, but ‘just right’. He explores the consequences of social media for groups ranging from schoolchildren through to the patients of a hospice, and he compares these connections to more traditional forms of association such as the church and the neighbourhood. Above all, Miller finds an extraordinary clash between new social media that bridges the private and the public domains, and an English sensibility that is all about keeping these two domains separate.
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cover of Social Media, Social Justice and the Political Economy of Online Networks

Social Media, Social Justice and the Political Economy of Online Networks

Jeffrey Layne Blevins and James Jaehoon Lee

University of Minnesota Press, 2021

Next Generation e-book nonfiction 2023 Indie Book Award Prize.

While social network analyses often demonstrate the usefulness of social media networks to affective publics and otherwise marginalized social justice groups, this book explores the domination and manipulation of social networks by more powerful political groups. Jeffrey Layne Blevins and James Lee look at the ways in which social media conversations about race turn politically charged, and in many cases, ugly. Studies show that social media is an important venue for news and political information, while focusing national attention on racially involved issues. Perhaps less understood, however, is the effective quality of this discourse, and its connection to popular politics, especially when Twitter trolls and social media mobs go on the attack.

Taking on prominent case studies from the past few years, including the Ferguson protests and the Black Lives Matter movement, the 2016 presidential election, and the rise of fake news, this volume presents data visualization sets alongside careful scholarly analysis. The resulting volume provides new insight into social media, legacy news, and social justice.

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cover of Social Writing/Social Media: Publics, Presentations, and Pedagogies

Social Writing/Social Media

Publics, Presentations, and Pedagogies

Douglas M. Walls

University Press of Colorado, 2018

Social media have been (for quite some time now) part of the fabric of our lives. But as with many new technologies, it often takes a while for us to be able to step back, assess the tool's impact, and consider what's next. This collection offers one of the first sets of scholarly work in our field that responds to social media's influence on both popular and extra-curricular writing as well as on scholarly communication. Too frequently, social media is dismissed as non-academic, unworthy of sustained attention by researchers. The authors featured here present compelling reasons why this oft-neglected form of writing deserves—and demands—continued academic response.

Social Writing/Social Media: Publics, Presentations, and Pedagogies makes this contribution by examining the impact of social media on three writing-related themes: publics and audiences, presentation of self and groups, and pedagogy at various levels of higher education. The contributors to this collection urge readers to pay attention to an undertheorized aspect of writing online—the acts of composing that occur specifically in social-media spaces. Organized in three sections—social media and public audiences; social media and presentation; and social media and pedagogy—it builds on previous explorations of the role of multimodality in composition studies by extending ongoing conversations that have asked readers to expand notions of literacy in the twenty-first century. By addressing the wide range of composing activities that take place in social media and the rich variety of genres, audiences, stylistic choices, and pedagogical possibilities, this collection offers an important contribution to our understanding of pedagogy and practice in social media spaces.

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cover of Strategic Planning for Social Media in Libraries

Strategic Planning for Social Media in Libraries

Sarah K. Steiner

American Library Association, 2012

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