This book explores how digital media can extend care practices among friends and peers, researching young people’s negotiations of sexual health, mental health, gender/sexuality, and dating apps, and highlighting the need for a multifocal approach that centres young people’s expertise. Taking an "everyday practice" approach to digital and social media, Digital Media, Friendship and Cultures of Care emphasises that digital media are not novel but integrated into daily life. The book introduces the concept of "digital cultures of care" as a new framework through which to consider digital practices of friendship and peer support, and how these play out across a range of platforms and networks. Challenging common public and academic concerns about peer and friendship influences on young people, these terms are unpacked and reconsidered through attention to digital media, drawing on qualitative research findings to argue that digital and social media have created important new opportunities for emotional support, particularly for young people and LGBTQ+ people who are often excluded from formal healthcare and social support. This book and its comprehensive focus on friendship will be of interest to a range of readers, including academics, students, health promoters, educators, policymakers, and advocacy groups for either young people, LGBTQ+ communities, or digital citizenship. Academics most interested in this book will be working in digital media studies, health sociology, critical public health, health communication, sexualities, cultural studies, sex education, and gender studies.

This book explores how digital media can extend care practices among friends and peers, researching young people’s negotiations of sexual health, mental health, gender/sexuality, and dating apps, and highlighting the need for a multifocal approach that centres young people’s expertise. Taking an "everyday practice" approach to digital and social media, Digital Media, Friendship and Cultures of Care emphasises that digital media are not novel but integrated into daily life. The book introduces the concept of "digital cultures of care" as a new framework through which to consider digital practices of friendship and peer support, and how these play out across a range of platforms and networks. Challenging common public and academic concerns about peer and friendship influences on young people, these terms are unpacked and reconsidered through attention to digital media, drawing on qualitative research findings to argue that digital and social media have created important new opportunities for emotional support, particularly for young people and LGBTQ+ people who are often excluded from formal healthcare and social support. This book and its comprehensive focus on friendship will be of interest to a range of readers, including academics, students, health promoters, educators, policymakers, and advocacy groups for either young people, LGBTQ+ communities, or digital citizenship. Academics most interested in this book will be working in digital media studies, health sociology, critical public health, health communication, sexualities, cultural studies, sex education, and gender studies.

Never look at social media the same way again. Social media are an integral part of contemporary society. From news and politics to language and everyday life, they have changed the way we communicate, use information and understand the world. So we have to ask critical questions about social media. We have to dig deeper into issues of ownership, power, class and (in)justice. This book equips you with a critical understanding of the complexities and contradictions at the heart of social media’s relationship with society. The revised and expanded

Contestations of Citizenship, Education, and Democracy in an Era of Global Change: Children and Youth in Diverse International Contexts considers the shifting social, political, economic, and educational structures shaping contemporary experiences, understandings, and practices of citizenship among children and youth in diverse international contexts. As such, this edited book examines the meaning of citizenship in an era defined by monumental global change. Chapters from across both the Global South and North consider emerging formations of citizenship and citizen identities among children and youth in formal and non-formal education contexts, as well as the social and civic imaginaries and practices to which children and youth engage, both in and outside of schools. Rich empirical contributions from an international team of contributors call attention to the social, political, economic, and educational structures shaping the ways young people view citizenship and highlight the social and political agency of children and youth amid increasing issues of polarization, climate change, conflict, migration, extremism, and authoritarianism. The book ultimately identifies emergent forms of citizenship developing in formal and non-formal educational contexts, including those that unsettle the nation-state and democracy. Edited by a team of academics with backgrounds in education, citizenship, and youth studies, this book will appeal to scholars, researchers, and faculty who work across the broader field of youth civic engagement and democracy, as well as international and comparative education and citizenship. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Currently, more than half the population in developed countries has experienced online social networking. What is more, a quarter of the world’s citizens now have a profile in social media, whose users number 1.47 billion. Although English-speaking countries top the list of active social media-using nations, people from all around the world are represented in online social network channels. Social media obviously is a global phenomenon; however, we don’t know much about how each nation uses this tool and whether cultural values and demographic factors impact the usage behavior. This book discusses how culture relates to social media use around the world. Chapter 1 summarizes the recent impact of social media on our lives. Chapter 2 describes what social networks are and introduces online social networks. Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 focus on the theoretical aspects of social media. While Chapter 5 connects social media use and human communication, Chapter 6 looks at the effects of social media on society. Chapter 7 is about social innovations. Chapter 8 and 9 provide some basic information about Facebook and Twitter – the two most popular social media platforms – and Chapter 10 looks at the business aspects of social media. Chapter 11 reviews past studies on social media and culture, and Chapter 13 once again talks about Eastern and Western communication styles and how people in the East and West use social media. Chapter 14 compares and contrasts the way Americans and Japanese have been using social media. The last chapter provides a very brief summary of the book.

Covid-19 has been described as a 'digital pandemic'. But who might the characterisation of the pandemic as 'digital' leave behind? This timely book reconsiders the pandemic as 'postdigital', examining tensions between a growing postdigital attitude of disenchantment with digital technologies and the increasing reliance on adapted modes of online practice mid-lockdown in both performance-making and healthcare. What emerged amidst the pandemic restrictions was a theatre that was unable to show its face, instead adapting into a variety of 'covid-safe' remote forms of engagement, from 'Zoom plays' to self-generating experiences sent by post. This book explores the ways that both performances and healthcare practices found proxies for direct touch and face-to-face encounters, deconstructing the way that care and resilience were spectacularized by political actors online. Liam Jarvis and Karen Savage explore aspects of care in relation to technology, spectacle and facilitation, and how new modes of delivery and the repurposing of theatre spaces that were displaced amidst the mass migration online have been enabling as well as controversial. The variety of case studies assessed includes internet memes, online films, performances of everyday resilience through social media and participatory theatre productions, including Thaddeus Phillips' Zoom Motel, Coney's Telephone and Nightcap's Handle with Care.

In the globalization era, social media become more popular in everyone's daily life with its user friendly and effective functions. Social media support the people across the world in communicating, meeting new people, making socialization, sharing knowledge, learning different experiences and interacting with each other instead of distance and separation between persons. Moreover, social media can encourage the increasing of intercultural adaptation level of people who are facing different cultural experiences in new communities. The study shows that people use social media to become more adaptable with the new cultures of the host countries and to preserve their connections with home countries.

This book provides a critical introduction to the ways in which digital technologies have enabled new types of interactions, experiences and collaborations across a range of platforms and media, profoundly shaping our socio-cultural landscapes. These discussions are grounded in classical sociological concepts; community, the self, gender, consumption, power and exclusion and inequality, to demonstrate the continuities that exist between sociological studies of ‘real’ world phenomena and their digital counterparts. Examining the various debates around methods in digital sociology in recent years, this book provides an accessible and engaging guide to using methodologies to study digital technology. From the moment we wake up until we go to bed, many of us constantly use digital technologies. Our mobile phones have become our maps, banks, newspapers and entertainment consoles. What′s more, they allow us to be constantly connected with the people in our lives. This book will equip you to analyse digital media in your own work. The book offers a broad guide to the various areas of our lives that are impacted by digital technology, from the virtual communities that we form on social media to the impact that digital technology has on our identity through a ′sociology of selfies′. With chapters on leisure, work, privacy and methods, this is an essential introduction for students in the areas of sociology, digital media, and cultural studies. Learning features include: - Annotated further reading in every chapter - Case studies that illustrate theory - Learning objectives and questions throughout - Historical and theoretical context in every chapter

Digital media are normal. But this was not always true. For a long time, lay discourse, academic exhortations, pop culture narratives, and advocacy groups constructed new Information and communications technologies (ICTs) as exceptional. Whether they were believed to be revolutionary, dangerous, rife with opportunity, or other-worldly, these tools and technologies were framed as extraordinary. But digital media are now mundane, thoroughly embedded - and often unquestioned - in everyday life. Digital ICTs are enmeshed in health and wellness, work and organizations, elections, capital flows, intimate relationships, social movements, and even our own identities. And although the study of these technologies has always been interdisciplinary - at the crossroads of computer science, cultural studies, science and technology studies, and communications - never has a sociological perspective been more valuable. Sociology has always excelled at helping us re-see the normal. The Oxford Handbook of Digital Media Sociology is a perfect point of entry for those curious about the state of sociological research on digital media. Each chapter reviews the sociological research that has been done thus far and points towards unanswered questions. The 34 chapters in the Handbook are arranged in six sections which look at digital media as they relate to: theory, social institutions, everyday life, community and identity, social inequalities, and politics & power. More than ever, the contributors to this volume help make it a centralizing resource, pulling together the various strands of sociological research focused on digital media. In addition to providing a distinctly sociological center for those scholars looking to find their way in the subfield, the volume offers top sociological research that provides an overview of digital media to explain our quickly changing world to a broader public. Readers will find it accessible enough for use in class, and thorough enough for seasoned professionals interested in a concise update in their areas of interest.

Artificial intelligence not only powers our cars, hospitals and courtrooms: predictive algorithms are becoming deeply lodged inside us too. Machine intelligence is learning our private preferences and discreetly shaping our personal behaviour, telling us how to live, who to befriend and who to date. In Algorithmic Intimacy, Anthony Elliott examines the power of predictive algorithms in reshaping personal relationships today. From Facebook friends and therapy chatbots to dating apps and quantified sex lives, Elliott explores how machine intelligence is working within us, amplifying our desires and steering our personal preferences. He argues that intimate relationships today are threatened not by the digital revolution as such, but by the orientation of various life strategies unthinkingly aligned with automated machine intelligence. Our reliance on algorithmic recommendations, he suggests, reflects a growing emergency in personal agency and human bonds. We need alternatives, innovation and experimentation for the interpersonal, intimate effort of ongoing translation back and forth between the discourses of human and machine intelligence. Accessible and compelling, this book sheds fresh light on the impact of artificial intelligence on the most intimate aspects of our lives. It will appeal to students in the social sciences and humanities and to a wide range of general readers.