Digital Media, Sharing and Everyday Life provides nuanced accounts of the processes of sharing in digital culture and the complexities that arise in them. The book explores definitions of sharing, and the roles that our digital devices and the platforms we use play in these practices. Drawing upon practice theory to outline a theoretical framework of sharing practice, the book emphasizes the need for a coherent and consistent framework of sharing in digital culture and explains what this framework might look like. With insightful descriptions, the book draws out the relationship of sharing to privacy and control, the labored strategies and boundaries of reciprocation, and our relationships with the technologies which mediate sharing practices. The volume is an essential read for researchers, postgraduate and undergraduate students in Media and Communication, New Media, Sociology, Internet Studies, and Cultural Studies.

This book explores emergent intimate practices in social media cultures. It examines new digital intimacies as they are constituted, lived, and commodified via social media platforms. The study of social media practices has come to offer unique insights into questions about what happens to power dynamics when intimate practices are made public, about intimacy as public and political, and as defined by cultural politics and pedagogies, institutions, technologies, and geographies. This book forges new pathways in the scholarship of digital cultures by fusing queer and feminist accounts of intimate publics with critical scholarship on digital identities and everyday social media practices. The collection brings together a diverse range of carefully selected, cutting-edge case studies and groundbreaking theoretical work on topics such as selfies, oversharing, hook-up apps, sexting, Gamergate, death and grief online, and transnational family life. The book is divided into three parts: ‘Shaping Intimacy’, ‘Public Bodies’, and ‘Negotiating Intimacy’. Overarching themes include identity politics, memory, platform economics, work and labour, and everyday media practices.

From Facebook and YouTube to TikTok and WeChat, this accessible book explores the relationships between public and personal communication on social media to understand their impacts on users’ everyday lives. Social media have made possible new kinds of relationships, entertainment, and politics, and enabled billions of people to experience new forms of communication, community, and communion. But social media are also profit-driven, data-mining corporations, and their core business model is often built around targeted surveillance that enables the commercial exploitation of their users’ everyday lives. Graham Meikle explores the tensions between these different dimensions of social media, engaging with questions of communication, data, remix, news, visibility, citizenship, and regulation. This second edition has been substantially revised: more than half of the text is entirely new to this edition, and those sections that remain have been completely updated. This new edition includes analysis of the data-driven business models of major social media firms, and of how these firms are expanding into new areas such as AI. It also includes discussion of major developments in news, surveillance, and activism on social media, as well as a new chapter on regulation. This book is an ideal critical introduction to social media in all their complexity.

This book explores how the complex scenario of platforms, practices and content in the contemporary digital landscape is shaping participatory cultures of health and illness. The everyday use of digital and social media platforms has major implications for the production, seeking and sharing of health information, and raises important questions about health peer support, power relations, trust, privacy and knowledge. To address these questions, this book navigates contemporary forms of participation that develop through mundane digital practices, like tweeting about the latest pandemic news or keeping track of our daily runs with Fitbit or Strava. In doing so, it explores both radical activist practices and more ordinary forms of participation that can gradually lead to social and/or cultural changes in how we understand and experience health and illness. While drawing upon digital media studies and the sociology of health and illness, this book offers theoretical and methodological insights from a decade of empirical research of health-related digital practices that span from digital health advocacy to illness-focused social media uses. Accessible and engaging, this book is ideal for scholars and students interested in digital media, digital activism, health advocacy and digital health.

This book explores how social media is used in South Africa, through a range of case studies exploring various social networking sites and applications. This volume explores how, over the past decade, social media platforms have deeply penetrated the fabric of everyday life. The author considers South Africans’ use of wearable tech and use of online health and sports tracking systems via mobile phones within the broader context of the digital data economy. The author also focuses on the dating app Tinder, to show how people negotiate and redefine intimacy through the practice of online dating via strategic performances in pursuit of love, sex and intimacy. The book concludes with the use of Facebook and Twitter for social activism (e.g. Fees Must Fall), as well as networked community building as in the case of the #imstaying movement. This book will be of interest to social media academics and students, as well as anyone interested in social media, politics and cultural life in South Africa.

A bold dive into the problematic development (and developers) of "smart wives"--feminized digital assistants who are friendly, sometimes flirty, docile, efficient, occasionally glitchy, and perpetually available. Meet the Smart Wife--at your service, an eclectic collection of feminized AI, robotic, and smart devices. This digital assistant is friendly and sometimes flirty, docile and efficient, occasionally glitchy but perpetually available. She might go by Siri, or Alexa, or inhabit Google Home. She can keep us company, order groceries, vacuum the floor, turn out the lights. A Japanese digital voice assistant--a virtual anime hologram named Hikari Azuma--sends her "master" helpful messages during the day; an American sexbot named Roxxxy takes on other kinds of household chores. In The Smart Wife, Yolande Strengers and Jenny Kennedy examine the emergence of digital devices that carry out "wifework"--domestic responsibilities that have traditionally fallen to (human) wives. They show that the principal prototype for these virtual helpers--designed in male-dominated industries--is the 1950s housewife: white, middle class, heteronormative, and nurturing, with a spick-and-span home. It's time, they say, to give the Smart Wife a reboot.

Digital Performance in Everyday Life combines theories of performance, communication, and media to explore the many ways we perform in our everyday lives through digital media and in virtual spaces. Digital communication technologies and the social norms and discourses that developed alongside these technologies have altered the ways we perform as and for ourselves and each other in virtual spaces. Through a diverse range of topics and examples—including discussions of self-identity, surveillance, mourning, internet memes, storytelling, ritual, political action, and activism—this book addresses how the physical and virtual have become inseparable in everyday life, and how the digital is always rooted in embodied action. Focusing on performance and human agency, the authors offer fresh perspectives on communication and digital culture. The unique, interdisciplinary approach of this book will be useful to scholars, artists, and activists in communication, digital media, performance studies, theatre, sociology, political science, information technology, and cybersecurity—along with anyone interested in how communication shapes and is shaped by digital technologies.

SOCIAL MEDIA AND MINISTRY Sharing the Gospel in the Digtal Age is a practical guide for all (including pastors and church leaders) to social media. It is a handbook, a how-to-manual for ministries on how to use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media platforms to grow and increase their influence. It is a Pastor's Guide to Social Media. This book is also for those, in general, who seek a better understanding of social networking, and how social media impacts our daily lives. Finally, it is about the information-based Digital Age and how we relate to it.

The new, updated edition of the authoritative and comprehensive survey of modern sociology The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Sociology, Second Edition is an authoritative survey of the major topics, current and emerging trends, and contemporary issues in the study of human social relationships and institutions. A collection of contributions from globally-recognized scholars and experts explore the theoretical and methodological foundations of sociology, new and established debates, and the most current research in the field. Broad in scope, this book covers a multitude of topics ranging from crime, urbanization, sexuality, and education to new questions surrounding big data, authoritarian capitalism, and the rise of nationalism. Since the first edition of the Companion was published, new developments have emerged and new problems have been created such as the omnipresence of social media, political and institutional upheaval, and the global refugee and immigration crises. This revised and updated second edition describes and explains social changes that have occurred in the past several years, both within the field of sociology and society as a whole. Previous material has been updated to reflect current research, while eleven new chapters address topics including feminist theory, debt and social change, and armed conflict and war. This comprehensive volume: Offers an engaging and accessible guide to the field of sociology, revised and updated for the second edition Presents wide-ranging, comprehensive coverage of the discipline Explores issues of contemporary relevance such as digital media and consumption Reflects state-of-the-art scholarship and contemporary debates New chapters for the second edition cover essential topics including feminist theory, armed conflict, big data, authoritarian capitalism, debt and social change, and the rise of nationalism The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Sociology, Second Edition is an invaluable resource for academics and graduate students, researchers, scholars, and educators in the discipline of sociology and allied fields such as anthropology, human geography, political science, and psychology.

The evolution of digital media has enhanced global perspectives in all facets of communication, greatly increasing the range, scope, and accessibility of shared information. Due to the tremendously broad-reaching influence of digital media, its impact on learning, behavior, and social interaction has become a widely discussed topic of study, synthesizing the research of academic scholars, community educators, and developers of civic programs. The Handbook of Research on the Societal Impact of Digital Media is an authoritative reference source for recent developments in the dynamic field of digital media. This timely publication provides an overview of technological developments in digital media and their myriad applications to literacy, education, and social settings. With its extensive coverage of issues related to digital media use, this handbook is an essential aid for students, instructors, school administrators, and education policymakers who hope to increase and optimize classroom incorporation of digital media. This innovative publication features current empirical studies and theoretical frameworks addressing a variety of topics including chapters on instant messaging, podcasts, video sharing, cell phone and tablet applications, e-discussion lists, e-zines, e-books, e-textiles, virtual worlds, social networking, cyberbullying, and the ethical issues associated with these new technologies.