The first collection to address the collective transformation
happening in response to the rise of social media
With the rise of web 2.0 and social media platforms taking over vast
tracts of territory on the internet, the media landscape has shifted
drastically in the past 20 years, transforming previously stable
relationships between media creators and consumers. The Social Media
Reader is the first collection to address the collective transformation
with pieces on social media, peer production, copyright politics, and
other aspects of contemporary internet culture from all the major
thinkers in the field.
Culling a broad range and incorporating different styles of scholarship
from foundational pieces and published articles to unpublished pieces,
journalistic accounts, personal narratives from blogs, and whitepapers,
The Social Media Reader promises to be an essential text, with
contributions from Lawrence Lessig, Henry Jenkins, Clay Shirky, Tim
O'Reilly, Chris Anderson, Yochai Benkler, danah boyd, and Fred von
Loehmann, to name a few. It covers a wide-ranging topical terrain, much
like the internet itself, with particular emphasis on collaboration and
sharing, the politics of social media and social networking, Free
Culture and copyright politics, and labor and ownership. Theorizing new
models of collaboration, identity, commerce, copyright, ownership, and
labor, these essays outline possibilities for cultural democracy that
arise when the formerly passive audience becomes active cultural
creators, while warning of the dystopian potential of new forms of
surveillance and control.
