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Historical mass media and contemporary social media are typically seen as opposites. "The culture industry" was the term used by the Frankfurt School in the 1940s to explain the emerging commercial mass media. The culture industry was portrayed as a semi-fascist apparatus of indoctrination. It selected cultural products and made them popular based on obscure determinations of economic value. In contrast, the common view of contemporary social media is that it is more democratic. Using voting algorithms and human voting, social media can finally realize widespread participation that was denied to the passive audiences of the mass media system. Social media appear to remove the bottleneck of the mass media system, allowing everyone to aspire to celebrity, or at least popularity. However, despite these appearances, social media have also now evolved into an elaborate system that selects social products and makes them popular based on obscure determinations of economic value. Social media platforms filter, censor, control, and train—and they may do so without the user's awareness. Advances in computation now make a social media industry possible that is based on individual difference and action rather than sameness and passivity. But in other respects, the social industry resembles the culture industry: the co-option of culture has been superseded by the co-option of sociality. The word "social" may then be the biggest challenge facing those who study social media. Our task is to rescue genuine sociality from the emerging social industry.

Behind-the-scenes stories of how Internet research projects actually get done.The realm of the digital offers both new methods of research and new objects of study. Because the digital environment for scholarship is constantly evolving, researchers must sometimes improvise, change their plans, and adapt. These details are often left out of research write-ups, leaving newcomers to the field frustrated when their approaches do not work as expected. Digital Research Confidential offers scholars a chance to learn from their fellow researchers' mistakes--and their successes. The book--a follow-up to Eszter Hargittai's widely read Research Confidential--presents behind-the-scenes, nuts-and-bolts stories of digital research projects, written by established and rising scholars. They discuss such challenges as archiving, Web crawling, crowdsourcing, and confidentiality. They do not shrink from specifics, describing such research hiccups as an ethnographic interview so emotionally draining that afterward the researcher retreated to a bathroom to cry, and the seemingly simple research question about Wikipedia that mushroomed into years of work on millions of data points. Digital Research Confidential will be an essential resource for scholars in every field.ContributorsMegan Sapnar Ankerson, danah boyd, Amy Bruckman, Casey Fiesler, Brooke Foucault Welles, Darren Gergle, Eric Gilbert, Eszter Hargittai, Brent Hecht, Aron Hsiao, Karrie Karahalios, Paul Leonardi, Kurt Luther, Virag Molnar, Christian Sandvig, Aaron Shaw, Michelle Shumate, Matthew Weber

History repeatedly demonstrates that rural communities have unique technological needs. Yet little is known about how rural communities use modern technologies, which therefore results in a collective lack knowledge about how to design for rural life. To address this gap, the present empirical article investigates behavioral differences between more than 3,000 rural and urban social media users. With a data set collected from a broadly popular social network site, the current work analyzes users' profiles, 340,000 online friendships, and 200,000 interpersonal messages. Based on social capital theory, differences are predicted between rural and urban users, and strong evidence supports the present hypotheses—namely, rural people articulate far fewer friends online, and those friends live much closer to home. Results indicate that the groups have substantially different gender distributions and use privacy features differently. The article concludes with a discussion of the design implications drawn from these findings; most important, designers should reconsider the binary friend-or-not model to allow for incremental trust building.

Computer algorithms organize and select information across a wide range of applications and industries, from search results to social media. Abuses of power by Internet platforms have led to calls for algorithm transparency and regulation. Algorithms have a particularly problematic history of processing information about race. Yet some analysts have warned that foundational computer algorithms are not useful subjects for ethical or normative analysis due to complexity, secrecy, technical character, or generality. We respond by investigating what it is an analyst needs to know to determine whether the algorithm in a computer system is improper, unethical, or illegal in itself. We argue that an "algorithmic ethics" can analyze a particular published algorithm. We explain the importance of developing a practical algorithmic ethics that addresses virtues, consequences, and norms: We increasingly delegate authority to algorithms, and they are fast becoming obscure but important elements of social structure.

Two theoretical approaches have recently emerged to characterize new digital objects of study in the media landscape: infrastructure studies and platform studies. Despite their separate origins and different features, we demonstrate in this article how the cross-articulation of these two perspectives improves our understanding of current digital media. We use case studies of the Open Web, Facebook, and Google to demonstrate that infrastructure studies provides a valuable approach to the evolution of shared, widely accessible systems and services of the type often provided or regulated by governments in the public interest. On the other hand, platform studies captures how communication and expression are both enabled and constrained by new digital systems and new media. In these environments, platform-based services acquire characteristics of infrastructure, while both new and existing infrastructures are built or reorganized on the logic of platforms. We conclude by underlining the potential of this combined framework for future case studies.

Starting in the early 1990s, journalists and scholars began responding to and trying to take account of new technologies and their impact on our lives. By the end of the decade, the full-fledged study of cyberculture had arrived. Today, there exists a large body of critical work on the subject, with cutting-edge studies probing beyond the mere existence of virtual communities and online identities to examine the social, cultural, and economic relationships that take place online.Taking stock of the exciting work that is being done and positing what cyberculture's future might look like, Critical Cyberculture Studies brings together a diverse and multidisciplinary group of scholars from around the world to assess the state of the field. Opening with a historical overview of the field by its most prominent spokesperson, it goes on to highlight the interests and methodologies of a mobile and creative field, providing a much-needed how-to guide for those new to cyberstudies. The final two sections open up to explore issues of race, class, and gender and digital media's ties to capital and commerce-from the failure of dot-coms to free software and the hacking movement.This flagship book is a must-read for anyone interested in the dynamic and increasingly crucial study of cyberculture and new technologies