Conclusion

Why is it important to know ourselves in order to understand social media? This book is called Humans R Social Media because the development of social media culture, including norms and technological affordances, is wrapped up in you, us, and other humans. And we are also wrapped up in that culture; as we shape it, it shapes us.

We’ve tried to show how social media technologies and human culture partnership plays out in this book. We began with the reverberations of this partnership on identity. We examined our society’s communication practices informing early social media technologies. We looked at how human-created algorithms bounce against human behaviors, reinforcing them but also sometimes being rejected by them. We learned about the ways humans have learned to use social technologies to seek what we want through online activism, branding, and lying. And we looked at the ways our bodies and needs for love play out in the digital landscape, performing new relationships and spectacular selves.

We hope this book has helped you to understand how important your role is as a human in a technological revolution.

And we hope that you will share what you’ve learned.