Welcome to an evolving world, and an evolving “book”. This is a textbook on social media, new media, and participatory culture. What makes this book special is that the book itself is participatory, drawing on the insights and artistry of those immersed in social media cultures. We believe in channeling students’ “funds of knowledge” as we teach about social media technologies, because what students know about social media is essential in connecting with students in order to teach them, and in helping all of us learn about this ever-evolving digital world.
I began writing this book on my own in 2017, and have updated it since as often as I could. (Future updates to this book will look different—read more about that here.) The social media landscape changes so quickly, it’s wise to question whether any book on the subject can remain relevant. One answer to this question is that any book or knowledge source remains relevant longer when it’s dynamic, or embracing of continuous change.
This edition of Humans R Social Media is a culmination of work by the iVoices Student Media Lab (visit iVoices here), funded by the Center for University Education and Scholarship, the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, and the iSchool at the University of Arizona. The goal of iVoices is to integrate student voices including narratives and media into instruction about technologies, and – beginning in Fall 2022 – to broaden our understandings of youth and new media experiences through research and scholarship.
Students hold extraordinary knowledge and experiences in our social media-saturated world, as I learned when I began inviting student perspectives in the Social Media and Ourselves podcast (visit the podcast here). Then our iVoices student Media Lab workers helped design assignments and train students in the large General Education course I teach, to produce media based on their experiences with technologies. Our team of iVoices interns training in Library and Information Science then carefully described, tagged, selected, and integrated student stories and media into the textbook. This edition you are reading now is the product of this extraordinary collaborative effort.
I am thrilled to broaden this book to include more student stories and media, and just as thrilled that you are here to read and share it. Throughout the book Humans R Social Media, you can find personal stories in video, audio, and writing. by students in the course the book was first designed for. In most chapters of the book, these student stories are presented as Case Studies followed by thought-provoking questions, to which readers are invited to respond. Case studies are frameworks for learning from life in the social sciences, and these stories offer opportunities for observation and analysis.
Many books pretend permanence. This one is unusual in acknowledging that books today – indeed any written information today – will not hold steady value for long. The value of this webbook is directly proportional to the human attention it can manage to sustain.
All informational content today, and particularly online content, is comprised of structures built on shifting foundations. Books, and especially online books, are like the New Jersey beaches I grew up on. On those beaches it is easy to forget that the sands beneath treasured the boardwalks and evening bingo games are drifting into the sea, to settle on ocean floors and other shores.
In the case of this book, the sands on which it is built are always shifting and changing; some of the channels that will suck them away fastest are already in view. First, we will lose the hyperlinks, as one, then a few, then many links lead to disappeared pages; indeed I wouldn’t be surprised if a link or two is already broken today on the first day of publication. Second, the platform on which this book is published could be compromised. (We hope not. As an Open Educational Resource drawn from open source development, Pressbooks has an advantage over other proprietary platforms. But things happen.) Third and last, this book’s truths will be cast into doubt as new information emerges around situations about which I’ve written.
I will do my best to keep this book relevant through all of these shifts. And I hope readers will find my writing voice human enough to contact me and alert me when something has slipped out of place.
Today Humans R Social Media is technically a “webbook”, currently hosted on Pressbooks. It is designed so that the menu – a stack of lines icon – at your upper left will drop down to show you the book’s major Parts, which can then be expanded with a + sign to show you the chapters within each part. The arrows at the bottom also help you navigate to the next chapter.
Below is more information on Pressbooks if you need it.
You can learn the most about social media through this text if you perform, as you read, some critical self-reflection – that is, intense inward examination – of your own use of online social networking technologies. What do you do online, and why? Really? What makes that a good idea? Is it possible it’s not a good idea? Why does that process look as it does? Can you envision it working differently? I invite you to critically engage with the content covered in this book. To examine social media critically, you will need to challenge your own beliefs and practices, as well as social norms, institutions, corporations, and governments.
In our iVoices Media Lab days, we trained students to produce media stories and content, and then offered them the opportunity to openly license their work for future use. We depended on interns to organize all of that student content. Below, one of them introduces a story that made her smile.
Integrating hundreds of stories into a textbook can be a tedious process, but sometimes, student stories like this one grab your attention.
As part of the intern team in 2021, I was part of multiple phases of integration including tagging student media. I had been working for hours on tagging when I stumbled across this audio clip. Even though I love this story because it highlights how stepping away from social media can be as impactful as being on social media, it really made me smile for another reason. Most of the audio disruption we get is a result of static noise or technical difficulties. Imagine my laugh of surprise when I recognized the familiar sound of a cat purring! It made me so happy, I just had to share it with the other members of our team. It was such a special, endearing thing to find, we even made “cat purring” a tag in our tagging system. ~ Randi Baltzer, iVoices Intern, Spring 2021
Stories like the one Randi found are in textboxes like the one just below. Look out for them, learn, and enjoy.
You will sometimes find an episode embedded in chapters of this book from the media including podcast Social Media & Ourselves. This podcast was produced with members of iVoices Media Lab including Diana Daly, Gabe Stultz, and Jacquie Kuru from 2021 to 2022. Here’s one episode we produced, to give you a feel for it.
Release Date: July 1st, 2021
iVoices intern Randi Baltzer explores the differences in communication and connection between the tangible world and the digital world through student stories and her own experiences. Theme music and music backtracks by Gabe Stultz. Produced by Diana Daly, Jacquie Kuru and iVoices Media Lab.
Respond to this podcast episode…How did the podcast episode “The Intern Series Part 3: War Of The Worlds” use interviews, student voices, or sounds to demonstrate a current or past social trend phenomenon? If you were making a sequel to this episode, what voices or sounds would you include to help listeners understand more about this trend, and why?
Please think beyond the specific definitions given to the meanings of these concepts, and try to understand what they mean in your own words.
Some of our qualitative questions prompt you to consider situations and stories from your own experiences with technologies. Users make sense of technologies personally, ideologically, and culturally. This does not mean youth or any other users are “digital natives,” as there is no such thing as a digital native! But the sense you make of technologies in your own familial and cultural ways is a valuable form of knowledge that belongs to you. Honor it by thinking seriously about the questions asking you to reflect on your tech lives.
Other qualitative questions at the bottom of these chapters ask you to think imaginatively. In these scenarios, you have the power to manipulate the past, the future, or both. Think deeply about social media decisions, their impacts, and your potential power in these.
Acknowledgments
Humans R Social Media - 2024 "Living Book" Edition Copyright © 2024 by Diana Daly is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
