Social Media ─ Communication, Sharing and Visibility

This book is about sharing and social media. The word share is at the heart of the Internet. It appears as a link under every YouTube video, every Facebook post, every story on theNew York Times website. From Spotify playlists to Tumblr blogs, from BitTorrent to theGuardian opinion page, we are encouraged to communicate, cooperate, collaborate, connect, and share. At the same time, content industries lobby for the criminalization of sharing, and for regulatory models and technological interventions that will protect their content by inhibiting sharing. Plus, while online sharing opens up new social possibilities, new kinds of networks, and new forms of distributed creativity and collaboration, it also opens Internet users up to new forms of visibility, exploitation, and surveillance.

Drawing upon a range of qualitative methods and theoretical approaches, Graham Meikle here explores the cultural politics of sharing through networked digital media. Meikle takes readers through the history of the so-called sharing industry, as well as its cultural motivations and implications, engaging readers with questions of technologies and texts, of audiences and users, and of how networked digital media and are adopted and adapted in a communications environment built around sharing.