"Theory of the Hashtag traces the young and spectacular career of the humble hashtag, shining a bright light on a small but pervasive feature of our contemporary digital culture and shows how it is surreptitiously shaping the public sphere. It is a short book about the most prominent sign of our times"--

The internet is changing the way that knowledge is made and shared. Knowledge-making in face-to-face settings is being replaced by information gathering from remote sources, whose origins may be concealed but which can create an illusion of intimacy. Though remote communication is beneficial in many ways - modern societies would fail without it - and though the tight boundaries of the face-to-face can be used for evil purposes such as criminal conspiracy,...

Art-form, send-up, farce, ironic disarticulation, pastiche, propaganda, trololololol, mode of critique, mode of production, means of politicisation, even of subjectivation -- memes are the inner currency of the internet's circulatory system. Independent of any one set value, memes are famously the mode of conveyance for the alt-right, the irony left, and the apoliticos alike, and they are impervious to many economic valuations: the attempts made in...

Cutting across multiple disciplines, this book maps out a new role for the public sociologist in the post-COVID world. It envisions a new kind of public sociology that brings together "the digital" and the "physical" to create public spaces where critical scholarship and active civic engagement can meet in a mutually reinforcing way

Governments and consumers expect internet platform companies to regulate their users to prevent fraud, stop misinformation, and avoid violence. Yet, so far, they've failed to do so. The inability of platforms like Facebook, Google, and Amazon to govern their users has led to stolen elections, refused vaccines, counterfeit N95s in a pandemic, and even genocide. Such failures stem from these companies' inability to manage the complexity of their userbases,...

The author of the breakout hit "Here Comes Everybody" reveals how new technology is changing us from consumers to collaborators, unleashing a torrent of creative production that will transform our world.

When we click on a picture of a shopping cart it connects a complex set of technologies to represent a simple idea that we're all familiar with. A heart icon under a photo is understood as an expression of interest or appreciation. Digital metaphors like these are everywhere in our lives, but they aren't just a clever way to describe technology. Metaphors like "the cloud" are also changing the way we think. They are the linchpin for a constant feedback...

"From New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Coddling of the American Mind, an essential investigation into the collapse of youth mental health--and a plan for a healthier, freer childhood. After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on most measures. Why? In The Anxious Generation, social...

"EGirls, eCitizens is a landmark work that explores the many and varied forces shaping girls' and young women's experiences of privacy, identity, and equality in our digitally networked society. Drawing on the multi-disciplinary expertise of a remarkable team of leading Canadian and international scholars, as well as Canada's leading digital literacy organization, MediaSmarts, this edited collection definitively presents the complex realities of digitized...