12 Information Studies
Information Studies (ISI)
Humans R Social Media∗
Diana Daly (University of Arizona)
2021
Licence: CC BY 4.0
Social media and humans exist in a world of mutual influence, and humans play central roles in how this influence is mediated and transferred. Originally created by University of Arizona Information scholar Diana Daly, this Third Edition of the book Humans R Social Media uses plain language and features contributions by students to help readers understand how we as humans shape social media, and how social media shapes our world in turn.
Formats: Pressbooks webbook, EPUB, PDF, and more
Reviews: Open Textbook Library
Suggested for:
ISI 6351 Social Media
Instruction in Libraries and Information Centers: An Introduction∗
Laura Saunders (Simmons University) and Melissa Wong (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
2020
Licence: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 (Note: assigning sections is permitted, but adaptations are not allowed without permission)
This open access textbook offers a comprehensive introduction to instruction in all types of library and information settings. Designed for students in library instruction courses, the text is also a resource for new and experienced professionals seeking best practices and selected resources to support their instructional practice.
Formats: Pressbook webbook and PDF
Includes: instructional strategies, examples of lesson plans
Suggested for:
ISI 6371 Learning and Instruction
Social Media and the Self: An Open Reader∗
Edited by Jefferson Pooley (Muhlenberg College)
2021
Licence: CC BY-NC 4.0
Social Media & the Self is intended to serve students enrolled in media and communication courses. It is built on PubPub, which includes its own public annotation feature. The resulting marginalia is public by default, enabling not just reaction to the main text but also back-and-forth among the comments.
One premise of this course reader is that the self on social media is suspended between authenticity and performance. The dilemma, which may be an opportunity too, is that the authentic self must be performed—enacted, with forethought and even calculation. To stage-manage oneself, then, is to violate a tenet of authenticity: that expression should be spontaneous and unrehearsed. The crux of the dilemma is the ability to curate impressions that most social media apps grant. The services, by way of time-delayed self-editing, give users lots of performative control. In practice this means that the demand to present an authentic self can be met with deliberate care. Other users—the audience for these iterative performances—know this about social media: They too tailor their posts and plandids to come off as #unfiltered. The result is mutual awareness of calculation, a presumption that the seemingly authentic is instead an artifact of strategy. This leaves everyone, from the casual user to the self-employed influencer, caught in a bind.
This collection’s second premise de-stabilizes the first. The implicit contrast to engineered spontaneity on Instagram is the so-called real world: The space of face-to-face talk, allegedly free of premeditated impression management. But a moment’s reflection complicates the apparent contrast. We were, long before Mark Zuckerberg dreamed up Facebook in a dorm, already performing. We manage the way we come off to others in the offline world too. The classic statement of this truth—that all the world’s a stage—is Erving Goffman’s 1959 book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. According to the Canadian sociologist, we are our own handlers, keen to give off good impressions to others—even in pre-internet conditions of real-time co-presence. Goffman’s “dramaturgical” framework is rich with the vocabulary of the theater: actors, roles, props, and the backstage.
Format: Online
Suggested for:
ISI 6351 Social Media
The Social Media Reader∗
Edited by Michael Mandiberg (College of Staten Island/CUNY)
2012
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
With the rise of web 2.0 and social media platforms taking over vast tracts of territory on the internet, the media landscape has shifted drastically in the past 20 years, transforming previously stable relationships between media creators and consumers. The Social Media Reader is the first collection to address the collective transformation with pieces on social media, peer production, copyright politics, and other aspects of contemporary internet culture from all the major thinkers in the field.
Culling a broad range and incorporating different styles of scholarship from foundational pieces and published articles to unpublished pieces, journalistic accounts, personal narratives from blogs, and whitepapers, The Social Media Reader promises to be an essential text, with contributions from Lawrence Lessig, Henry Jenkins, Clay Shirky, Tim O’Reilly, Chris Anderson, Yochai Benkler, danah boyd, and Fred von Loehmann, to name a few. It covers a wide-ranging topical terrain, much like the internet itself, with particular emphasis on collaboration and sharing, the politics of social media and social networking, Free Culture and copyright politics, and labor and ownership. Theorizing new models of collaboration, identity, commerce, copyright, ownership, and labor, these essays outline possibilities for cultural democracy that arise when the formerly passive audience becomes active cultural creators, while warning of the dystopian potential of new forms of surveillance and control.
Format: PDF
Suggested for:
ISI 6351 Social Media
