Social media has played a significant role in mediating the communication of information about COVID-19, although coverage of social media is more often than not negative. In this post, Ronnie Das and Wasim Ahmed, highlight some of the ways in which social media has become essential to societal responses to the crisis and how social … Continued
Category: Social Media
Book Review: Instagram: Visual Social Media Cultures by Tama Leaver, Tim Highfield and Crystal Abidin
In Instagram: Visual Social Media Cultures, Tama Leaver, Tim Highfield and Crystal Abidin elaborate on how and why Instagram has grown to become an icon that has altered understandings of visual social media cultures. Students, scholars, social media practitioners and platform users can all benefit from the book as a great introduction to how to approach and study … Continued
Book Review: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell
In a frenetic world obsessed with deliverables and results, Jenny Odell makes the case for How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, arguing not for passivity, wilful ignorance or sloth, but rather for the potential we create by refusing productivity and redirecting our attention to active modes of listening and contemplation. By shining a critical light on … Continued
Weibo – How is China’s second largest social media platform being used for social research?
Social media research in the global north is primarily focused on western social media platforms, notably Twitter and Facebook. In this post Shulin Hu describes how researchers have used data from Weibo, China’s second most popular social media platform, to undertake a variety of research projects and provides resources for researchers looking to use Weibo … Continued
Book Review: The Quirks of Digital Culture by David Beer
In The Quirks of Digital Culture, David Beer provides a patchwork of quirky vignettes that together create a representative picture of the cultural environment in which we now live, showing how digital culture offers a means of access, insight and possibility while also bringing the payoff of surveillance, manipulation and a sense of inescapability. Ignas Kalpokas highly … Continued
Book Review: Are Filter Bubbles Real? by Axel Bruns
As references to echo chambers and filter bubbles become ubiquitous in contemporary discourse, Axel Bruns offers a riposte in Are Filter Bubbles Real?, which questions the existence of these phenomena. While not convinced by all of the author’s arguments, Ignas Kalpokas welcomes the book as a must-read for those looking to critically reflect on some of the assumptions surrounding social … Continued
The future of public intellectualism lies in reforming the digital public sphere
Public intellectuals as they have traditionally been perceived, as individual scholars speaking truth to power, are a declining feature of public life. Responding to the centrality of digital communication in the public sphere Mark Murphy and Cristina Costa, argue that academia needs to further value and prioritise engagement with the digital public sphere and that beyond simply taking its forms […]
2019 In Review: Communicating your research
From formal academic papers, to the use of emojis in social media, communicating your research can take many forms. This post brings together some of the top posts on research communication featured on the LSE Impact Blog in 2019. The Art of Connection – To deliver a good research seminar you need to connect with an audience at a pragmatic, […]
From hermits to celebrities – How social media is reshaping academic hierarchies and what we can do about it.
By adopting social media in increasing numbers, academics have also bought into the dynamics of social media celebrity. In this post Mark Carrigan reflects on the impact of the attention economy on academia and how attention is often unfairly concentrated on a small number of individuals. Taking this into account, he argues that well edited multi-author outlets can play an […]
Book Review: Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media by Sarah T. Roberts
In Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media, Sarah T. Roberts explores the work conditions and experiences of people employed in ‘commercial content moderation’, drawing on interviews with those tasked with detecting and removing harmful and upsetting online content. As the problems faced by CCM workers reveal the economic, social and political distortions of the digital age, this book […]