Social Media: Usage and Impact

(Paperback)

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Within the past ten years, social media such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, and others have grown at a tremendous rate, enlisting an astronomical number of users. Social media have inevitably become an integral part of the contemporary classroom, of advertising and public relations industries, of political campaigning, and of numerous other aspects of our daily existence.

Social Media: Usage and Impact, edited by Hana S. Noor Al-Deen and John Allen Hendricks, provides a comprehensive and scholarly analysis of social media. Designed as a reader for upper-level undergraduate and graduate level courses, this volume explores the emerging role and impact of social media as they evolve. The contributors examine the implementation and effect of social media in various environments, including educational settings, strategic communication (often considered to be a merging of advertising and public relations), politics, and legal and ethical issues. All chapters constitute original research while using varied research methodologies for analyzing and presenting information about social media.

Social Media: Usage and Impact is a tremendous source for educators, practitioners (such as those in advertising, PR, and media industries), and librarians, among others. This collection is an essential resource for any media technology course. With the rapid proliferation and adoption of social media, it is a juggernaut that must be addressed in the higher education curriculum and research.

Reviews

This excellent edited book smartly moves the literature about social media past the wow-gee-whiz/technology-love-fest stage that has accompanied the emergence of these new means of communication. It gives a good 360-view of why social media are important, including who uses them, and how and why they use them. It also covers legal and ethical issues raised by social media, a crucial set of concerns that come to the fore as these media grow in adoption, usage, and influence. Communication students will find in this book a thoughtful and rich perspective on activities they take for granted and accept uncritically. -- Joan Van Tassel, National University
This book provides explanations that will be useful for both academics and professionals interested in communication and its societal functions to inform, to create context, to spread dominant and emerging cultures, and of course to entertain. -- Gary Copeland, University of Alabama
A brave and successful effort to capture the essence and importance of social media with rigorous studies that add up to a vital snapshot in time of this ever-changing platform. Under editors Noor Al-Deen and Hendricks, some twenty-five scholars offer a unique and pace-setting assessment of the newest of the new media. -- Everette E. Dennis, Northwestern University in Qatar
Social Media: Usage and Impact, edited by Hana S. Noor Al-Deen and John Allen Hendricks, is not designed as an ethics text, but many of the chapters uncover ethical questions inherent in this new medium. The book becomes a much more effective text for teaching ethics by the very fact that it was not meant to do so. Each chapter raises questions that, because of the infancy of the medium, have yet to be fully examined. Some of these ethical questions arise from research behavior in social media spaces. . . . Many of the studies in this collection provide excellent real-world examples of the challenges and possible pitfalls of research in the realm of social media. * Journal of Media Ethics *

Author Bio

Hana S. Noor Al-Deen is professor of communication at University of North Carolina Wilmington. John Allen Hendricks is professor of communication at Stephen F. Austin State University and author of The Twenty-First-Century Media Industry.