Superconnected: The Internet, Digital Media, and Techno-Social Life
- Mary Chayko - Rutgers University, USA
What does it mean to live in a superconnected society?
In this new revised, updated edition of Superconnected: The Internet, Digital Media, and Techno-Social Life, Mary Chayko continues to explore how social life is impacted when communication and information technology enters the picture. She provides timely analysis of such critical issues as privacy and surveillance, online harassment and abuse, and dependency and addiction, while examining new trends in social media use, global inequalities and divides, online relating and dating, and the internet of things. The new edition highlights such issues as technology and mental health, digital public policy and law, and the author’s own research on bias and stereotyping in digital environments. Throughout, she considers how individuals, families, communities, organizations, and whole societies are affected. The author’s clear, nontechnical discussions and interdisciplinary synthesis make the third edition of Superconnected an essential text for any course that explores how contemporary life is impacted by the internet, social media, mobile devices, and smart technologies.
The text is accompanied by the author's Superconnected Blog (superconnectedblog.com) which includes lecture slides, discussion questions and assignments, and short podcasts for each chapter that summarize key ideas.
Supplements
The text has been updated throughout, with 75 new research citations.
Ch. 1
New information explaining sociotechnical systems, sociomateriality, and systemic bias.
Updated statistics for global internet use, number of social media users, percentage of world that has electricity, and text relevant to these issues.
Updated/changed examples of mediated platforms throughout (i.e. from Facebook to Instagram), along with relevant aspects of platforms.
Gender has been highlighted as an example in discussion of binary categorization.
Highlights more broadly and deeply the reality of the digital world and the enmeshment of the online and offline, and includes added text and examples to this effect.
Ch. 2
Updated statistics for text messaging use, number of blogs, social media and Facebook users.
Updated text on gaming, dark web and hacking, including updated examples of massive multi-player online games and data hacks.
Shifted “bitcoin” to lower case (and throughout book) and included new material on cryptocurrency and the impact of social media “bots” on elections.
Ch. 3
New section on bias and stereotyping in social media and search engines.
New and updated material regarding “cyberspace,” “cyberasocial,” networked individualism, the strength of weak ties, the symbolic representations of groups, metaphors, platforms, memes, and the mental transportedness of media users to similarly envisioned environments,
Ch. 4
New and updated material regarding privacy, surveillance, terms of service, algorithmic bias, search engines, bodily microchipping, facial recognition technology, and mediated social movements (including the #MeToo movement).
Ch. 5
New section on digital public policy and law.
New and updated material regarding global internet use, including patterns of use in less-developed societies, activism and social change.
Ch. 6
New and updated material on intersectional identity (gender, race, sexuality) and internet/media use; children and internet/media use; disabilities and internet/media use
Ch. 7
New and updated material and statistics on friending, online dating, sexuality, sex work, and pornography.
Ch. 8
The section called "Health and Moods" has been re-named "Health, Including Mental Health, and Moods," and now contains new material on mental health effects and “digital detoxing”
New and updated material regarding families and media use, including parents’ and grandparents’ use of social media with children; e-health and health apps; digital religiosity; remote learning (including in an era of emergencies and pandemic), digital work and e-commerce; politics; media conglomerates and experiential news.
Ch. 9
Summary of changes: Inclusion of new and updated material regarding constant availability, stress and depression (including in children), internet dependency and social impacts of technology
Ch. 10
New and updated material regarding wearable technologies, smart cities, robotics, bots and digital propaganda, the internet of things, artificial intelligence, virtual reality and other new and emerging digital technologies with an emphasis on forthcoming problems and concerns.