[ecrea] Open Access Book Announcement: Three new books about social media usage around the world

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*/How the World Changed Social Media:/*

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press/browse-books/how-world-changed-social-media

*/Social Media in an English Village:/*

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press/browse-books/social-media-in-an-english-village*//*

*/Social Media in South East Turkey: /*

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press/browse-books/social-media-in-southeast-turkey

*******Apologies for any cross-posting********

UCL Press is delighted to announce the publication of three brand new
open access books that may be of interest to members of this list.

Download all three books free from http://bit.ly/1TRDJAw

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How the World Changed Social Media

Download free from http://bit.ly/24AUbKH

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How the World Changed Social Media is the first book in Why We Post, a
book series that investigates the findings of anthropologists who each
spent 15 months living in communities across the world. This book offers
a comparative analysis summarising the results of the research and
explores the impact of social media on politics and gender, education
and commerce. What is the result of the increased emphasis on visual
communication? Are we becoming more individual or more social? Why is
public social media so conservative? Why does equality online fail to
shift inequality offline? How did memes become the moral police of the
internet?

Supported by an introduction to the project’s academic framework and
theoretical terms that help to account for the findings, the book argues
that the only way to appreciate and understand something as intimate and
ubiquitous as social media is to be immersed in the lives of the people
who post. Only then can we discover how people all around the world have
already transformed social media in such unexpected ways and assess the
consequences.

Download free from http://bit.ly/24AUbKH

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Social Media in an English Village

Download free from http://bit.ly/1nhPP9o

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Daniel Miller spent 18 months undertaking an ethnographic study with the
residents of an English village, tracking their use of the different
social media platforms. Following his study, he argues that a focus on
platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram does little to explain
what we post on social media. Instead, the key to understanding how
people in an English village use social media is to appreciate just how
‘English’ their usage has become. He introduces the ‘Goldilocks
Strategy’: how villagers use social media to calibrate precise levels of
interaction ensuring that each relationship is neither too cold nor too
hot, but ‘just right’.

He explores the consequences of social media for groups ranging from
schoolchildren through to the patients of a hospice, and he compares
these connections to more traditional forms of association such as the
church and the neighbourhood. Above all, Miller finds an extraordinary
clash between new social media that bridges the private and the public
domains, and an English sensibility that is all about keeping these two
domains separate.

Download free from http://bit.ly/1nhPP9o

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Social Media in Southeast Turkey

Download free from http://bit.ly/1oOTIDJ

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This book presents an ethnographic study of social media in Mardin, a
medium-sized town located in the Kurdish region of Turkey. The town is
inhabited mainly by Sunni Muslim Arabs and Kurds, and has been
transformed in recent years by urbanisation, neoliberalism and political
events.

Elisabetta Costa uses her 15 months of ethnographic research to explain
why public- facing social media is more conservative than offline life.
Yet, at the same time, social media has opened up unprecedented
possibilities for private communications between genders and in
relationships among young people – Costa reveals new worlds of intimacy,
love and romance. She also discovers that, when viewed from the
perspective of people’s everyday lives, political participation on
social media looks very different to how it is portrayed in studies of
political postings separated from their original complex, and highly
socialised, context.

Download free from http://bit.ly/1oOTIDJ

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About Why We Post

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Why do we post on social media? Is it true that we are replacing
face-to-face relationships with on-screen life? Are we becoming more
narcissistic with the rise of selfies? Does social media create or
suppress political action, destroy privacy or become the only way to
sell something? And are these claims equally true for a factory worker
in China and an IT professional in India? With these questions in mind,
nine anthropologists each spent 15 months living in communities in
China, Brazil, Turkey, Chile, India, England, Italy and Trinidad. They
studied not only platforms but the content of social media to understand
both why we post and the consequences of social media on our lives.
Their findings indicate that social media is more than communication –
it is also a place where we now live.  The first three titles have now
been released- if you’d like us to notify you about forthcoming titles
when the publish, sign up at bit.ly/whywepostbooks

To find out more about the Why We Post project (outputs include a MOOC,
website, youtube channel and 11 open access books), visit
ucl.ac.uk/why-we-post

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