The rise of social networking sites, the Internet, and mobile computing have ushered in a new era of social organization and interaction. This three-pronged change, dubbed the Triple Revolution by Rainie and Wellman (2012), has “made possible the new social operating system… call[ed] ‘networked individualism’” (p. 12). The characteristic features of this transformative event enable […]
Recent years have seen a return of political economic approaches to analyzing manifold facets of digital media (see, e.g., Gehl, 2014; Rigi & Prey, 2015; Obar & Oeldorf-Hirsch, 2018). This perspective is especially relevant, as the hegemonic influence of technology on society is perhaps best understood as a confluence of powerful political, economic, and social […]
Traversing Kentucky and Tennessee in 1830, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that not “in the most enlightened rural districts of France there is intellectual movement either so rapid or on such a scale as in this wilderness” (Tocqueville & Reeve, 2013). More than 175 years before social media, the United States postal service transformed the fledgling […]