SAGE Handbook of Social Media: Introduction

The world is in the midst of a social media paradigm--a distinctive moment in the history of media communications shaped by the dominance of social media technologies. By social media technologies, we mean those digital platforms, services and apps built around the convergence of content sharing, public communication, and interpersonal connection. Social media have been widely but unequally taken up by the world’s diverse populations, but have an influence on all our lives through pervasive ‘social media logics’ like connectivity (van Dijck & Poell, 2013). Through its logic of convergence (Burgess, 2017), social media brings with it entanglements between commercial, public and personal contexts. Well-known platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and WeChat, once seen as mere sources of teenage distraction, have become embedded into the ICT infrastructures of corporations, societal organisations, and public institutions. Especially with the rapid uptake of mobile media, these platforms, their uses, and their politics are also increasingly embedded in our everyday life, work and relationships at a very personal and embodied level. The social media paradigm is also shaping the interests and knowledge practices of media and communication studies. From the mid to the late 1990s, proto-social media like social networking sites and content sharing platforms (from Friendster to MySpace) were objects of burgeoning interest in internet studies, media studies and communication studies. Since then, social media has become a recognisable field of study within these disciplines. As of 2015, this sub-field even has its own journal: Social Media + Society (also published by Sage), as well as a number of edited collections, and now this Handbook.