Few people will have failed to notice the recent emergence of social media—especially much-publicized applications such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Wikipedia. Even the most casual of internet users will now be aware of the notion of social network sites and blogs, maybe even wikis and virtual worlds. Since being declared Time Magazine‘s ‘Person of the Year’ at the end of 2006, social media have come to dominate the ways in which digital technology is now used around the world. Of course, there are distinct geographical and cultural variations within this global adoption—whereas people in the USA may log on to Facebook and
Twitter, Chinese users are more likely to access Renren and NetEase. Yet in all these guises, the general principles of social media remain the same. These are internet applications that rely on openly shared digital content that is authored, critiqued and re-configured by a mass of users. Social media applications therefore allow users to converse and interact with each other; to create, edit and share new forms of textual, visual and audio content; and to categorize, label and recommend existing forms of content. Perhaps the key characteristic of all these social media practices is that of ‘mass socialization’—i.e. harnessing the power of the collective actions of online user communities rather than individual users (see Shirky, 2008).
The growth of social media over the past five years has transformed the ways in which the internet is experienced by most end users. Now the internet is no longer a one-way broadcast delivery system where the individual user downloads data, information and other resources produced by a relatively small number of content providers. Instead, the internet is now driven by (and to some extent determined through) the activities of its ordinary users—what has been described as