"This year we have evidence of the growth of distributed (offsite) news consumption, a sharpening move to mobile and we can reveal the full extent of ad-blocking worldwide. These three trends in combination are putting further severe pressure on the business models of both traditional publishers and
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new digital-born players – as well as changing the way in which news is packaged and distributed." (Overview & key findings)
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"Following the Arab Spring, the use of social media has become instrumental in organising activist movements and spreading political dissent in the Middle East. New online behaviours have transformed traditional communication channels, enabling young people of all backgrounds to feel politically emp
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owered. But now that spring has turned to winter, what are the long-term implications of internet activism in the region? Social Media in the Arab World provides a unique insight into the role of online communications as a force for change in the Gulf States. Featuring examples as diverse as neo-patrimonial politics in Saudi Arabia and the ways an online presence affects the status of women in Kuwait, the chapters examine shifts in the political, social and religious identities of citizens as a result of increased digital activism. With contributions from a variety of inter-disciplinary experts, this wide-ranging study examines the consequences of changing power dynamics brought about by popular social media." (Publisher description)
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"Based on 15 months of ethnographic research in the city of Alto Hospicio in northern Chile, this book describes how the residents use social media, and the consequences of this use in their daily lives. Nell Haynes argues that social media is a place where Alto Hospicio’s residents – or Hospice
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ños – express their feelings of marginalisation that result from living in city far from the national capital, and with a notoriously low quality of life compared to other urban areas in Chile. In actively distancing themselves from residents in cities such as Santiago, Hospiceños identify as marginalised citizens, and express a new kind of social norm. Yet Haynes finds that by contrasting their own lived experiences with those of people in metropolitan areas, Hospiceños are strengthening their own sense of community and the sense of normativity that shapes their daily lives." (Back cover)
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"The percentage of Pakistanis using the Internet increased by 37.5% between 2009 and 2013, though overall internet penetration remains very low with only 11% of the population having access to the Internet". (Page 9) "Heavy internet users in Pakistan are very young (72% under 30 years of age), large
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ly male (59%), and highly educated (72% with at least some university schooling). Light users are much more likely to be over thirty years of age (42% for light compared to 18% for heavy users), women (47% for light vs. 36% for heavy users), but more highly educated (38% of light users have graduate degree vs. 31% for heavy users) [...] Television news is by far the most popular source of information among Pakistani Internet users, with 80% of survey respondents selecting this communication channel as one of their three top sources of information. After television news, social networking sites are the most commonly cited source of information used by Pakistani Internet users with 55% of respondents selecting it as one of their top three sources." (Executive summary)
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"This report is the fifth in a series of annual reports designed to capture key developments and data related to usage of social media in the Middle East. The past year has seen the continued growth of visual-led social networks, especially in the more affluent Gulf region. Meanwhile, the discernibl
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e growth in mobile social users(+66% notes the creative agency We Are Social) emphasizes the increasing primacy of the mobile social experience. For many users, mobile is the only way that they interact with social networks. Mobile platforms, for millions in the region, will also offer their first online experience. Recognizing this, companies like Facebook have launched Facebook Lite, an Android app targeting users on slow networks (and with small dataplans). Their Free Basics program allows customers on the Zain network in Jordan and Asia Cell, Korek and Zain in Iraq avoid data charges when using Facebook on their mobile devices. Will other providers follow suit? Yet, for all the positives, the social experience in some parts of the region remains beset with challenges. Networks and services can be blocked – both temporarily and permanently – and issues around freedom of expression persist." (Introduction)
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"It is too often assumed anyone can communicate via the internet or share in the benefits of easily available newspapers and free-to-air television or radio; this is not always true. Lower internet penetration and mobile broadband access in countries like Egypt and Tunisia, for example, stand in sha
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rp contrast to that of the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. The 2016 report brings some good news about a narrowing digital divide between these countries, along with significant gains in internet connectivity in every country studied except Tunisia, where internet access has stagnated since 2014. Six in 10 Egyptians now use the internet, considerably more than the share of Tunisians online, but just three in 10 Egyptians have access to, or choose to use, mobile broadband. It is ironic that the two countries most closely linked to the Arab uprisings—Tunisia, where the uprisings began and Egypt, the location of the most publicized revolution—are still struggling to be fully enfranchised into the digital age." (Introduction, page 8)
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"This book provides a variety of cases and theoretical insights that touch upon communication across media in everyday life. The cases favour user perspectives and are focused on coordinating mundane activities on smartphones, the role played by apps when exercising, the use of self-organised Facebo
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ok groups for civic participation, the role various cross-media communication patterns play in the everyday practices of bereaved parents, the framing and use of digitized cultural heritage, and the political everyday life appropriations of users on social media. While the cases are empirically grounded, the theoretical insights provide different frameworks for understanding cross-mediated communication patterns and space of agency in everyday contexts." (Back cover)
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"Tom McDonald spent 15 months living in a small rural Chinese community researching how the residents use social media in their daily lives. His ethnographic findings suggest that, far from being left behind, many rural Chinese people have already integrated social media into their everyday experien
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ce. Throughout his ground-breaking study, McDonald argues that social media allows rural people to extend and transform their social relationships by deepening already existing connections with friends known through their school, work or village, while also experimenting with completely new forms of relationships through online interactions with strangers. By juxtaposing these seemingly opposed relations, rural social media users are able to use these technologies to understand, capitalise on and challenge the notions of morality that underlie rural life." (Back cover)
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"Described as the biggest migration in human history, an estimated 250 million Chinese people have left their villages in recent decades to live and work in urban areas. Xinyuan Wang spent 15 months living among a community of these migrants in a small factory town in southeast China to track their
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use of social media. It was here she witnessed a second migration taking place: a movement from offline to online. As Wang argues, this is not simply a convenient analogy but represents the convergence of two phenomena as profound and consequential as each other, where the online world now provides a home for the migrant workers who feel otherwise ‘homeless’." (Back cover)
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"La sostenibilidad de los medios depende en gran medida de las nuevas relaciones que tejen con su audiencia poniendo la tecnología a su servicio. El desafío al que el periodismo y los medios se enfrentan es pensar cómo usar la información que capturan de los recorridos de sus usuarios en la red
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para planear sus prácticas narrativas. Las claves que se plantean en este informe buscan dar luces a manera de hipótesis que ayuden a entender la dinámica de las audiencias digitales en Colombia." (www.fnpi.org)
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"The debate on Facebook raises questions about the use and users of this information service. This collected volume gathers a broad spectrum of social science and information science articles about Facebook. Facebook has many facets, and we just look forward above all to the use and users. The facet
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of users has sub-facets, such as different age, sex, and culture. The facet of use consists of sub-facets of privacy behavior after the Snowden affair, dealing with friends, unfriending and becoming unfriended on Facebook, and possible Facebook addiction. We also consider Facebook as a source for local temporary history and respond to acceptance and quality perceptions of this social network service, as well. This book brings together all the contributions of research facets on Facebook." (Publisher description)
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"Este libro muestra los resultados de una investigación cuyo objetivo fue explorar la producción académica sobre Consumos Culturales en la Argentina en el período 2000-2012. Con el fin de poder delimitar el alcance del estudio, en un primer momento se definieron las dimensiones que esta indagaci
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ón atendería, teniendo en cuenta que los consumos culturales generalmente abarcan prácticas, o conjunto de prácticas, numerosas y diversas. Se decidió seguir el camino de la definición convencional. Es decir, se contemplaron aquellas publicaciones que tratan los fenómenos estudiados bajo el paraguas de esa expresión e investigaciones reconocidas tradicionalmente en el país que son comentadas tanto en el marco referencial como en otros s de esta obra. En este sentido, los textos analizados sustentan argumentos, o son producto de investigaciones, que examinan la asistencia a cines, teatros, festivales y fiestas populares, las audiencias y los públicos de radio y televisión, la lectura de prensa gráfica y de libros de circulación masiva y el uso y la apropiación de tecnologías de la información y la comunicación (TIC). Si bien pueden existir referencias a investigaciones o estudios que incluyan prácticas diferentes, las citadas son las que aparecen más recurrentemente estudiadas en las publicaciones que pueden enmarcarse como estudios dirigidos a registrar prácticas y hábitos vinculados a los consumos de bienes culturales en el país en la última década." (Introducción, página 15)
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"L’approfondissement des pratiques démocratiques dans les pays étudiés passe non seulement par le renforcement des capacités des médias et des journalistes, pour qu’ils puissent s’emparer pleinement des outils numériques, mais aussi par la montée en puissance d’un grand nombre de nouv
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eaux acteurs citoyens qui ont déjà montré, notamment lors de rendezvous électoraux, le rôle positif qu’ils pouvaient jouer. Les enjeux liés à la qualité et à la diversité de l’information disponible dans ces pays, à la transparence de l’action publique et à la redevabilité des institutions, sont intimement liés à l’existence d’un écosystème structuré qui englobe des journalistes, des blogueurs, des développeurs informatiques, des représentants d’administrations publiques, des spécialistes des données ou de la cartographie, des membres d’OSC ou d’ONG, etc. Accompagner ces acteurs citoyens d’Afrique dans le développement d’un espace public ouvert, pluriel, participatif et bien informé constitue aujourd’hui un défi à plusieurs dimensions : Contribuer à l’amélioration de l’accès à l’information (et donc, à l’accès à l’internet); Sensibiliser aux enjeux de la société numérique et de la participation citoyenne; Soutenir les acteurs de l’information et de la donnée au service du débat public; Structurer des réseaux nationaux/internationaux et d’éco-systèmes locaux d’acteurs citoyens; Développer une culture de la donnée publique ouverte et des usages que l’on peut en faire." (Conclusion, page 38)
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"The first book in Why We Post, a book series that investigates the findings of nine anthropologists who each spent 15 months living in communities across the world, including Brazil, Chile, China, England, India, Italy, Trinidad and Turkey. This book offers a comparative analysis summarising the re
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sults of the research and exploring 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." (Back cover)
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"We propose a new user-Centric imagery of the WWW that foregrounds local usage and its shaping forces, in contrast to existing imageries that prioritize Internet infrastructure. We construct ethnological maps of WWW usage through a network analysis of shared global traffic between 1000 most popular
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websites at 3 time points and develop granular measures for exploring global participation in online communication. Our results reveal the significant growth and thickening of online regional cultures associated with the global South. We draw attention to how local cultural identity, affirmative state intervention and economic contexts shape regional cultures on the global WWW." (Abstract)
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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 Cos
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ta 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." (Publisher description)
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"El número de usuarios de Internet en el Perú llega al 42%. Esta cifra se incrementa cuando se considera únicamente el ámbito urbano (50%) y se reduce considerablemente en el entorno rural, donde la conectividad llega a sólo 18%." (Página 6)