A gender role, or sex role, is a set of socially accepted behaviors and attitudes deemed appropriate or desirable for individuals based on their sex. Gender roles are usually centered on conceptions of masculinity and femininity, although there are exceptions and variations.
Queer theory is a field of post-structuralist critical theory that emerged in the early 1990s out of queer studies and women's studies.
A virtual community is a social work of individuals who connect through specific social media, potentially crossing geographical and political boundaries in order to pursue mutual interests or goals. Some of the most pervasive virtual communities are online communities operating under social networking services.
New media are communication technologies that enable or enhance interaction between users as well as interaction between users and content. In the middle of the 1990s, the phrase "new media" became widely used as part of a sales pitch for the influx of interactive CD-ROMs for entertainment and education. The new media technologies, sometimes known as Web 2.0, include a wide range of web-related communication tools such as blogs, wikis, online social networking, virtual worlds, and other social media platforms.
Barry Wellman is an American-Canadian sociologist and is the co-director of the Toronto-based international NetLab Network. His areas of research are community sociology, the Internet, human-computer interaction and social structure, as manifested in social networks in communities and organizations. His overarching interest is in the paradigm shift from group-centered relations to networked individualism. He has written or co-authored more than 300 articles, chapters, reports and books. Wellman was a professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Toronto for 46 years, from 1967 to 2013, including a five-year stint as S.D. Clark Professor.
Digital rhetoric can be generally defined as communication that exists in the digital sphere. As such, digital rhetoric can be expressed in many different forms, including text, images, videos, and software. Due to the increasingly mediated nature of our contemporary society, there are no longer clear distinctions between digital and non-digital environments. This has expanded the scope of digital rhetoric to account for the increased fluidity with which humans interact with technology.
Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the creation, sharing and aggregation of content, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. Common features include:
Global village describes the phenomenon of the entire world becoming more interconnected as the result of the propagation of media technologies throughout the world. The term was coined by Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan in his books The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) and Understanding Media (1964). Literary scholar Sue-Im Lee describes how the term global village has come to designate “the dominant term for expressing a global coexistence altered by transnational commerce, migration, and culture”. Economic journalist Thomas Friedman's definition of the global village as a world “tied together into a single globalized marketplace and village” is another contemporary understanding of the term.
Identity tourism may refer to the act of assuming a racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, sexual or gender identity for recreational purposes, or the construction of cultural identities and re-examination of one's ethnic and cultural heritage from what tourism offers its patrons.
The sociology of the Internet involves the application of sociological or social psychological theory and method to the Internet as a source of information and communication. The overlapping field of digital sociology focuses on understanding the use of digital media as part of everyday life, and how these various technologies contribute to patterns of human behavior, social relationships, and concepts of the self. Sociologists are concerned with the social implications of the technology; new social networks, virtual communities and ways of interaction that have arisen, as well as issues related to cyber crime.
James E. Katz is an American communication scholar with an expertise in new media. He has published widely and is frequently invited to comment on his research at both academic and public policy forms as well as to give interviews to media outlets.
Lisa Nakamura is an American professor of media and cinema studies, Asian American studies, and gender and women’s studies. She teaches at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she is also the Coordinator of Digital Studies and the Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor in the Department of American Cultures.
Racism on the Internet sometimes also referred to as cyber-racism and more broadly considered as an online hate crime or an internet hate crime consists of racist rhetoric or bullying that is distributed through computer-mediated means and includes some or all of the following characteristics: ideas of racial uniqueness, racist attitudes towards specific social categories, racist stereotypes, hate-speech, nationalism and common destiny, racial supremacy, superiority and separation, conceptions of racial otherness, and anti-establishment world-view. Racism online can have the same effects as offensive remarks made face-to-face.
Caroline Haythornthwaite is a professor emerita at Syracuse University School of Information Studies. She served as the School's director of the Library Science graduate program from July 2017 to June 2019. She previously served as Director and Professor at the Library, Archival and Information Studies, School of SLAIS, at The iSchool at The University of British Columbia (UBC). Her research areas explore the way interaction, via computer media, supports and affects work, learning, and social interaction, primarily from a social-network-analysis perspective. Previously, during 1996–2010, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Haythornthwaite had worked as assistant professor, associate, or full professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS).
Digital labor or digital labour represents an emergent form of labor characterized by the production of value through interaction with information and communication technologies such as digital platforms or artificial intelligence. Examples of digital labor include on-demand platforms, micro-working, and user-generated data for digital platforms such as social media. Digital labor describes work that encompasses a variety of online tasks. If a country has the structure to maintain a digital economy, digital labor can generate income for individuals without the limitations of physical barriers.
Karen A. Cerulo is an American sociologist specializing in the study of culture, communication and cognition. Currently, she is a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Rutgers University and working as an active consultant and mentor. She is the former editor of Sociological Forum, the flagship journal of the Eastern Sociological Society. From 2009 to 2010, she served as the Chair of the American Sociological Association's Culture section, and since 1999, she has directed the section's Culture and Cognition Network. Her book Identity Designs: The Sights and Sounds of a Nation won the section's award for the best book of 1996 and her article "Scents and Sensibilities: Olfaction, Sense-making and Meaning Attribution" won the section's 2019 Clifford Geertz Prize for Best Article. Her co-authored book Dreams of a Lifetime: How Who We Are Shapes How We Imagine Our Future won the section's Mary Douglas Best Book Award in 2023. Cerulo is a former Vice President of the Eastern Sociological Society. In 2013, she was named the Robin M. Williams Jr. Lecturer by the Eastern Sociological Society; she won that organization's Merit Award in the same year. In 2019, she was elected to the Sociological Research Association.
Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism is a 2018 book by Safiya Umoja Noble in the fields of information science, machine learning, and human-computer interaction.
Safiya Umoja Noble is a professor at UCLA, and is the co-founder and co-director of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry. She is the author of Algorithms of Oppression, and co-editor of two edited volumes: The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Class and Culture and Emotions, Technology & Design. She is a research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. She was appointed a Commissioner to the University of Oxford Commission on AI and Good Governance in 2020. In 2020 she was nominated to the Global Future Council on Artificial Intelligence for Humanity at the World Economic Foundation.
Rashida Richardson is a visiting scholar at Rutgers Law School and the Rutgers Institute for Information Policy and the Law and an attorney advisor to the Federal Trade Commission. She is also an assistant professor of law and political science at the Northeastern University School of Law and the Northeastern University Department of Political Science in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities.
Kishonna L. Gray is an American communication and gender studies researcher based at the University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences. Gray is best known for her research on technology, gaming, race, and gender. As an expert in Women's and Communication Studies, she has written several articles for publications such as the New York Times. In the academic year 2016–2017, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Professors and Scholars Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, hosted by the Department of Women's and Gender Studies and the MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing Program. She has also been a faculty visitor at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and at Microsoft Research.
