Manuel Castells Oliván is a Spanish sociologist. He is well known for his authorship of a trilogy of works, entitled The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. He is a scholar of the information society, communication and globalization.
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.
Glocalization or glocalisation is the "simultaneous occurrence of both universalizing and particularizing tendencies in contemporary social, political, and economic systems". The concept comes from the Japanese word dochakuka and "represents a challenge to simplistic conceptions of globalization processes as linear expansions of territorial scales. Glocalization indicates that the growing importance of continental and global levels is occurring together with the increasing salience of local and regional levels."
Internet activism involves the use of electronic-communication technologies such as social media, e-mail, and podcasts for various forms of activism to enable faster and more effective communication by citizen movements, the delivery of particular information to large and specific audiences, as well as coordination. Internet technologies are used by activists for cause-related fundraising, community building, lobbying, and organizing. A digital-activism campaign is "an organized public effort, making collective claims on a target authority, in which civic initiators or supporters use digital media." Research has started to address specifically how activist/advocacy groups in the U.S. and in Canada use social media to achieve digital-activism objectives.
The Bandung Institute of Technology is a national research university located in Bandung, Indonesia. It has produced many notable leaders in science, engineering, politics, business, academia, and culture.
Media activism is a broad category of activism that utilizes media and communication technologies for social and political movements. Methods of media activism include publishing news on websites, creating video and audio investigations, spreading information about protests, or organizing campaigns relating to media and communications policies.
Francis Paul Heylighen is a Belgian cyberneticist investigating the emergence and evolution of intelligent organization. He presently works as a research professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, where he directs the transdisciplinary "Center Leo Apostel" and the research group on "Evolution, Complexity and Cognition". He is best known for his work on the Principia Cybernetica Project, his model of the Internet as a global brain, and his contributions to the theories of memetics and self-organization. He is also known, albeit to a lesser extent, for his work on gifted people and their problems.
Alexander Halavais is an Associate Professor and Graduate Director of the Social Data Science master's program at Arizona State University, a social media researcher and former President of the Association of Internet Researchers. Before joining the faculty at Arizona State University, Halavais taught in the Interactive Media program at Quinnipiac University, the School of Informatics at the University at Buffalo and at the University of Washington.
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.
Informatization or informatisation refers to the extent by which a geographical area, an economy or a society is becoming information-based, i.e. the increase in size of its information labor force. Usage of the term was inspired by Marc Porat’s categories of ages of human civilization: the Agricultural Age, the Industrial Age and the Information Age (1978). Informatization is to the Information Age what industrialization was to the Industrial Age. It has been stated that:
Brian D. Loader is currently Co-Director of the Centre for Political Youth Culture and Communication (CPAC) at the University of York, UK. Brian joined the Department of Sociology at York in January 2006 to pursue his scholarly interests into digital media communication and democratic governance. His overarching interest is in new media communications technologies, and the social, political and economic factors shaping their development and diffusion, and their implications for social, economic, political and cultural change. He has published widely in these areas and is the founding Editor of the international journal Information, Communication and Society whose aim and scope is to critically explore these issues in depth.
Professor Gerard Goggin is an Australian media and communications researcher at the University of Sydney. He has produced award-winning research in disability and media policy alongside other contemporary works on digital technology and cultures.
Robert A. Hackett is a Canadian university professor and researcher. He has been a professor and researcher at the School of Communication in Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada since 1984. His main areas of research include media activism, political communication and news analysis. Since 1993, he has co-directed NewsWatch Canada, a news media monitoring project based at Simon Fraser University.
Virtual collective consciousness (VCC) is a term rebooted and promoted by two behavioral scientists, Yousri Marzouki and Olivier Oullier in their 2012 Huffington Post article titled: "Revolutionizing Revolutions: Virtual Collective Consciousness and the Arab Spring", after its first appearance in 1999-2000. VCC is now defined as an internal knowledge catalyzed by social media platforms and shared by a plurality of individuals driven by the spontaneity, the homogeneity, and the synchronicity of their online actions. VCC occurs when a large group of persons, brought together by a social media platform think and act with one mind and share collective emotions. Thus, they are able to coordinate their efforts efficiently, and could rapidly spread their word to a worldwide audience. When interviewed about the concept of VCC that appeared in the book - Hyperconnectivity and the Future of Internet Communication - he edited, Professor of Pervasive Computing, Adrian David Cheok mentioned the following: "The idea of a global (collective) virtual consciousness is a bottom-up process and a rather emergent property resulting from a momentum of complex interactions taking place in social networks. This kind of collective behaviour results from a collision between a physical world and a virtual world and can have a real impact in our life by driving collective action."
Radhika Gajjala is a communications and a cultural studies professor, who has been named a Fulbright scholar twice.
Connectivity refers broadly to social connections forged through mediated communications systems. That is, 'since the arrival of the World Wide Web and the spread of mobile communications, mediated connectivity has been quietly normalized as central to a consolidating ‘global imaginary’ One aspect of this is the ability of the social media to accumulate economic capital from the users' connections and activities on social media platforms by using certain mechanisms in their architecture. According to several scholars "it is a key element of social media logic, having a material and metaphorical importance in social media culture".This concept originates from the technological term of "connectivity" but its application to the media field has acquired additional social and cultural implications. The increasing role of social media in everyday life serves as the basis of such connectivity in the 21st century. It shows the interrelations between the users activities on social media and at the same time the empowerment of the social media platforms with the data that was produced by the users and given to those services for granted.
Christian Fuchs is an Austrian social scientist. From 2013 until 2022 he was Professor of Social Media and Professor of Media, Communication & Society at the University of Westminster, where he also was the Director of the Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI). Since 2022, he is Professor of Media Systems and Media Organisation at Paderborn University in Germany. He also known for being the editor of the open access journal tripleC: Communications, Capitalism & Critique. The journal's website offers a wide range of critical studies within the debate of capitalism and communication. This academic open access journal publishes new articles, special issues, calls for papers, reviews, reflections, information on conferences and events, and other journal specific information. Fuchs is also the co-founder of the ICTs and Society-network which is a worldwide interdisciplinary network of researchers who study how society and digital media interact. He is the editor of the Open Access Book Series "Critical, Digital and Social Media Studies" published by the open access university publishing house University of Westminster Press that he helped establish in 2015.
Online youth radicalization is the action in which a young individual or a group of people come to adopt increasingly extreme political, social, or religious ideals and aspirations that reject, or undermine the status quo or undermine contemporary ideas and expressions of a state, which they may or may not reside in. Online youth radicalization can be both violent or non-violent.
Guobin Yang is the Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Communication and Sociology at the Annenberg School for Communication and Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the Associate Dean for Graduate Studies at the Annenberg School for Communication, Director of the Center on Digital Culture and Society, and deputy director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China. Yang received his first PhD from Beijing Foreign Studies University in 1993 and his second PhD in sociology from New York University in 2000. His other former positions include being an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and as an associate professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College of Columbia University.
