TY - BOOK AU - Fuchs,Christian TI - Social media: a critical introduction SN - 9781473966833 AV - HM742 .F83 2017 U1 - 302.231 FU.S 2017 23 PY - 2017/// CY - Thousand Oaks, CA PB - SAGE Publications KW - Social media N1 - Includes bibliographical references (pages 357-376) and index; 1. What is a Critical Introduction to Social Media? -- I. FOUNDATIONS: 2. What Are Social Media and Big Data? -- 3. Social Media as Participatory Culture -- 4. Social Media and Communication Power. -- II. APPLICATIONS: 5. The Power and Political Economy of Social Media -- 6. Google: Good or Evil Search Engine? -- 7. Facebook: Surveillance in the Age of Edward Snowden -- 8. Twitter and Democracy: A New Public Sphere? -- 9. Weibo: Power, Ideology, and Social Struggles in Chinese Capitalism -- 10. Airbnb and Uber: The Political Economy of Online Sharing Platforms -- 11. Wikipedia: A New Democratic Form of Collaborative Work and Production? -- III. FUTURES: 12. Conclusion: Social Media and its Alternatives -- Towards a Truly Social Media N2 - Now more than ever, we need to understand social media - the good as well as the bad. We need critical knowledge that helps us to navigate the controversies and contradictions of this complex digital media landscape. Only then can we make informed judgments about what's happening in our media world, and why. Showing the reader how to ask the right kinds of questions about social media, Christian Fuchs takes us on a journey across social media, delving deep into case studies on Google, Facebook, Twitter, WikiLeaks and Wikipedia. The result lays bare the structures and power relations at the heart of our media landscape ER -