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The internet and the mobile phone have disrupted many of our conventional understandings of our selves and our relationships, raising anxieties and hopes about their effects on our lives. This timely and vibrant book provides frameworks for thinking critically about the roles of digital media in personal relationships. Rather than providing exuberant accounts or cautionary tales, it offers a data-grounded primer on how to make sense of these important changes in relational life. The book identifies the core relational issues these media disturb and shows how the ways we talk about them echo historical discussions about earlier communication technologies. Chapters explore how we use mediated language and nonverbal behavior to develop and maintain communities, social networks, new relationships, and to maintain relationships in our everyday lives. It combines research findings with lively examples to address questions such as whether mediated interaction can be warm and personal, whether people are honest about themselves online, whether relationships that start online can work, and whether using these media damages the other relationships in our lives. Throughout, the book argues for approaching these questions with firm understandings of the qualities of media as well as the social and personal contexts in which they are developed and used. Personal Connections in the Digital Age will be required reading for all students and scholars of media, communication studies, and sociology, as well as all those who want a firmer understanding of digital media and everyday life--Publisher

Is Twitter a place for sociability and conversation, a platform for public broadcasting, or a network for discussion? Digital platforms have become influential in every sphere of communication, from the intimate and everyday to the public, professional, and political. Since the scrappy startup days of social media in the mid-2000s, not only has the worldwide importance of platforms grown exponentially, but also their cultures have shifted dramatically, in a variety of directions. These changes have brought new opportunities for progressive communities to thrive online, as well as widespread problems with commercial exploitation, disinformation, and hate speech.

This article uses dialectical theory to examine how mobile phone use in close friendships affects relational expectations, the experiences of dependence, overdependence, and entrapment, and how those experiences affect relational satisfaction. Results suggest that increased mobile phone use for the purpose of relational maintenance has contradictory consequences for close friendships. Using mobile phones in close relationships increased expectations of relationship maintenance through mobile phones. Increased mobile maintenance expectations positively predicted dependence, which increased satisfaction, and positively predicted overdependence, which decreased satisfaction. Additionally, entrapment, the guilt and pressure to respond to mobile phone contact, uniquely predicted dissatisfaction. The results are interpreted in relation to the interdependent dialectical tensions of friendship, media entrapment, and the logic of perpetual contact.

This study uses co-orientation theory to examine the impact of mobile phone use on relational quality across three copresent contexts. It investigates the relationship between perceived similarity, actual similarity, and understanding of mobile phone usage on relationship outcomes, and uses a new measure of mobile relational interference to assess how commitment, satisfaction, and liking are affected by perceptions of relational partners' mobile phone use. Contrary to popular belief, the results from this study of 69 dyads reveals that, at least within a sample of young Americans, failing to adhere to injunctive (i.e., societal) norms regarding mobile phone usage does not impact relational quality. Rather, results indicate that perceived adherence to participants' own internal standards—by both the participant, and the participant's relational partner—and perceived similarity between partners were more influential.

Two studies compared college students' interpersonal interaction online, face-to-face, and on the telephone. A communication diary assessed the relative amount of social interactions college students conducted online compared to face-to-face conversation and telephone calls. Results indicated that while the internet was integrated into college students' social lives, face-to-face communication remained the dominant mode of interaction. Participants reported using the internet as often as the telephone. A survey compared reported use of the internet within local and long distance social circles to the use of other media within those circles, and examined participants' most recent significant social interactions conducted across media in terms of purposes, contexts, and quality. Internet interaction was perceived as high in quality, but slightly lower than other media. Results were compared to previous conceptualizations of the roles of internet in one's social life.

This study examines the relationship between relational quality and media use in relationships. In addition, the impacts of other potentially important variables such as the sex and relationship type of the participants and their partners are explored. College student participants focused on interaction experiences with an acquaintance, friend, romantic partner or family member. The results indicated that participant sex and partner sex did not affect reported media use, whereas relationship type had significant effects on the extent to which face-to-face and telephone communication were used. Relationships with acquaintances had the lowest relational quality and romantic relationships, while closer, were less satisfying than either family or friendship relationships. Same-sex relationships were perceived as more satisfying than cross-sex relationships. Finally, media use did not predict relational closeness or satisfaction.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Foreword -- Introduction -- Part I Frameworks and Methods -- 1 Platform Studies -- 2 Productive Ambivalence, Economies of Visibility, and the Political Potential of Feminist YouTubers -- 3 Affect and Autoethnography in Social Media Research -- 4 A Semio- discursive Analysis of Spanish- Speaking BookTubers -- 5 Critical Media Industry Studies The Case of Chinese Livestreaming -- Part II Genres and Communities -- 6 Video Gameplay Commentary Immersive Research in Participatory Cu -- 7 Value, Service, and Precarity among Instagram Content Creators -- 8 Toy Unboxing Creator Communities -- 9 Beyond the Nation Cultural Regions in South Asia's Online Video Communities -- 10 Creativity and Dissent in Arab Creator Culture -- Part III Industries and Governance -- 11 Wanghong Liminal Chinese Creative Labor -- 12 Content Creators and the Field of Advertising -- 13 The Political Economy of Sponsored Content and Social Media Entertainment Production -- 14 Creator Rights and Governance -- Acknowledgments -- About the Contributors -- Index

Starting in the early 1990s, journalists and scholars began responding to and trying to take account of new technologies and their impact on our lives. By the end of the decade, the full-fledged study of cyberculture had arrived. Today, there exists a large body of critical work on the subject, with cutting-edge studies probing beyond the mere existence of virtual communities and online identities to examine the social, cultural, and economic relationships that take place online.Taking stock of the exciting work that is being done and positing what cyberculture's future might look like, Critical Cyberculture Studies brings together a diverse and multidisciplinary group of scholars from around the world to assess the state of the field. Opening with a historical overview of the field by its most prominent spokesperson, it goes on to highlight the interests and methodologies of a mobile and creative field, providing a much-needed how-to guide for those new to cyberstudies. The final two sections open up to explore issues of race, class, and gender and digital media's ties to capital and commerce-from the failure of dot-coms to free software and the hacking movement.This flagship book is a must-read for anyone interested in the dynamic and increasingly crucial study of cyberculture and new technologies