Mass gatherings and the positive or negative phantasms of the masses instigate various discourses and practices of social control, communication, and community formation. Yet the masses are not what they once were. In light of the algorithmic analysis of mass data, the diagnosis of dispersed public spheres in the age of digital media, and new conceptions of the masses such as swarms, flash mobs, and multitudes, the emergence, functions, and effects of today s digital masses need to be examined and discussed anew. They provide us, moreover, with an opportunity to reevaluate the cultural and medial historiography of the masses. The present volume outlines the contours of this new field of research and brings together a collection of studies that analyze the differences between the new and former masses, their distinct media-technical conditions, and the political consequences of current mass phenomena. Contributors (among others): Marie-Luise Angerer, Dirk Baecker, Christian Borch, Christoph Engemann, Charles Ess, Wolfgang Hagen, Peter Krapp, Claus Pias, Mirko Tobias Schafer, Sebastian Vehlken. "

Exploring social media's integration with modern society, this text empowers students as social media consumers and creators. The thoroughly updated second edition includes a new chapter on AI technologies. Features include full color visuals; glossary; chapter questions and activities; and theory, ethics, and diversity and inclusion boxes.

Many technologies and practices that define the Internet today date back to the 1990s – such as user-generated content, participatory platforms and social media. Indeed, many early ideas about the future of the Internet have been implemented, albeit without fulfilling the envisioned political utopias. By tracing back the technotopian vision, Clemens Apprich develops a media genealogical perspecive that helps us to better understand how digital networks have transformed over the last 30 years and therefore to think beyond the current state of our socio-technical reality. This highly original book informs our understanding of new forms of media and social practices, such that have become part of our everyday culture. Apprich revisits a critical time when the Internet was not yet an everyday reality, but when its potential was already understood and fiercely debated. The historical context of net cultures provides the basis from which the author critically engages with current debates about the weal and woe of the Internet and challenges today’s predominant network model.

Written in a compelling, journalistic style, this text for the introductory mass media/communication course focuses on the role of technology in the evolution of various media and in the professions of advertising, journalism, and public relations. Central components of the text include the impact of the Internet on the media and the professions, the history of each medium and the professions, and the "demassification" of media. The author also addresses corporate ownership of various media and its effect on individuals and society, as well as the role of the media and the professions in society.

In The New Collective Behavior in Digital Society: Connection, Contagion, Control, Raymond L.M. Lee offers an updated view on the sociology of crowds. While the era of crowds that Le Bon famously wrote about more than a century ago reflected the social and political crises of his time, in the twenty-first century we encounter a completely new scenario with crowds forming online or morphing into swarms in digital space. Lee confronts large gatherings that are only virtually present and investigates collective behaviors that are not always palpable and visceral. This is the age of digital dominance where the collective becomes reduced to ones and zeros to become more vulnerable to the social and political interventions of our time. This book attempts to discern and dissect those interventions, focusing on the power of virality that sustains networks, assemblages, and platforms to generate new collective behaviors in an era of smartphones, surveillance, and pandemics that were never imagined in Le Bon’s time.

The Downfall of Mass Media Public Relations and the Rise of Social Media

How is performativity shaped by digital technologies - and how do performative practices reflect and alter techno-social formations? "Performing the Digital" explores, maps and theorizes the conditions and effects of performativity in digital cultures. Bringing together scholars from performance studies, media theory, sociology and organization studies as well as practitioners of performance, the contributions engage with the implications of digital media and its networked infrastructures for modulations of affect and the body, for performing cities, protest, organization and markets, and for the performativity of critique. With contributions by Marie-Luise Angerer, Timon Beyes, Scott deLahunta and Florian Jenett, Margarete Jahrmann, Susan Kozel, Ann-Christina Lange, Oliver Leistert, Martina Leeker, Jon McKenzie, Sigrid Merx, Melanie Mohren and Bernhard Herbordt, Imanuel Schipper and Jens Schröter.

We often invoke the “magic” of mass media to describe seductive advertising or charismatic politicians. In The Mana of Mass Society, William Mazzarella asks what happens to social theory if we take that idea seriously. How would it change our understanding of publicity, propaganda, love, and power? Mazzarella reconsiders the concept of “mana,” which served in early anthropology as a troubled bridge between “primitive” ritual and the fascination of mass media. Thinking about mana, Mazzarella shows, means rethinking some of our most fundamental questions: What powers authority? What in us responds to it? Is the mana that animates an Aboriginal ritual the same as the mana that energizes a revolutionary crowd, a consumer public, or an art encounter? At the intersection of anthropology and critical theory, The Mana of Mass Society brings recent conversations around affect, sovereignty, and emergence into creative contact with classic debates on religion, charisma, ideology, and aesthetics.

This volume features the writings of leading media scholars from South Asia and Europe on the topic of how media articulates political energies and transformational logics. The research traverses the press, newsreels, entertainment cinema, photography, television, music, social media and data-driven politics. The authors consider how media industries, institutions and practices constitute sites where conflicts relating to wider social change are observable. Authors address media materiality and aesthetics in tracking political effects and resonances on subjects such as wire photo transfers, film set design, the formal structures of the newsreel, the role of television audience surveys, the relationship between digital and paper records, the place of media in courts of law and the phenomenon of the media trial. The overall approach in understanding media and the political is not only to access formal institutions, both of media and politics but also to expand perspective to trace the wider dispersed appearance of the political in and through media.

Mass gatherings are at the center of contemporary discussions about community formation, communication, and social control. As new digital technologies and social media platforms have emerged, the concept of the mass gathering has evolved in parallel to take account of the different ways masses and crowds may form, including digital masses like flash mobs and protest groups. At the same time, these new digital masses provide a remarkable opportunity to reevaluate the broader historiographical framework surrounding mass gatherings. With Social Media--New Masses, Inge Baxmann, Timon Beyes, and Claus Pias have brought together a diverse group of sociologists, media and cultural studies theorists, and historians of knowledge and technology who, together, outline the contours of this expanding field of research and analyze the differences between the old and new conceptions of masses and the distinct conditions and political consequences for each. Contributors to the volume include Marie-Luise Angerer, Dirk Baecker, Christian Borch, Christoph Engemann, Charles Ess, Wolfgang Hagen, Peter Krapp, Mirko Tobias Schäfer, and Sebastian Vehlken.