HELPING PEOPLE'S

By Tianzhang Zhao, student in the MA in Social Media at the University of Westminster Watch the video here!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9f-tJ3G5uRg This video I produced is an interview with David Gauntlett and Simon Lindgren talking about the book ‘Making is Connecting’. David Gauntlett is the author of this work. He is a sociologist and media theorist and works for University of Westminster in UK. Simon Lindgren is a sociologist as well, and a social media researcher, who works for Umeå University in Sweden. The video is about 30 minutes long and is divided into 9 parts: The first part is about the relationship between making things, individuals’ happiness, and society. In this book, David Gauntlett promotes that making things would reflect and realize individuals’ values, which would bring people happiness and would further influence society as a whole in a positive way. Therefore, this section is focused on the question if ‘making things’ can raise individuals’ happiness...

By María Belén Conti , student in the MA in Social Media at the University of Westminster. I have directed a movie about the collected volume “Media, Surveillance and Identity” that has been edited by Andr é Jansson and Miyase Christensen. Watch the video interview here!  https://vimeo.com/91504300 As early as 1995, John Thompson was talking of a world of “mediated visibility” in which technology was a double-edged sword, since it allowed the few people in power positions to control the many, but also empowered the many to control those few. Since then, many things have changed, with the Internet growing in importance as well as with the appearance of a new actor: social media. In these social and networked spaces, private and public communications merge and the invisible turns visible. It is no longer easy to maintain the private sphere private and unintended audiences may reach any message we send. But these unintended audiences that have access to our communications are not o...

Kandy Woodfield is the Director of Learning at NatCen Social Research and one of the founders of the NSMNSS network. You can follow her on Twitter @jess1ecat. I took part in a panel at the SRA's annual social media in social research conference  on May 16th and took the opportunity to reflect on the challenges facing social media research in the future. The original version of this blog was posted here : You might be able to explain social media using doughnuts, but what about how we research that behaviour and the data it produces. Three years into our New Social Media, New Social Science? peer-led network we have over 600 researchers in our community and we've witnessed an explosion of interest in social media research in the social sciences.  Over the course of those three years researchers from around the world have come together in person and online to share their experiences, frustrations and achievements. We've identified a number of challenges. There is no doubt ...

By Barrie Schooling, student in the MA in Social Media at the University of Westminster Watch the video interview here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3u4CyVStk4 Google ‘Twitter book review’ and you’ll get reviews of 1,000 page tomes reduced to 140 characters, for example “ The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Beautiful and thought provoking novel of love, obsession, lust and oppression". This sort of activity, indeed every sort of activity on Twitter from the profound to the banal are the subject of a book called ‘Twitter: Social Communication in the Twitter Age’ by Dhiraj Murthy. Having recently written a review of the book I arranged to interview Dhiraj in his Goldsmiths lab and chat to him a bit more about his work and to ask questions that might help to me critically review his work. In ‘Twitter. Social communication in the Twitter age’ Dhiraj Murthy discusses the platform as it gives ‘ordinary’ people a medium to publish ‘user-generated “news/updates”, Twitter is a ‘soci...

We had a Twitterchat on 8/5/14 ably hosted by Janet Salmon a.ka. @einterview. The chat focused on how we can engage students with reflective practice for online qual research and covered a range of issues. Our now annual 'time zone confusion' moment happened when the UK moves over to summertime but we advertise the tweetchat at GMT so huge apologies if you were hoping to join in only to find the chat had started 60 minutes before. Thanks to Janet for staying online to pick up discussions with people turning up at the later session. And a final thanks to @jennacondie who quietly goes about running the #NSMNSS Twitter account and managed during this chat to contribute both as facilitator and participant, well impressed.  See you all soon. And don't forget you can keep up with news and events by following #NSMNSS and @NSMNSS Read all about what you missed on Storify, here: https://storify.com/jess1ecat/nsmnss-twitter-chat-may-8th-2014

Akin Olaniyan is a student in the MA in Social Media at the University of Westminster Watch the video interview here!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV-PBy3iaDk He sounds very much like a techno-pessimist. When I first read Professor Geert Lovink’s book, ‘Networks without a cause: A critique of social media,’ the first thing that struck me was the sense of despair that runs through all the chapters. With chapters devoted to Facebook and the crisis of identity, big data and the ‘Googlisation of our lives,’ and a proposition to divorce the study of social media from media studies, there appeared to be no other way to understand Geert Lovink. And that was the starting point of my interview with him conducted via Skype. As you can see in the video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV-PBy3iaDk ), when I asked him what was the source of the despair I felt running through his book, Geert describes his frustration that the Internet has become too centralized and cites cloud computing a...

By Jinshuang Zhao, student in the MA in Social Media at the University of Westminster Could you image your life without the Internet in contemporary society? What difficulties can you overcome with the help of Internet? How do information and communication technology influence society? If you are interested to learn more about these issues, please watch my video that presents interviews with Christian Fuchs and Eran Fisher.  Watch the video of the interview here!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0Gt_8SQiSc Christian Fuchs is professor of social media at the University of Westminster and is conducting research about the relationship between information and communication technology (ICT) and society. He is a neo-Marxist and utilises Marxist theory for theorizing the connections between ICT and society. Eran Fisher is an assistant professor at the Open University of Israel, He is the author of “Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age”. His research fields are media and c...