The Social Media Debate

This accessible, student-friendly book provides a concise overview of the primary debates surrounding the impact and effects of social media.

From Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to Snapchat and TikTok, social media has become part of our everyday experience. However, its proliferation has brought a myriad of serious concerns about the long-term effects of social media on socializing and personal relationships and the impact on well-being and mental health (particularly in relation to children and adolescents), as well as issues linked to information and culture (such as privacy, misinformation, and manipulation). Featuring contributions by leading international scholars and established authorities such as Christian Fuchs, Henry Jenkins, Michael A. Stefanone, and Joan Donovan, editor Devan Rosen brings together key contemporary research from multiple disciplines in order to provide crucial insight into these debates.

This book will be an important resource for students and scholars of media and communication, as well as educators, parents, policy makers, and clinicians interested in the impacts of social media.

Devan Rosen is Professor of Emerging Media in the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College. His research focuses on the social uses of new media, social network analysis, and distributed socio-technical systems. He has developed social and semantic network-analytic theories and methods for the analysis of dynamic social networks in online environments. His research on decentralized self-organizing systems, Flock Theory, has been featured as the basis for several episodes of the hit CBS show NUMB3RS.