BOOKS

Coming May 2023:

The Private is Political: Networked Privacy and Social Media

(This is a draft cover, obviously the final version won’t have the stock image watermark on it LOL)

Online privacy is under constant attack by social media and big data technologies. But we cannot rely on individual actions to remedy this—it is a matter of social justice. Alice E. Marwick offers a new way of understanding how privacy is jeopardized, particularly for marginalized and disadvantaged communities—including immigrants, the poor, people of color, LGBTQ+ populations, and victims of online harassment.
 
Marwick shows that there are few resources or regulations for preventing personal information from spreading on the internet. Through a new theory of “networked privacy,” she reveals how current legal and technological frameworks are woefully inadequate in addressing issues of privacy—often by design. Drawing from interviews and focus groups encompassing a diverse group of Americans, Marwick shows that even heavy social media users care deeply about privacy and engage in extensive “privacy work” to protect it. But people are up against the violation machine of the modern internet. Safeguarding privacy must happen at the collective level.

Preorder at Amazon.com | Preorder at Bookshop.org (coming soon)

Other Books

The SAGE Handbook of Social Media

A full exploration of the state-of-the-art of social media research. Includes 33 chapters from emerging scholars and leaders in the field written exclusively for this volume, including Nick Couldry, Jose van Dijk, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Tarleton Gillespie, Zizi Papacharissi, Brooke Erin Duffy, Alfred Hermida, Jill Walker Rettberg, Jack Linchuan Qiu, Gerard Goggin and many, many others. An excellent text for graduate social media study.

Edited by Jean Burgess, Alice Marwick & Thomas Poell

Sample Chapters:

BUY ON AMAZON (Hardcover or Kindle version)

BUY ON AMAZON (Paperback version)

Status Update:

Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age

Alice Marwick, Yale University Press, 2013

Social media technologies such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook promised a new participatory online culture. Yet, technology insider Alice Marwick contends in this insightful book, “Web 2.0” only encouraged a preoccupation with status and attention. Her original research– which includes conversations with entrepreneurs, Internet celebrities, and Silicon Valley journalists– explores the culture and ideology of San Francisco’s tech community in the period between the dot com boom and the App store, when the city was the world’s center of social media development. Marwick argues that early revolutionary goals have failed to materialize: while many continue to view social media as democratic, these technologies instead turn users into marketers and self-promoters, and leave technology companies poised to violate privacy and to prioritize profits over participation. Marwick analyzes status-building techniques– such as self-branding, micro-celebrity, and life-streaming– to show that Web 2.0 did not provide a cultural revolution, but only furthered inequality and reinforced traditional social stratification, demarcated by race, class, and gender.

Sample Chapters:

BUY ON AMAZON (Hardcover, paperback, Kindle, or audiobook)

“A must-read for anyone interested in the culture of the tech world and in the techniques of status-building in contemporary digital society.” (Finola Kerrigan, Times Higher Education Supplement)

“A fascinating ethnographic account of Silicon Valley culture and how entwined that culture is in the design of the social media platforms that we use daily.” (Barbara Fister, Inside Higher Ed)