The social media reader / edited by Michael Mandiberg.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction / Michael Mandiberg -- The people formerly known as the audience / Jay Rosen -- Sharing nicely : On shareable goods and the emergence of sharing as a modality of economic production / Yochai Benkler -- Open source as culture/culture as open source / Siva Vaidhyanathan -- What is Web 2.0 : design patterns and business models for the next generation of software / Tim O'Reilly -- What is collaboration anyway? / Adam Hyde, Mike Linksvayer, kanarinka, Michael Mandiberg, Marta Peirano, Sissu Tarka, Astra Taylor, Alan Toner, Mushon Zer-Aviv -- Sociality -- Participating in the always-on lifestyle / danah boyd -- From Indymedia to demand media : journalism's visions of its audience and the horizons of democracy / C.W. Anderson -- Humor -- Phreakers, hackers, and trolls and the politics of transgression and spectacle / E. Gabriella Coleman -- The language of (internet) memes / Patrick Davison -- Money -- The long tail / Chris Anderson -- Law -- Remix : how creativity is being strangled by the law / Lawrence Lessig -- Your intermediary is your destiny / Fred von Lohmann -- On the fungibility and necessity of cultural freedom / Fred Benenson -- Giving it away is hard work : three creative commons case studies / Michael Mandiberg -- Labor -- Quentin Tarantino's star wars? : grassroots creativity meets the media industry / Henry Jenkins -- Gin, television, and social surplus / Clay Shirky -- Between democracy and spectacle : the front-end and back-end of the social web / Felix Stalder -- D.I.Y. academy? : cognitive capitalism, humanist scholarship, and the digital transformation / Ashley Dawson -- About the contributors -- Index.

With the rise of web 2.0 and social media platforms taking over vast tracts of territory on the internet, the media landscape has shifted drastically in the past 20 years, transforming previously stable relationships between media creators and consumers. The Social Media Reader is the first collection to address the collective transformation with pieces on social media, peer production, copyright politics, and other aspects of contemporary internet culture from all the major thinkers in the field. Culling a broad range and incorporating different styles of scholarship from foundational pieces and published articles to unpublished pieces, journalistic accounts, personal narratives from blogs, and whitepapers, The Social Media Reader promises to be an essential text, with contributions from Lawrence Lessig, Henry Jenkins, Clay Shirky, Tim O'Reilly, Chris Anderson, Yochai Benkler, danah boyd, and Fred von Loehmann, to name a few. It covers a wide-ranging topical terrain, much like the internet itself, with particular emphasis on collaboration and sharing, the politics of social media and social networking, Free Culture and copyright politics, and labour and ownership. Theorizing new models of collaboration, identity, commerce, copyright, ownership, and labour, these essays outline possibilities for cultural democracy that arise when the formerly passive audience becomes active cultural creators, while warning of the dystopian potential of new forms of surveillance and control.