To me, this represents a perfect example of a media literacy issue: Twitter is one of a growing breed of part-technological, part-social communication media that require some skills to use productively. Sure, Twitter is banal and trivial, full of self-promotion and outright spam. So is the Internet. The difference between seeing Twitter as a waste of time or as a powerful new community amplifier depends entirely on how you look at it – on knowing how to look at it.

Media are fundamental to our sense of living in a social world. Since the beginning of modernity, media have transformed the scale on which we act as social beings. And now in the era of digital media, media themselves are being transformed as platforms, content, and producers multiply. Yet the implications of social theory for understanding media and of media for rethinking social theory have been neglected; never before has it been more important to understand those implications. This book takes on this challenge.

Computational models of social phenomena, social simulation Social choice mechanisms in the e-society Social networks: discovery, evolution, analysis, applications Social Behavior Modeling Web mining and its social interpretations Social Influence and Diffusion Models of Social Influence Security, privacy, trust, reputation and incentive issues Social Communities and Social Network Analysis Design and analysis of social/collaborative Web applications Social Interactions and Collaboration Algorithms and protocols inspired by human societies Socio-economic Systems and Applications Mechanisms for providing fairness in information systems Virtual communities (e.g., open-source, multiplayer gaming) Impact of technology on socio-economic Recommendation systems Visualization of dynamic social networks Social applications of the Semantic Web Social Informatics Theory Social system design and architectures Trust, Privacy, Risk and Security in Social Contexts Social Intelligence and Social Cognition Social media analytics and social media intelligence Emotional Intelligence and Data Mining