English 1A - Current Issues and Pop Culture: Library Resources

Heritage and Social Media explores how social media reframes our understanding and experience of heritage. Through the idea of 'participatory culture' the book begins to examine how social media can be brought to bear on the encounter with heritage and on the socially produced meanings and values that individuals and communities ascribe to it. To highlight the specific changes produced by social media, the book is structured around three major themes:　 Social Practice. New ways of understanding and experiencing heritage are emerging as a result of novel social practices of collection, representation, and communication enabled and promoted by social media. Public Formation. In the presence of widely available social technologies, peer-to-peer activities such as information and media sharing are rapidly gaining momentum, as they increasingly promote and legitimate a participatory culture in which individuals aggregate on the basis of common interests and affinities. Sense of Place. As computing becomes more pervasive and digital networks extend our surroundings, social media and technologies support new ways to engage with the people, interpretations and values that pertain to a specific territorial setting. Heritage and Social Media provides readers with a critical framework to understand how the participatory culture fostered by social media changes the way in which we experience and think of heritage. By introducing readers to how social media are theorized and used, particularly outside the institutional domain, the volume reveals through groundbreaking case studies the emerging heritage practices unique to social media. In doing so, the book unveils the new issues that are emerging from these practices and the new space for debate and critical argumentation that is required to illuminate what can be done in this burgeoning sector of heritage work.

As part of the advocacy of the Asian Congress for Media and Communication (ACMC) to promote regional studies in global academic discourse, this book contributes to a better understanding of social media within the context of Southeast Asian countries, with the addition of Sri Lanka.

Over the first two decades of the 21st century, celebrity has undergone significant changes as mass media have shifted from a restricted broadcast model to a digital free-for-all. Existing celebrities have been forced to adapt their style of presentation to suit a more interactive environment where fans expect continuous access, while the emergent social media have generated new forms of celebrity that reflect the unique affordances of YouTube, Instagram and other platforms.  In this book, David Giles argues that these developments are best understood by rethinking traditional concepts of media and audience in order to explain how a platform like YouTube has evolved its own media culture that affords a different type of celebrity to those associated with cinema, radio and television. Above all else, the 21st century celebrity is valued more for their (apparent) authenticity than for their glamour or talents, and Giles examines how that authenticity is a carefully crafted performance. Drawing extensively on the burgeoning celebrity studies literature, he explores the impact of digital culture on earlier concepts like parasocial relationships and celetoids as well as critiquing more recent ideas such as microcelebrity.