ABSTRACT
In the early 21st century, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are everywhere. As social media corporations expand worldwide and billions of people log in to their platforms each day, academic research on social media grows. This chapter presents a broad and holistic overview of some key issues in the study of social media in society. It begins by reviewing and assessing some prominent ways of conceptualizing “social media” (with regard to the digital age and Web 2.0’s technological uses and affordances) and then moves on to probing conceptualizations of social media as a system, a tool and an agent. To emphasize the interdependent relations between social media and society, the final section highlights how social media is shaped by and is shaping capitalism (the economic sphere), the state (the political sphere) and the entirety of how people live their lives (the cultural sphere).
