Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The first collection to address the collective transformation happening in response to the rise of social media
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a broad range and incorporating different styles of scholarship from foundational pieces and published articles to unpublished pieces, journalistic accounts, personal narratives from blogs, and whitepapers, The Social Media Reader promises to be an essential text, with contributions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 labor and ownership. Theorizing new models of collaboration, identity, commerce, copyright, ownership, and labor, 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.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Acknowledgments (p. ix)
• Introduction (p. 1)
• Part I Mechanisms
• 1 The People Formerly Known as the Audience (p. 13)
• 2 Sharing Nicely: On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production (p. 17)
• 3 Open Source as Culture/Culture as Open Source (p. 24)
• 4 What Is Web 2.0? Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software (p. 32)
• 5 What Is Collaboration Anyway? (p. 53)
• Part II Sociality
• 6 Participating in the Always-On Lifestyle (p. 71)
• 7 From Indymedia to Demand Media: Journalism's Visions of Its Audience and the Horizons of Democracy (p. 77)
• Part III Humor
• 8 Phreaks, Hackers, and Trolls: The Politics of Transgression and Spectacle (p. 99)
• 9 The Language of Internet Memes (p. 120)
• Part IV Money
• 10 The Long Tail (p. 137)
• Part V Law
• 11 REMIX: How Creativity Is Being Strangled by the Law (p. 155)
• 12 Your Intermediary Is Your Destiny (p. 170)
• 13 On the Fungibility and Necessity of Cultural Freedom (p. 178)
• 14 Giving Things Away Is Hard Work: Three Creative Commons Case Studies (p. 187)
• Part VI Labor
• 15 Quentin Tarantino's Star Wars? Grassroots Creativity Meets the Media Industry (p. 203)
• 16 Gin, Television, and Social Surplus (p. 236)
• 17 Between Democracy and Spectacle: The Front-End and Back-End of the Social Web (p. 242)
• 18 DIY Academy? Cognitive Capitalism, Humanist Scholarship, and the Digital Transformation (p. 257)
• About the Contributors (p. 275)
• Index (p. 279)