Graham Meikle – författare

From Facebook and YouTube to TikTok and WeChat, this accessible book explores the relationships between public and personal communication on social media to understand their impacts on users’ everyday lives.

Social media have made possible new kinds of relationships, entertainment, and politics, and enabled billions of people to experience new forms of communication, community, and communion. But social media are also profit-driven, data-mining corporations, and their core business model is often built around targeted surveillance that enables the commercial exploitation of their users’ everyday lives. Graham Meikle explores the tensions between these different dimensions of social media, engaging with questions of communication, data, remix, news, visibility, citizenship, and regulation. This second edition has been substantially revised: more than half of the text is entirely new to this edition, and those sections that remain have been completely updated. This new edition includes analysis of the data-driven business models of major social media firms, and of how these firms are expanding into new areas such as AI. It also includes discussion of major developments in news, surveillance, and activism on social media, as well as a new chapter on regulation.

This book is an ideal critical introduction to social media in all their complexity.

From Facebook and YouTube to TikTok and WeChat, this accessible book explores the relationships between public and personal communication on social media to understand their impacts on users’ everyday lives.

Social media have made possible new kinds of relationships, entertainment, and politics, and enabled billions of people to experience new forms of communication, community, and communion. But social media are also profit-driven, data-mining corporations, and their core business model is often built around targeted surveillance that enables the commercial exploitation of their users’ everyday lives. Graham Meikle explores the tensions between these different dimensions of social media, engaging with questions of communication, data, remix, news, visibility, citizenship, and regulation. This second edition has been substantially revised: more than half of the text is entirely new to this edition, and those sections that remain have been completely updated. This new edition includes analysis of the data-driven business models of major social media firms, and of how these firms are expanding into new areas such as AI. It also includes discussion of major developments in news, surveillance, and activism on social media, as well as a new chapter on regulation.

This book is an ideal critical introduction to social media in all their complexity.

The Routledge Companion to Media and Activism is a wide-ranging collection of 42 original and authoritative essays by leading contributors from a variety of academic disciplines.

Introducing and exploring central debates about the diverse relationships between both media and protest, and communication and social change, the book offers readers a reliable and informed guide to understanding how media and activism influence one another. The expert contributors examine the tactics and strategies of protest movements, and how activists organize themselves and each other; they investigate the dilemmas of media coverage and the creation of alternative media spaces and platforms; and they emphasize the importance of creativity and art in social change.

Bringing together case studies and contributors from six continents, the collection is organized around themes that address past, present and future developments from around the world. The Routledge Companion to Media and Activism is an essential reference and guide for those who want to understand this vital area.

The Routledge Companion to Media and Activism is a wide-ranging collection of 42 original and authoritative essays by leading contributors from a variety of academic disciplines.

Introducing and exploring central debates about the diverse relationships between both media and protest, and communication and social change, the book offers readers a reliable and informed guide to understanding how media and activism influence one another. The expert contributors examine the tactics and strategies of protest movements, and how activists organize themselves and each other; they investigate the dilemmas of media coverage and the creation of alternative media spaces and platforms; and they emphasize the importance of creativity and art in social change.

Bringing together case studies and contributors from six continents, the collection is organized around themes that address past, present and future developments from around the world. The Routledge Companion to Media and Activism is an essential reference and guide for those who want to understand this vital area.

In this accessible introduction, Graham Meikle and Mercedes Bunz observe its promises of convenience and the breaking of new frontiers in communication. They also raise urgent questions regarding ubiquitous surveillance and information security, as well as the transformation of intimate personal information into commercial data.

Discussing the internet of things from a media and communication perspective, this book is an important resource for courses analysing the internet and society, and essential reading for anyone who wants to better understand the rapidly changing roles of our networked lives.

What happens when we can no longer believe what we see? Show the AI technologies that create deepfakes enough images of a celebrity or a politician and they will generate a convincing video in which that person appears to say and do things they have never actually said or done. The result is a media environment in which anyone’s face and image can be remixed and manipulated.

Graham Meikle explains how deepfakes (synthetic media) are made and used. From celebrity porn and political satire to movie mash-ups and disinformation campaigns, this book explores themes of trust and consent as face-swapping software becomes more common. Meikle argues that deepfake videos allow for a new perspective on the taken-for-granted nature of contemporary media, in which our capacity to remix and share content increasingly conflicts with our capacity to trust. The book analyses how such videos deepen the social media environment in which the public and the personal converge, and in which all human experience becomes data to be shared. 

Timely, clear, and accessibly written, this is an essential text for students and scholars of media, communication, cultural studies, and sociology as well as general readers.