Module overview
The second generation of web sites that came along in the mid 2000's included many of the social media sites that are now household names (YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia, Facebook, Blogger, Twitter, etc.) These sites (known at the time as Web 2.0) focused on content that was generated by users, rather than the site's owners, and thus shifted the balance of power on the Web from a technical few to the masses.
We now live in a world where social media is a powerful influence. In this course we will look at the science that is attempting to analyse its use, see how conceptualising social media as networks allows us to use techniques from network science as part of that analysis, and explore some of the personal and social issues that have arisen and the technologies that might address them.
This is a course that empowers you to meaningfully engage with the many issues that we see everyday in the news and media, and we hope that it will capture the excitement and concern that exists around Social Media. This is our Guttenberg, let's make it work for us.