This book combines an account of the emergence and growth of new digital social networks with the results of large-scale online research exploring the 'Screen Society'. It provides a critical examination of the ways an entire generation of people who habitually engage with screens are reshaping the nature of social interaction and are doing so by adjusting technology to accommodate their own needs. These users are creating and sustaining new kinds of social relationships that have rarely, if ever, been considered by theorists of communication and which bear a resemblance to pre-industrial forms.
Marshall McLuhan postulated the creation of a single global consciousness facilitated by technology. This book will determine empirically whether this has transpired, or whether there has in fact, been a proliferation of fragmented consciousness.
This book combines an account of the emergence and growth of new digital social networks with the results of large-scale online research exploring the 'Screen Society'. It provides a critical examination of the ways an entire generation of people who habitually engage with screens are reshaping the nature of social interaction and are doing so by adjusting technology to accommodate their own needs. These users are creating and sustaining new kinds of social relationships that have rarely, if ever, been considered by theorists of communication and which bear a resemblance to pre-industrial forms.
Marshall McLuhan postulated the creation of a single global consciousness facilitated by technology. This book will determine empirically whether this has transpired, or whether there has in fact, been a proliferation of fragmented consciousness.