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A student’s transition into a school starts well before he or she walks through the front doors or sits down at a desk. There are multiple strategies schools can use to smooth students’ transition and make families feel welcome before they arrive at the school. Since many of these strategies involve technology, they are presented in their own chapter. The first impression many schools leave on incoming families takes place in front of a computer, tablet screen, or mobile phone—not face-to-face. When a family is moving to a new community, one of the first things many parents— and students— will do is search online for the district or school and try to gather some basic information about the enrollment process, the neighborhood, and the achievement scores. “During my most recent move, I spent time on the school website to get a feel of how the school ran and what classes were available,” says Eraina, a student featured in Chapter 3. “This was helpful and made the transition not so shocking and confusing.” Parents might also search for information on courses or activities for their children and even read teacher profiles if those are available. Parents want to cushion the transition process for their children as much as possible; they want to be able to answer their children’s questions about the new school. School and district websites don’t, however, always make that process simple. Sometimes registration information is not easily found on a homepage, and parents might end up on pages that say “under construction” when they try to dig for more details. Some schools and districts provide email addresses for key staff members; others don’t. And, sometimes, staff members have left their position or the district, but their contact information is not updated. School Webmasters is a Mesa, Arizona-based company that develops and administers websites for schools and districts. A December 2014 blog post on the company’s site entitled “Do Parents Use Your Website?” offered this advice: In this digital age, parents looking to find a school for their child are likely to visit your website before ever visiting your campus.

The rat-a-tat of automatic gunfire burst through the morning air in Anantnag. For the locals of this troubled district in the south of Kashmir, it came as a shock but no longer a surprise. Separatist militants had once again clashed with army forces. Several civilians were caught in the crossfire. One died; three others were wounded. It was Saturday, July 1, 2017. Hours earlier, at midnight, India had adopted a new national sales tax, designed to stitch the country’s twentynine states together into one economic union. The new system—known as the Goods and Services Tax, or GST—was heralded as an economic reform that would spur growth, enlarge the tax base, and make it easier to do business. Kashmir was the only state still debating whether to join. It was a symbolic outlier. Some distance from the gunfire, sixteen-year-old Zeyan Shafiq was just waking up. He hadn’t heard the shooting; his home was well insulated. When he opened his eyes, he told me, the first thing he did was to reach for his iPhone. He looked at the screen and sighed. The wireless internet at home was down. So was mobile data. Shafiq got out of bed, put on his slippers, and shuffled toward the front door, where he knew he would have a stronger mobile signal. No luck. He couldn’t catch the internet. Shafiq looked up at the skies, opened his lungs, and let out a bellow of frustration. For Shafiq, it was easy to guess what had happened. There must have been what locals called an encounter—a skirmish between Kashmiri separatists and the state. These days, encounters were inevitably followed by the government shutting down the internet. The digital blackouts weren’t aimed at stopping separatists or terrorists from communicating. They were usually already dead. The shutdowns were to prevent people from sharing videos and photos of the violence on social media. In effect, 13 million Kashmiris were collateral damage, unable to do something as simple as check email. There was a time when curfews were merely physical, imposed with barbed wire, barriers, and troops on the streets.

This chapter provides a detailed analysis of the social media activity surrounding the London 2012 Olympic & Paralympic Games, widely discussed as the first social-media Olympics. It examines how social media platforms were instrumental in generating news content during these Games – not just distributors of the news of others - while also discussing how the organizing committee, stakeholders, and audiences contributed to generating the record breaking volume of social-media content that came out around these Games.

This chapter exposes the deep cracks in narratives of social media leisure and amateurism. It looks at how forms of value-generating, gendered self-expression are rife in the social media world through blogs, vlogs, Instagram, and more. Though these activities are superficially framed as amusement and sociality, this chapter contends that many young women do not produce and promote content just for the fun of it. Rather, they approach social media creation with strategy, purpose, and aspirations of career success. Hence, this chapter explores some of the most salient conditions and features of aspirational labor: narratives of creative expression, relationship-building in online and offline contexts, and modes of individualized self-expression that both reveal and conceal normative feminine consumer behavior.

This chapter examines Gaiman's intensive use of social media to create a shadow self that gives fans the access they crave to his inner processes and daily life. This means making selections, much like a curator faced with a massive archive must select pieces that form a cohesive exhibit, a process that is much more nuanced than the commercial call to create a "brand," an idea that is commonly touted within the world of business. Instead, it is a conscious construction of a shadow self, an embodiment that both is and is not the real Neil Gaiman.

Chapter 4 examines how digital traces produced through locative media and geo-location technologies can be read as performative rather than precise and highlights some of the ways that cultural studies and humanities scholars can add value and insight to discussions of locative and location-based social media. Several of the projects discussed in this chapter surface personal, and/or collective memories and ontologies, and incorporate digital stories and situated knowledges into the practice of moving through the city. These examples evidence re-placeing the city by urban residents or travelers at the scale of the street. The chapter begins with a brief examination of the ways in which people utilized early (and now defunct) locative media projects and continues with an analysis of more recent incarnations of location-based social media to examine shifts in digital storytelling and performances of place evident in these projects. Check-in and location-announcement services such as Foursquare and photographic social media such as Instagram are analyzed through participatory observation and textual and discourse analysis to understand how people imagine and express their sense of place through these services.

This chapter explores the still-evolving business and revenue models and geolocation data capture efforts of two commercial businesses now central to the contemporary settlement of locative media: Foursquare and Facebook. In Foursquare’s case, it underwent a quite dramatic series of transformations, evolving from a check-in based mobile social networking service, to a search and recommendation service, and now also serving as a firm offering location intelligence related enterprise services. In Facebook’s case, it set about further strengthening its grip on social media data markets by adding geolocation functionalities and geodata capture capabilities to its social networking operations. These two case studies provide a rich composite picture of the business ecologies of locational information. The aim in selecting these cases is to develop a clearer understanding of how both firms accrue location data and how they extract location value—that is, how this information is shared, harvested, valued, reused, and commodified.

This chapter is concerned with the analysis of contemporary, community-based practices surrounding the user-generated deity Safety Kitty on the image-sharing platform Instagram. Users engage with Safety Kitty both as an image and through the associated hashtag #safetykitty to protect themselves from the existential threat of supernatural chain images shared on the platform. This chapter first demonstrates that the use of “magic” as a rhetorical tool by programmers and advertisers to describe the various mysteriously obfuscating and wondrously enabling qualities of information technologies has fallen out of popular use in recent years. Attention is then shifted to magical thinking as manifest within lay users’ participation on the social web. Drawing from early sociological approaches to magic in conjunction with new media theory, this chapter proposes that the Instagram-based rituals associated with protection from supernatural threats is indicative of a collective understanding of the unknowability of the processes behind our personal devices.