- Title
- Social media networks and the "unthinkable present": a users' perspective
- Creator
- Carroll, John; Cameron, David
- Relation
- Networks in Society: Links and Language p. 167-200
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1201/b16448-8
- Publisher
- Pan Stanford
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2014
- Description
- A decade ago the Canadian author William Gibson observed that science fiction is often mistakenly credited with predicting the future, simply because technological change seems to happen so quickly. With the benefit of hindsight, he argues, observations of emerging trends can only seem prescient if they are not interrogated too deeply: “As I’ve said many times before the future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed”. What we perceive as new technology is often a combination or application of current but hitherto distributed knowledge or tools—for example, the relatively rapid development of smartphones and tablet computers can be attributed to many decades of prior development in telecommunications, computing and even photography and satellite navigation. What we have seen in the first decade of the 21st century is a coming together of existing social and computing networks to form new patterns of connections in the online world. These principles of human social interaction, painstakingly unearthed in the past by social scientists using small sample sizes and in-depth field research, are now becoming available for empirical research in an unprecedented way.
- Subject
- social media; technology; techological changes; social interaction
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1065381
- Identifier
- uon:17823
- Identifier
- ISBN:9789814316286
- Language
- eng
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