The Digital Rights Movement: The Role of Technology in Subverting Digital Copyright — The evolution of activism against the expansion of copyright in the digital domain, with case studies of resistance including eBook and iTunes hacks.

How we imagine our place within the structure of sociotechnical-human relationships—specifically, in domains of life affected by data-analytics and the probabilistic bets institutions and people in power make on the future of our credit worthiness, political leanings, shopping habits etc.—is our “algorithmic imagination.” The purpose of this panel is to explore the “algorithmic imagination” as it manifests in particular scholarly, historical, socio-cultural, and technical contexts. The panelists prioritize how soc…

Milan Kundera, in his classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being undertook a consideration of the ephemeral. So I use it as a springboard for a brief consideration of social media and what is fixed and what is passing about its meaning to us as a self-aware species. Paradoxically that application of the concept slips into a conceptual tesseract as we attempt to hold social media to mean yet another contrivance for fixing our life experiences and then realize that who we were yesterday is not necessarily who we are …

This essay introduces the special issue of Social Media + Society curated by the editors of Culture Digitally and drawn from the community of Culture Digitally contributors.