Global Social Media Design

Social media users fracture into tribes, but social media ecosystems are globally interconnected technically, socially, culturally, and economically. At the crossroads, Huatong Sun, author of Cross-Cultural Technology Design, presents theory, method, and case studies to uncover the global interconnectedness of social media design and reorient universal design standards. Centering on the dynamics between structure and agency, Sun draws on practice theories and transnational fieldwork and articulates a critical design approach. The "CLUE2 (CLUE squared)" framework extends from situated activity to social practice, and connects macro institutions with micro interactions to redress asymmetrical relations in everyday life. Why were Japanese users not crazed about Facebook? Would Twitter have had been more successful than its copycat Weibo in China if not banned? How did mobilities and value propositions play out in the competition of WhatsApp, WeChat, LINE, and KakaoTalk for global growth? Illustrating the cultural entanglement with a relational view of design, Sun provides three provocative accounts of cross-cultural social media design and use. Concepts such as affordance, genre, and uptake are demonstrated as design tools to bind the material with the discursive and leap from the critical to the generative for culturally sustaining design. Sun calls to reshape the crossroads into a design square where differences are nourished as design resources, where diverse discourses interact for innovation, and where alternative design epistemes thrive from the local. This timely book will appeal to researchers, students, and practitioners who design across disciplines, paradigms, and boundaries to bridge differences in this increasingly globalized world.

Social media users fracture into tribes, but social media ecosystems are globally interconnected technically, socially, culturally, and economically. At the crossroads, Huatong Sun, author of Cross-Cultural Technology Design, presents theory, method, and case studies to uncover the global interconnectedness of social media design and reorient universal design standards. Centering on the dynamics between structure and agency, Sun draws on practice theories and transnational fieldwork and articulates a critical design approach. The "CLUE2 (CLUE squared)" framework extends from situated activity to social practice, and connects macro institutions with micro interactions to redress asymmetrical relations in everyday life. Why were Japanese users not crazed about Facebook? Would Twitter have had been more successful than its copycat Weibo in China if not banned? How did mobilities and value propositions play out in the competition of WhatsApp, WeChat, LINE, and KakaoTalk for global growth? Illustrating the cultural entanglement with a relational view of design, Sun provides three provocative accounts of cross-cultural social media design and use. Concepts such as affordance, genre, and uptake are demonstrated as design tools to bind the material with the discursive and leap from the critical to the generative for culturally sustaining design. Sun calls to reshape the crossroads into a design square where differences are nourished as design resources, where diverse discourses interact for innovation, and where alternative design epistemes thrive from the local. This timely book will appeal to researchers, students, and practitioners who design across disciplines, paradigms, and boundaries to bridge differences in this increasingly globalized world.

Over 50 years ago, Pepsi sponsored the UNICEF pavilion at the 1964 New York World's Fair's. They worked with the Walt Disney Company to develop an attraction called the "Children of the World" which boasted a song and included a boat ride that passed by "animated figures frolicking in miniature settings of many lands of the world". This song correctly anticipated the effect communication technology has on how people interact with one another. A line in the song declares that "Though the mountains divide and the oceans are wide / It's a small world after all". Indeed, computer mediated-communication technologies, through cell phones, satellite phones, or the computer-based technologies of Skype or Facetime have trivialised the ability to connect to anyone at anytime, anywhere on the planet. Fast forward 25 years and the software phenomenon known as social media has further compressed not only time and space, but has also democratised news and information. Pundits talk about the 24/7 news cycles where news is available from anyone around the world and from around the clock. This new software has made the local global and the global local.

How the World Changed Social Media is the first book in Why We Post, a book series that investigates the findings of anthropologists who each spent 15 months living in communities across the world. This book offers a comparative analysis summarising the results of the research and explores the impact of social media on politics and gender, education and commerce. What is the result of the increased emphasis on visual communication? Are we becoming more individual or more social? Why is public social media so conservative? Why does equality online fail to shift inequality offline? How did memes become the moral police of the internet? Supported by an introduction to the project’s academic framework and theoretical terms that help to account for the findings, the book argues that the only way to appreciate and understand something as intimate and ubiquitous as social media is to be immersed in the lives of the people who post. Only then can we discover how people all around the world have already transformed social media in such unexpected ways and assess the consequences

This book uses data collected from in-depth interviews with young people over the course of a year to explore the complex role of social media in their lives, and the part it plays in shaping how they understand and present their identity to a broad public on a wide array of platforms. Using this data, the book proposes and develops a new theoretical framework for understanding identity performances. Comic Theory, detailed in this book, centres on a consideration of the role of social media design in shaping identity, and explores the ways in which socio-culturally grounded users engage in acts of compromise, novelty, and negotiation with social media designs and digital technologies to produce unique identity performances. Positioned within the field of educational research, this book overtly challenges assumptions and myths about the internet as a neutral source of knowledge, instead exploring the way in which designs and technologies shape who we interact with and how we understand what it is to be social. Moving beyond the over-used ‘digital natives’ paradigm, this book makes a clear case that educators and education researchers need to move beyond a focus on coding and digital skills alone, highlighting the pressing need to take explicit account of the overlaps between digital technology, culture, and education.

Technological advancements have influenced many fields of study, and the visual arts are no exception. With the development of new creative software and computer programs, artists and designers are free to create in a digital context, equipped with precision and efficiency. Analyzing Art, Culture, and Design in the Digital Age brings together a collection of chapters on the digital tools and processes impacting the fields of art and design, as well as related cultural experiences in the digital sphere. Including the latest scholarly research on the application of technology to the study, implementation, and culture of creative practice, this publication is an essential reference source for researchers, academicians, and professionals interested in the influence of technology on art, design, and culture. This publication features timely, research-based chapters discussing the connections between art and technology including, but not limited to, virtual art and design, the metaverse, 3D creative design environments, cultural communication, and creative social processes.

Globalism is often discussed using abstract terms, such as ‘networks’ or ‘flows’ and usually in relation to recent history. Global Design History moves us past this limited view of globalism, broadening our sense of this key term in history and theory. Individual chapters focus our attention on objects, and the stories they can tell us about cultural interactions on a global scale. They place these concrete things into contexts, such as trade, empire, mediation, and various forms of design practice. Among the varied topics included are: the global underpinnings of Renaissance material culture the trade of Indian cottons in the eighteenth-century the Japanese tea ceremony as a case of ‘import substitution’ German design in the context of empire handcrafted modernist furniture in Turkey Australian fashions employing ‘ethnic’ motifs an experimental UK-Ghanaian design partnership Chinese social networking websites the international circulation of contemporary architects. Featuring work from leading design historians, each chapter is paired with a ‘response’, designed to expand the discussion and test the methodologies on offer. An extensive bibliography and resource guide will also aid further research, providing students with a user friendly model for approaches to global design. Global Design History will be useful for upper-level undergraduate and postgraduate students, academics and researchers in design history and art history, and related subjects such as anthropology, craft studies and cultural geography.

From the Dachis Group—the global leader in social business—comes the groundbreaking book on transformative social business strategies. Social Business By Design is the definitive management book on how to rethink the modern organization in the social media era. Based on their research and work through the Dachis Group, thought leaders Dion Hinchcliffe and Peter Kim deftly explore how the social, cultural, and technological trends provoked by the social media explosion are transforming the business environment. Designed as both a strategic overview and a hands-on resource, Social Business By Design clearly shows how to choose and implement a social business strategy and maximize its impact. Explains the mechanisms, applications, and advantages of a strategic array of social media topics, including social media marketing, social product development, crowdsourcing, social supply chains, social customer relationship management, and more Features examples from high-profile companies such as SAP, Procter & Gamble, MillerCoors, Bloomberg, HBO, Ford, and IBM who have implemented social business strategies Draws on the extensive research and expertise of the Dachis Group, which has helped numerous Fortune 500 clients plan, build, and activate effective social business solutions Containing actionable, high-impact techniques that save time and the bottom line, Social Business By Design will transform any organization's strategy to ensure success and avoid disruption in a fast-moving world.