Social Networks and Social Media

Social media and social networking systems have become ubiquitous phenomena in the daily routines and activities of hundreds of millions of citizens around the world. In many ways these platforms and technologies have supplanted longstanding traditional forms of communication, information sharing, and relationship building. This chapter describes major social media tools based on their popularity and influence as observed from evidence gathered from significant applications that have impacted disciplines, processes, events, scholarly paradigms, and social contracts. It provides a discussion of progress in professional networks and research networking software that have arisen as innovative collateral and are being leveraged to further the advancements of commerce, research, and scholarship. Computer mediated communication (CMC) systems have been available for several decades. Initially, the primary form of CMC existed as e-mail applications supported by basic text editing software backed by message exchange functionality that provided users linked to a single mainframe computer to communicate asynchronously.