Media and communication influence, shape, and change our societies. Therefore, this first chapter aims to explain the implications of digital communication for our societies and the relationship between media, technology, and society. The chapter introduces the concept of society from a sociological perspective and explains how societies change because of the effects technological developments have on them, and vice versa. It illustrates this interplay with the example of digital divides.

In order to explain the significance and changes of public communication in a digital society, the chapters zooms in on the media landscape and explicates the difference between new media and old (or traditional) media. It pays particular attention to the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, as his work remains a cornerstone when studying the relationship between media, technology, and society. The chapter then outlines the discipline of media linguistics and explains how media linguistics can help to make digital media and digital communication more tangible. It focuses on three key terms crucial for understanding public digital communication: multimodality, media convergence, and mediatization.

The book concludes with Chapter 6’s discussion of the particular ethical concerns raised by using social media data. This includes data privacy concerns, for instance the need in some contexts to anonymize unique user identifiers in all stored tweets so that not even the researchers have access to user names and such. In addition, the chapter mentions concerns frequently raised by IRB in terms of human subjects research, and some of the thorny issues raised by the terms of use of social media sites with regard to data sharing and replicability. In particular, it will walk through what scholars need to know about the limitations imposed by Twitter’s terms of use, what use cases are considered acceptable use (sharing data among researchers on the same project), and strategies for common scholarly needs that fall within gray areas (for example, providing word frequency matrices so that content analysis can be fully replicated, but the terms of use conditions regarding republication of tweets are not violated).

The book opens with a discussion of the theoretical importance of the rise of social media, focusing on the way that decreases in transaction costs of communication change the potential for populations to solve their collective action problem. In addition, it highlights the historical importance of social media as a data source, with scholars having access to the communications of the public en masse for the first time. The cheapness and accessibility of this data democratizes data collection efforts, which changes the nature of research questions that can be asked by scholars.