ABSTRACT
The digitization of information into the universal language of electronic binary code has blurred the boundary between technological and human interaction. Contemporary social processes are increasingly mediated via a labyrinthine web of Internet and mobile communication networks and supplemented by increasingly elaborate search tools and social networks such as Google, Baidu, MySpace, and Facebook. Technology, of course, emerges out of specific human contexts. But once facilitated, technological networks influence and compel human-centered networks. Not surprisingly, particularly since the birth of the World Wide Web in 1994, social scientists have turned their attention to the ways in which computer networks have facilitated radical changes to societal practices and organization, and the implications of these transformations for culture, economics, and politics.
