Summary

The wide range of chapters on social media/social writing in this book provide insight on the considerations of audience, space, and identity. The audiences of this book likely don’t always take much time to deeply reflect upon the vast reach of social media and its implications, of which the authors point out are often simultaneously good and bad, benefitting and constraining. This book provides rhetoric and composition professors and writing instructors valuable information that needs to be considered by students, especially as they enter the workforce and craft online identity. As a researcher that’s interested in how academia uses and views social media, I was hoping there would be more of a focus on how prominent members of the field are using social media to reach wide audiences on topics that trend in the news, thus entering public conversations with as credible experts. In other words, I was hoping for more practical advice and information about direct usage and application of rhetorical theory in my own social media space and in the classrooms in which I teach. However, there are some chapters in this book that offer useful discussion on how the pragmatic use of social media tools, like hash tagging, can have impacts that cannot be anticipated once a topic becomes water cooler conversation. This book also does a nice job of asking readers to examine privacy online, the ways social media spaces are constructed, and how we can engage our students better in the classroom through integrating social media platforms into everyday work, many of the lessons I can take and share in my research and with students.