NEW MEDIA? RE-IMAGINING TECHNOLOGY, CULTURE AND THE SOCIAL explores the enduring fascination with the idea of novelty through a new media lens. The brand names in the discourse are familiar: Twitter, Facebook, Google, Digg, Tumblr, MySpace, to name a few. But these buzzwords reveal more than their commercial application. Critical analyses of these tools reveal ongoing dialogue and tensions between technology, culture and society. As these vectors – with ever-shifting contours, contested meanings and competing claims – overlap, they raise important questions about what can be claimed by ‘new media’ and why and how this term maintains currency and power within the social realm. Articles in this issue include: • Introduction: New media? Re-imagining technology, culture and the social (Zeena Feldman, City University London) • Novel noise? A systems-theoretical approach to Twitter (Richard Wigley, City University London) • Navigating digital publishing law without a ‘night lawyer’: an exploration of informal legal support networks (Judith Townend, City University London) • Power struggles in Korean cyberspace and Korean cyber asylum seekers (Dong-Hyun Song, Goldsmiths, University of London) • Designing scripts and performing Kurdishness in diaspora: the online-offline nexus (Jowan Mahmod, Goldsmiths, University of London) • Are new media democratic? (Jenny Kidd, City University London) • Reading the stranger in the age of social media (Zeena Feldman, City University London) This is a special issue of the Cultural Policy, Criticism and Management Research journal. All articles are available for free download on the journal's website, http://culturalpolicyjournal.org. .... Zeena Feldman PhD Candidate, Centre for Cultural Policy and Management School of Arts, City University London Northampton Square London EC1V 0HB United Kingdom +44 (0)075 1283 2058 (mobile) zinaida.feldman.1@city.ac.uk