HI all, I apologize in advance for the completely self-serving and self-promoting announcement. My first book, "Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity and Branding in the Social Media Age" has just been published by Yale Press. The book is an ethnography of the San Francisco tech scene, the people who create social media technologies. It argues that these people use social media to boost their online status, and includes in-depth critiques of such status-seeking strategies as self-branding and life-streaming. I build on AOIR all-star Terri Senft's theory of "micro-celebrity" to show how it plays out in the tech world in particular. There's also a very long chapter called "The Cultural History of Web 2.0" which looks at the rhetoric around social media as participatory, democratic, etc. and links this to various counter-cultural movements like punk rock, zines, and cyber-utopianism, as well as entrepreneurial capitalism. I also drill down into gender and how the industry's discourses of meritocracy and authenticity contribute to excluding women from the upper echelons of tech. Ultimately, I conceptualize social media as a technology of subjectivity which encourages people to govern themselves according to neoliberal ideals of the entrepreneurial individual. As most of you know, AOIR is very near and dear to my heart and many portions of this book have been presented at AOIR. Many of the people on this list were instrumental to how I conceptualize social media use and technology use in general. If you read the book, please let me know what you think-- or better yet write an Amazon or GoodReads review! (Spoken like a true self-promoter. Call it participant observation.) You can order it directly from Yale (http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300176728), from Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/Status-Update-Celebrity-Publicity-Branding/dp/03001767...), or your favorite bookseller. Reasonably priced! Makes a great gift! Best, Alice -- Alice E. Marwick, PhD Assistant Professor Department of Communication and Media Studies Fordham University (718) 817-4861 amarwick@fordham.edu http://www.tiara.org http://www.socialmediacollective.org