Social Media Networks: From Local to Global

Social media networks have played an increasingly conspicuous role in national and transnational politics, from the Arab Spring uprisings, to the 2013 Gezi Park demonstrations in Turkey, to the viral spread of fake news leading up to the 2016 US election. In this course, we will discuss how media connect people across the globe to an unprecedented degree, as well as the stark divisions and borders they reveal, complicating any utopian visions of a “global village.” We will explore how individuals’ networked identities and national and global scales of social media communities are mutually constituted.