This excellent edited book smartly moves the literature about social media past the wow-gee-whiz/technology-love-fest stage that has accompanied the emergence of these new means of communication. It gives a good 360-view of why social media are important, including who uses them, and how and why they use them. It also covers legal and ethical issues raised by social media, a crucial set of concerns that come to the fore as these media grow in adoption, usage, and influence. Communication students will find in this book a thoughtful and rich perspective on activities they take for granted and accept uncritically.

Joan Van Tassel, National University

This book provides explanations that will be useful for both academics and professionals interested in communication and its societal functions to inform, to create context, to spread dominant and emerging cultures, and of course to entertain.

Gary Copeland, University of Alabama

A brave and successful effort to capture the essence and importance of social media with rigorous studies that add up to a vital snapshot in time of this ever-changing platform. Under editors Noor Al-Deen and Hendricks, some twenty-five scholars offer a unique and pace-setting assessment of the newest of the new media.

Everette E. Dennis, Northwestern University in Qatar

Social Media: Usage and Impact, edited by Hana S. Noor Al-Deen and John Allen Hendricks, is not designed as an ethics text, but many of the chapters uncover ethical questions inherent in this new medium. The book becomes a much more effective text for teaching ethics by the very fact that it was not meant to do so. Each chapter raises questions that, because of the infancy of the medium, have yet to be fully examined. Some of these ethical questions arise from research behavior in social media spaces. . . . Many of the studies in this collection provide excellent real-world examples of the challenges and possible pitfalls of research in the realm of social media.

Journal of Media Ethics