social media icons

Understanding Social Media

by Sam Hinton & Larissa Hjorth

Reviewed by Jenna Pack Sheffield, University of New Haven

photo of book cover

Abstract

This book review of Sam Hinton and Larissa Hjorth's (2013) Understanding Social Media is presented in the Prezi below (which may take a minute to download). The reason I chose to use a Prezi is because a core component of Hinton and Hjorth's argument is that the popularity of social media stemmed from the rise of Web 2.0, which allowed for users to easily create, share, and publish without advanced coding skills, much like Prezi allows. In this review, I first provide a brief overview of the book. I break the text into three main themes—Social Network Sites, Participation and Cultural Production, and Games and Mobile Media—and I discuss the book's main chapters under these key categories. Lastly, I provide a "conclusions and usefulness" section of the Prezi to discuss how this text contributes to the scholarly work in computers and composition.

Full Citation

Hinton, Sam, & Hjorth, Larissa. (2013). Understanding social media. Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications. 168 pp. ISBN: 9781446201213

Prezi Review

Reading Instructions & Transcript

I recommend viewing this prezi in full-screen mode and following the built-in paths, which you can navigate by using the arrows at the bottom of the screen. You can also move forward using your spacebar. So that readers can access this text in other ways, I've also provided a PDF Descriptive Transcript, in which I have done my best to describe what viewers would see on every slide of the prezi, including all of the written text of my review. Readers can view this PDF for free using Adobe Reader.