Sexually oriented digital media use is important in adolescents’ sexuality development. The literature points to affordances of media uses (e.g., accessibility), inviting adolescents to use media for sexuality construction and engagement in sexual behaviors. Different theories on sexually oriented digital media use (e.g., Uses and Gratifications and Self-effects) explain why adolescents use media and how it shapes adolescents’ sexuality. Research has documented motivations of sexually oriented digital media use (e.g., sexual exploration) and how they relate to sexual self-development outcomes (e.g., sexual certainty), attitudinal outcomes (e.g., gender stereotypical beliefs), relationship quality indicators (e.g., commitment), and sexual behavioral outcomes (e.g., risky sexual behavior). The literature suggests challenges and future directions of sexually oriented digital media use research. Future research should explore the beneficial implications of digital media uses for adolescents’ sexuality. More attention should cover processes explaining the link between adolescents’ digital media uses and sexuality-related outcomes, and their bidirectional nature.

Digital media are integrated into the lives of adolescents in almost every corner of the globe, yet the extent of integration, how media are used, and the effects of media in development are anything but universal. In this chapter, we summarize studies that illustrate how cultural context matters for understanding digital media and adolescent psychological development. In keeping with our transactional view of culture and human development, we explore how cultural values, structures of community, and notions of selfhood shape, and are shaped by, digital media use. To balance the disproportionate representation of survey research with samples in North America and Western Europe, we draw from anthropological and ethnographic research, including our own fieldwork in northern Thailand and a Maya community in Mexico. We conclude by proposing future directions in the study of culture and digital media.

Digital media are significant developmental contexts of families, peer groups, and schools, and it is important to investigate their impact on adolescent well-being and mental health. This introductory chapter overviews the terms and history of research on adolescent digital media use and psychological well-being and mental health and describes methodological and conceptual issues confronting researchers investigating this topic. We highlight two themes: (1) Changes in technology are inevitable; consequently, researchers need to be flexible in their methodological approaches to investigate the short- and long-term implications of youths’ social media use. (2) Researchers must clearly articulate how they conceptualize and operationalize digital media, its role, usage, and pathways of influence. The chapter presents ways researchers can adapt to the methodological challenges and clarify how they should innovate when conceptualizing and measuring adolescents’ digital media use. We encourage researchers to expand on our suggestions as they investigate social media in adolescents’ lives.

The relationship between social media use, suicide, and self-injurious behaviors has received public and academic attention. Social media are platforms that facilitate social connection and support around life challenges, including self-injurious thoughts and behaviors, and spaces where they may encounter content or interactions increasing risk. This chapter’s purposes are twofold: (1) to summarize research on the risks and benefits of social media use for SITB-related outcomes, including what is and is not known about primary mechanisms in these relationships; (2) to identify high-level implications, including opportunities and challenges for future research, intervention and prevention efforts. The first section overviews the prevalence and presentation of SITB in adolescence and the role of social media in SITB, while the second section summarizes findings on risks and benefits of social media use for SITB, and key mechanisms involved in these relationships. The final section covers implications for research, practice, and policy, through high-level opportunities.

Today’s adolescents are often considered to be digital natives given the near-ubiquity of their access and use of these technologies. In the context of the near-ubiquity of digital media, studies have endeavored to understand the relationship between digital media use and common mental health concerns of depression and anxiety. This chapter begins with an overview of depression and anxiety among adolescents. After providing that background, the chapter reviews the state of the science of the relationship between these two critical mental health issues and social media use. Both potential risks and benefits of social media use on mental health are explored. Finally, throughout the chapter we consider other factors that may influence these relationships between digital media use, depression and anxiety. The chapter concludes with considering clinical implications and future research directions.

Despite the pervasive use of social technology among minoritized youth, digital media research has been primarily based on White samples of older adolescents and emerging adults. It is critical to understand how overlooked populations including racial-ethnic, sexual and gender, and other minorities use digital media for purposes associated with their marginalized backgrounds. As social media adopters are becoming younger, we must explore how the pervasiveness of constant exposure and use affects marginalized identity development in early adolescence. This chapter provides an overview of how understudied subgroups of adolescents, namely racial/ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+, economically disadvantaged, and neurodiverse individuals, are influenced by online representations affecting their identity development, and inherent opportunities for risk and resilience. Social media research needs a) to begin at earlier developmental stages to capture critical identity development online and offline; b) more nuanced research beyond digital access to examine online connections for healthy identity exploration of marginalized adolescents.

Substance use, aggression/violence, delinquency, and risky sexual behaviors emerge and peak during adolescence, as teens enter new social and digital ecologies. This chapter reviews the literature on the co-occurrence and mutual influences between adolescent digital media use and engagement in online and offline health risk behaviors, with attentions to the mechanisms underlying these associations. Research suggests the quantity of time adolescents spend online is less important than the quality of how they spend that time, and that many well-documented peer influence processes (first studied in face-to-face peer interactions) are also emerging in online spaces. Shared vulnerabilities, peer selection, peer socialization, and identity development are important mechanisms helping us understand why adolescents engage in online and offline risk taking (and thus potential targets of interventions to reduce risk processes). This chapter highlights directions for future research, emphasizing longitudinal and experimental designs to improve causal inference and testing directionality of effects.

Where is the line between virtual and real? This chapter introduces readers to the complex components, physical and virtual, which constitute our rapidly changing digital world. It examines how digital forms of representation blur the boundaries between what is considered material. The chapter addresses issues of transcendence and transgression in virtual space.

With the rise of digital technologies the number and diversity of related tools (such as phones, computers, 3-D printers, etc.) have markedly increased. This chapter examines how digital objects and other new technologies alter human experiences with the material world.

The contemporary ecological crisis is also a crisis of human perception, representation, and agency. We are required to make frenetic alterations of scale, adjusting our daily experiences, actions and lifestyles to ever-changing global and atmospheric patterns and impacts. Yet the polysemy of climate and its diffuse presence in our lives – as extreme weather event, day-to-day expectation, scientific data, or urgent socio-political issue – also makes it amenable to multi-media or transmedia dissemination. Analogously, digital media is itself characterised by movement across and between microscopic (tweets, data) and macroscopic levels – i.e. a digital sphere marked simultaneously by ‘infowhelm’ and the possibility of mass global, networked, and resistant communities. This exploratory survey ranges from the quotidian dimensions of digital and online media – how changes in climate are being recorded and registered in tweets, blogs, and citizen science – to deeper qualitative storytelling formats adapted from and sometimes in dialogue with old media. The latter include online self-published fiction, podcasting (e.g. the BBC audio drama Forest 404), and personal ‘climate stories’ and testimonies. Ultimately, this essay argues for the continued importance, and potential agency, of human-scale perspectives on micro- and macroscopic ecological complexities and for preserving distinct, often maligned human modes of narrative and storytelling.

Today’s information environment is drastically different from the heyday of print and broadcast, but these changes exceed the scope of researchers’ agendas. More is known now than when these technologies were in their infancy, yet efforts to understand the implications of changing communication technology for media effects have produced mixed findings, limiting progress towards cohesive and generalisable theoretical explanations. A literature review suggests one reason for this is that media effects scholarship has often neglected insights from political psychology and information processing, contributing to a lack of theoretical coherence across these bodies of work. Though research thoroughly examines directional motivations dictating media choice and exposure, it does not equally consider other cognitive biases driving choice, exposure, and processing, which can offset effects from the structural aspects of digital media. Given ample evidence that communication technology influences information processing, any viable, contemporary explanation of media effects must reconcile with these literatures.

This second chapter on business strategy examines marketing mix decisions. In particular, it focuses on more complex aspects of pricing not covered in the context of Chapter 9 on market structure and pricing. This starts with a discussion of price discrimination, and its various degrees and types. It then moves on to examine multi-product pricing, transfer pricing and dynamic aspects of pricing over the product life cycle (PLC). A detailed discussion of psychological pricing is included, and this covers behavioural aspects not normally considered within the scope of managerial economics, but highly prominent in real-life applications. Advertising decisions are also discussed in the context of the marketing mix, examining the different strategy variables in terms of content and choice of media. Recent trends in strategy related to digital and social media are discussed. There is also a discussion on the controversial topic of the effects of advertising on welfare. Finally, there is an advanced section at the end of the chapter related to optimising the marketing mix, which is mathematical in nature and involves some counterintuitive conclusions.

This chapter addresses the dynamics of world literature from a postcolonial angle, integrating the role of the cultural industry in the dynamics of literature across borders. It focuses on the role of texts in reshaping cosmopolitan imaginaries, accounting for the tension between commercialization and the politics of resistance. In particular, the chapter addresses the role of digital technologies in articulating the worldliness of literature not just through circulation and reception but also through new narrative strategies and tropes that open up new scenarios for thinking and imagining migration beyond the limits of borders and geography. It takes as case studies Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah (2013), in which blogging is used as a form of advocacy, Hamid Mohsin’s Exit/West, which introduces the expedient of magic doors as portals to overcome the sense of stuckness of migration, and the poems of Warson Shire, who emerges as a prominent new Instapoet capable of cutting across audiences, generations and media platforms.

Postdigital Gothic describes a mode of narrative and critical enquiry that evokes the unsettling nature of human and nonhuman actors interwoven within technological assemblages. This represents a turn away from the ‘Cybergothic’ fascination with the ghostly, immaterial aspects of digital media. Instead, Postdigital Gothic calls attention to hidden architecture undergirding the virtual. From sound and image compression formats to the secret algorithms that fuel social media, the digital realm is not an empty portal for ghosts, but rather a vault of manuscripts buried beneath familiar interfaces. The unspeakable manifests itself through the noise of computer glitches, compression artefacts and sonic disruptions. Those unwelcome disturbances signify our human entanglement with the nonhuman. This chapter begins and ends by highlighting cinematic examples of Postdigital Gothic narratives, first, in found footage horror, and then, in the computer screen horror movies Unfriended (2014) and Unfriended: Dark Web (2018). In addition to those readings of cinematic texts, a Postdigital Gothic interpretation of popular compression formats for music (MP3) and images (JPEG) suggests the usefulness of the Gothic as tool for understanding the interpretive work of machinic speech.

Chapter 3 frames the role of research genres within the broader social views of Giddens’s structuration theory and Russell’s activity theory to show how genres act within highly articulated social systems. The chapter seeks to validate the assumption that the processes underlying generic forms are paramount for assessing how researchers today draw on language repertoires to communicate their research work locally and globally in the physical and the virtual space. The discussion of this chapter revolves around the interdependence between traditional genres and what Miller and Kelly define as emerging genres in new media environments. Analogies with concepts from the field of literary criticism serve to clarify how emerging digital genres can be conceptualised as ‘generic hybrids’ as they draw on features of existing genres and enhance those genres using the multimodal and hypertextual possibilities of the Internet. The chapter finally addresses transformative practice in science communication to illustrate emerging forms of social interaction between scientists and science stakeholders.