Abstract or Keywords
“The medium is the message” argues media scholar Marshall McLuhan. This famous aphorism can help us make sense of the contemporary workings of social media. One of his students and equally noteworthy media theorist Neil Postman built on this approach and offered five things we should know about technological change more generally. In this textbook chapter, I apply his five ideas to the context of social media to unpack the socio-cultural effects of advertising-based social networking sites. What can we learn from this approach and how do we move forward?