The new social media build on and further complicate all of the issues and processes of symbolic interaction. This volume builds on and expands the existing symbolic interactionist perspective to include the study of social interaction made possible by the use of new social media. This special issue demonstrates the interface between willful social interaction and structured technological features - how social media are defined by social interactions, as well as how social interactions are dictated by the use of social media.

According to Carl J. Couch, the history of human society is one of successive, sometimes overlapping, information technologies used to process the various symbolic representations that inform social contexts. Unlike earlier -media- theorists who ignored social context in order to concentrate on the information technologies themselves, Couch implements a consistent theory of interpersonal and intergroup relations to describe the essential interface between information technologies and the social contexts in which they are used.

Couch emphasizes the formative capacities of information...

According to Carl J. Couch, the history of human society is one of successive, sometimes overlapping, information technologies used to process the various symbolic representations that inform social contexts. Unlike earlier -media- theorists who ignored social context in order to concentrate on the information technologies themselves, Couch implements a consistent theory of interpersonal and intergroup relations to describe the essential interface between information technologies and the social contexts in which they are used.

Couch emphasizes the formative capacities of information...