The four book series "Technology in Our Time" thoughtfully examines a broad range of topics and issues central to the study of new media.
"Volume I: Doing Digital Media" explores emerging forms of self identification, self expression, and relationship formation in the online world. The book examines presentations of self, e-neighbors, the social implications of gaming, cyberbullying, and privacy and surveillance through readings that open up the discussion of how lives lived online and in virtual words may lead to communicating and behaving in ways that differ profoundly from face-to-face interpersonal interactions. Whether one is searching for love, openly and passionately tweeting a personal opinion, or expressing a hidden self through an avatar, doing digital media may well represent the next phase of how people define themselves and interact with others. Laura Robinson earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department at Santa Clara University. Professor Robinson held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Southern California's Annenberg Center, and her research has been funded by the MacArthur Foundation. Her research has focused on new media, digital inequality, and comparative research on The United States, Europe, and Latin America.
Professor Robinson has published in several peer-reviewed journals, including Sociology, Qualitative Sociology, The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, and Information, Communication, and Society. Her article The Cyberself, published in New Media & Society, was awarded the Outstanding Paper Award by the Computer Information Technology Section of the American Sociological Association. Professor Robinson's work on Brazilian, French, and American online political forums has won awards from the Computer Information Technology Section of the American Sociological Association, the Association of Internet Researchers, and the International and Intercultural Communication Division of the National Communication Association.