I hope you enjoy this book. I have tried to make it readable, unique, and timely, including new content and revision in 2018.

There is a caveat, however.

Unlike most books, I choose to begin this book acknowledging something many books should acknowledge but few do: It will not hold steady value for long. The value of this online book is directly proportional to the human attention it can manage to sustain and connect to behind its curtain of pretend permanence.

All informational content today, and particularly online content, is comprised of structures built on shifting foundations. Books, and especially online books, are like the the the New Jersey beaches I grew up on. On those beaches it is easy to forget that the sands beneath treasured the boardwalks and evening bingo games are drifting into the sea, to settle on ocean floors and other shores.

In the case of this book, the sands on which it is built are always shifting and changing; some of the channels that will suck them away fastest are already in view. First we will lose the hyperlinks, as one, then a few, then many links lead to disappeared pages; indeed I wouldn't be surprised if a link or two is already broken today on the first day of publication. Second, the platform Top Hat through which this book was published will be bought out, or stop offering the book, or go under (though I hope not); and this version of the book will be crushed beneath the wheels of digital obsolescence. Third and last, this book's truths will be cast into doubt as new information emerges around situations about which I've written.

I will do my best to keep this book relevant through all of these shifts. And I hope readers will find my writing voice human enough to contact me and alert me when something has slipped out of place. May Top Hat prosper, especially Trever who was wonderful in facilitating this book; and may they continue to support this book, thrive, and improve the world of education.

The above caveats notwithstanding, this book has value, and truths, and evidence that there are people in my life who prize knowledge enough to contribute their own. The University of Arizona's School of Information and College of Social and Behavioral Sciences were the incubators for insights in this book, and students and graduate assistants in the eSociety class Social Media and Ourselves helped it grow. For audiovisual content I am indebted to spectacular repositories offered via Creative Commons, Wikimedia Commons, Flickr, and Pixabay. I am thankful to authors like danah boyd who makes her crucial understandings of the online world widely available. I am indebted to the teaching assistants who worked with me in the classes in which this text has been conceived and presented, including Katie Luder, George Pescaru, and Limin Zhang. I would like to thank a wonderful team of volunteer proofers including Julie Gannon, Sal "Molotov" Meo, Whitney Donielson, Mary Franklin Harvin, Tony Yañez, and Mochi Gregurich; knowing such smart people would be reading made this book feel more worth writing. Finally, I would like to thanks Alexandria Fripp and Liliana Salas from migrating this ebook from the proprietary platform where it once resided to these Adobe Spark pages, for free sharing with students and the world.

Diana Daly, University of Arizona School of Information

This ebook is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Read about the License here.