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The current period of disruptive social change is inextricably bound up with new means and modes of communication, information, and media streams. The Communication, Information Technologies & Media Sociology section of the American Sociological Association (CITAMS) locates these factors at the center of our collective interests, investigating them through a plethora of methods, theories, and empirical cases. Each year, CITAMS runs a special issue in ICS showcasing select works presented at the previous year's American Sociological Association conference and the affiliated Media Sociology preconference. Papers in the 2022 CITAMS Special Issue reflect a social context defined by a prolonged global pandemic and wrought by democratic uncertainty. Across these social circumstances, technology and media loom large. Simultaneously, everyday life continues and classic CITAMS scholarship sustains relevance for the ways people interact, construct identity, consume, and mobilize. All of this and more are contained in the pages of this year's Special Issue, from which readers can get a sense of what CITAMS has to offer and consider how their own work may fit within the broad CITAMS umbrella. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The public/private distinction is one of the fundamental categories of modern social life. Historically, the two functioned as a dichotomous pair both theoretically and practically. During the height of the separation of public and private, 'private' was code for the home, personal, and non-professional contexts; 'public', on the other hand, stood for the professional world outside the home. This dichotomous treatment of public and private informed many aspects of social life ranging from gender relations and the division of household labor to the development of suburbs as purely residential (private) areas geographically separate from the public sphere of work. Recently, however, this dichotomous vision of the public/private divide has become outdated. It no longer accurately describes the ways in which public and private operate in contemporary social life; where the two spheres were once separate, there is now significant overlap and interaction. This breakdown in the public and private divide has occurred at many levels and has a strong relationship with the development and ubiquity of information and communications technologies such as mobile telephones and the Internet. This paper describes the ways in which public and private are changing and proposes a new way of theorizing the public/private distinction, as a continuum rather than as a dichotomy. This way of thinking about public and private reflects contemporary social life much more accurately than does the dichotomous conception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are changing the ways in which activists communicate, collaborate and demonstrate. Scholars from a wide range of disciplines, among them sociology, political science and communication, are working to understand these changes. The diversity of perspectives represented enriches the literature, providing an abundant repertoire of tools for examining these phenomena, but it is also an obstacle to understanding. Few works are commonly cited across the field, and most are known only within the confines of their discipline. The absence of a common set of organizing theoretical principles can make it difficult to find connections between these disparate works beyond their common subject matter. This paper responds by locating existing scholarship within a common framework for explaining the emergence, development and outcomes of social movement activity. This provides a logical structure that facilitates conversations across the field around common issues of concern, highlighting connections between scholars and research agendas that might otherwise be difficult to discern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]