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This special issue of Information, Communication, and Society (ICS) is edited by the Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology (CITAMS) section of the American Sociological Association and includes papers that were first presented at either the 2021 or 2022 ASA meetings or Media Sociology Symposia. For this special issue, an innovative editorial approach was taken that brought the editing process into a graduate classroom. That process is described below along with a brief introduction to themes of the selected articles. Key themes for this special issue include content analysis, ethics, privacy, new economy, and digital inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This article reviews the history of the Communication and Information Technologies section of the American Sociological Association (CITASA), and discusses its current research emphases and future trajectory. Critically, the article argues that CITASA has become the preeminent point of reconnection between sociology and communication, allowing cross-pollination of ideas in the study of digital media, and increasingly in the study of media more broadly. The article also discusses contemporary research emphases involving computational and programming-intensive research, research on the use and effects of digital tools, and research on communication and media broadly understood. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Each year the Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology section of the American Sociological Association curates a special issue highlighting sociological contributions to technology and media studies. That tradition continued in 2020, even as everything else changed. The articles included in this year's special issue were mostly written pre-Pandemic, yet their implications seem amplified by the current historical moment. With a globe gone remote, mediated communication rose from a specialist academic subject to an acute social consideration, intersecting with and illuminating basic sociological concerns about inequality, the nature of work, family life, and the compounding effects of race, class, gender, and sexuality as they interplay with social and material conditions. These topics are all reflected in the articles from this year's issue, now inflected with a post-Pandemic reality that shows insights from CITAMS are needed now, more than ever. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]