My good colleague Sian Lincoln and I are happy to announce that our special issue of New Media & Society on ‘ten years of Facebook’ is now out!  It’s vol. 16, issue 7.

This issue marks out a decade for Facebook, still the world’s biggest social media platform,  by bringing together key international scholars to reflect on the site’s rise to prominence and consider questions for the future.

The individual articles are linked below:

• ‘Editorial: 10 years of Facebook‘ by Sian Lincolan and Brady Robards
• ‘Networked privacy: How teenagers negotiate context in social media’ by Alice Marwick and danah boyd
• ‘Facebook’s Mobile Career’ by Gerard Goggin
• ‘Places Nearby: Facebook as a Location-based Social Media Platform’ by Rowan Wilken
• ‘Social Capital and Resource Requests on Facebook’ by Nicole Ellison, Rebecca Gray, Cliff Lampe, and Andrew T. Fiore
• ‘Facebook for Self-Empowerment? A Study of Facebook Adoption in Urban India’ by Neha Kumar
• ‘Queer Youth, Facebook and Faith: Facebook Methodologies and Online Identities’ by Yvette Taylor, Emily Falconer, and Ria Snowdon
• ‘Facebook Time: Technological and Institutional Affordances for Media Memories’ by Anne Kaun and Fredrik Stiernstedt
• ‘Strategies for the Suspension and Prevention of Connection: Rendering Disconnection as Socioeconomic Lubricant with Facebook’ by Ben Light and Elija Cassidy

Sian and I are really happy with how the issue has turned out. We would’ve liked to have included more – we certainly had a brilliant crop of over 150 initial abstract submissions to choose from, and a handful of excellent pieces that sadly didn’t make it through the review process – but we think these articles cover a good deal of terrain, both reflecting back on 10 years of Facebook while also looking forward to the future.

We acknowledge and thank all the contributors, our small legion of reviewers, the SAGE editors, and Steve Jones as editor-in-chief of NM&S.

Taken together, I think these articles paint a complex and compelling picture about the conventions of Facebook use, the trajectory of the corporation itself, the value of the site, its problems, and how we can manage these complexities into the future. Amidst various discourses of decline, Facebook isn’t going anywhere yet, and into the future – if it does go the way of MySpace – it will leave a very powerful legacy that has shaped not only the social web but also the practice of everyday life for many. We are glad to have captured some of that legacy at the 10 year post in this forthcoming issue.