It is such a pleasure to see the publication today of the second edition of Society and the Internet by Oxford University Press. My co-editor, Mark Graham, and I worked long and hard to assemble a wonderful set of authors to build on the first edition. The success of the original volume led to this new edition. The pace and scale of changes in the issues surrounding the Internet led to almost a completely new set of chapters. Information about the 2nd edition is available on the OUP web site for the paperback edition here, and the hardback here.

Our thanks to OUP and the many professional staff who helped us produce this new 2nd edition, and particularly to my friend Steve Russell for the brilliant art work on the cover. Thanks as well to the OII, which inspired our lecture series that led to these volumes, and OII colleagues who launched much of the research that informs them. I hope you can read the acknowledgements in full as we owe thanks to so many individuals and institutions, such as MSU’s Quello Center, which together with the Global Cyber Security Capacity Centre, supported my own contributions to this second edition.

We owe incredible thanks to our colleague Manuel Castells for his insightful foreword and all the authors of the book’s 24 chapters. These colleagues endured our many requests and most importantly accepted our call to contribute to what we hope will be a perfect reader for courses on Internet studies, digital technology and society, new media, and many other courses dealing with society and the Internet. The authors include junior and senior researchers from around the world. To all, we send our appreciation. No more deadlines, we promise. The authors are:

Maria Bada, Cambridge Cybercrime Centre
Grant Blank, University of Oxford
Samantha Bradshaw, University of Oxford
David A. Bray, People-Centered Internet
Antonio A. Casilli, Paris Institute of Technology
Manuel Castells, University of Southern California
Vint Cerf, Google
Sadie Creese, University of Oxford
Matthew David, Durham University
Laura DeNardis, American University, Washington, DC
Martin Dittus, University of Oxford
Elizabeth Dubois, University of Ottawa
Sandra González-Bailón, University of Pennsylvania 
Scott A. Hale, University of Oxford
Eszter Hargittai, University of Zurich
Philip N. Howard, University of Oxford
Peter John, King’s College London 
Sílvia Majó-Vázquez, University of Oxford
Helen Margetts, University of Oxford
Marina Micheli, European Commission
Christopher Millard, Queen Mary University of London
Lisa Nakamura, University of Michigan
Victoria Nash, University of Oxford
Gina Neff, University of Oxford
Eli Noam, Columbia Business School 
Sanna Ojanperä, University of Oxford
Julian Posada, University of Toronto
Anabel Quan-Haase, University of Western Ontario
Jack Linchuan Qiu, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Lee Rainie, Pew Research Center
Bianca C. Reisdorf, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Ralph Schroeder, University of Oxford
Limor Shifman, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Ruth Shillair, Michigan State University 
Greg Taylor, University of Oxford
Hua Wang, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York
Barry Wellman, NetLab
Renwen Zhang, Northwestern University

So, if you are seriously interested in the societal implications of the Internet and related social media and the mobile Internet, please consider this reader. You will see a variety of methods, data, and theoretical perspectives in play to address important issues in ways that challenge conventional wisdom and punditry about the Internet. You can get a paperback edition from OUP here or from your favourite bookstore.