Social media has been debated by political policymakers and social commentators for its potential to educate, unify, and mobilize the masses. In addition, scholars in sociology, culture, and media studies such as Douglas Rushkoff, Henry Jenkins, and Dhiraj Murthy have made clear that social media has altered communication habits. What isn’t as clear, and what hasn’t been adequately investigated by researchers, however, is how this transformation has affected social and cultural institutions. That is, there haven’t been many serious discussions about social media’s impact on business and industry practices, including but not limited to the American film industry.
Those who have explored social media’s impact on Hollywood, such as Tino Balio in Hollywood in the New Millennium, Robert Marich in the third edition of Marketing to Moviegoers: A Handbook of Strategies and Tactics, Wheeler Winston Dixon in Streaming: Movies, Media, and Instant Access, and Chuck Tryon in On-Demand Culture: Digital Delivery and the Future of Movies, devote about two pages of a chapter to it before moving to other topics like digital projection or global expansion, and the remaining commentators focus on the ways consumers make use of social media, thereby ignoring institutional uses.