ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of confl icting perspectives toward digital media technologies, with an emphasis on digital stigma. It begins with a tech-nological determinist perspective that suggests new technologies have direct eff ects on the social world. It then considers a social constructionist perspective where humans inscribe values and functions into technologies. Weighing the merits of both approaches, it endorses a mutual shaping perspective. Th is approach contends that social actors with specifi c ideologies and intentions construct technologies, which in turn enable and constrain what is socially possible. Applied to digital stigma, a mutual shaping perspective contends that social media are socially meaningful as a result of digital media culture, which in turn is shaped by the kinds of information exchange that are possible on services like Facebook.
