Definition

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media:

"Social media describes the online technologies and practices that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other."

Social Media are said to emerge when the two earlier paradigms of the internet, as communication medium and as publishing medium, are merged.

More attempts:

A potpourri of definitions is maintained by Brent Csutoras
Mashable collected the best 20 reader responses on "What are social media", at http://mashable.com/2010/06/11/top-20-mashable-reader-responses-to-what-is-social-media/

Typology

"Much of my presentations focus on social media, Social Bookmarking and social networking (YES, there is a VERY big distinction between the three (or four)). I contend that the former consists of sites like Wikipedia, Citizendium, Digg, SocialMedian, Newsvine, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Marketwatch and even Reuters Buzz and TD Ameritrade. Social Bookmarking consists of sites like Delicious, Magnolia and Furl. Social Networking consists of sites like Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, Bebo and newcomers like Corkd, Ning, and SocialGo. Maybe even there's room for a distinction between social media sites and social aggregators like FriendFeed, SocialThing, and others.

There is a very big difference between these four. Social Media relies on the wisdom of crowds and policing of its constituents. The users and community determine the story, definition, accuracy, popularity and trend of the data and/or information. Social Bookmarking sites allows users to store, organize, search, and manage information with other users. Social Networking consists of sites that allow its users to congregate, conversate and organize friends, events and information. Social Aggregators, which is still somewhat of a new term, allow users to stream their online lives and peer into the lives of others." (http://www.eyeballeconomy.com/2008/08/immunity-or-community.html)

Graphic: Social Media Categories, outlines 15 types of social media in one graphic [1]

Characteristics

"1. social medias network user generated content.

On Flickr many people upload photos from their cameras and mobile phones not just to put them on the internet, but as a form of presence that shows their friends what they're up to and where in the world they are. Their content is a social glue. Meanwhile, other users are busy competing with each other, getting support and advice from other users, or are collecting photos, tagging photos or using them in new creative ways due to the benefits of Creative Commons licenses. Somewhere at the back of all of this is a concept of publishing, but it's a one that's been elaborated on and extended extensively.

2. Social media aggregate user generated content.

Social media are all about creating what Tim O'Reilly in his essay "what is web2.0?" calls architectures of participation. But it's not just that. The architectures of participation allow users to create in aggregate value for all.

These new services are about creating frameworks and spaces, containers and supports that help users create and publish and use all kinds of data from the smallest comment to the best produced video clip which in aggregate create something of fascinating utility to all.

One could assert that social media creates added value for all from the aggregate of data that individuals publish in their selfish pursuit of their individual goals." (http://i-wisdom.typepad.com/iwisdom/2006/04/social_media_ve.html)

Stowe Boyd distinguishes four characteristics.

Discussion

Social Media are Dead

1. Steve Rubel at Micropersuasion:

"Social media, according to Wikipedia, includes "the online tools and platforms that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences and perspectives with each other." This includes blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis, vlogs and so on. For the last few years this was all considered related to, but separate from mainstream media. That point of differentiation is now gone.

In 2006 all media went social. Pretty much every newspaper, TV network and publication has wholeheartedly embraced these technologies. Newspapers have comments, RSS feeds, blogs, wikis and other forms of two-way communications. TV networks have a presence in Second Life and more. The lines have blurred. Even some of the marketers themselves are producing content that could be called "media."

The changes in communications go deeper, however. The media formerly called mainstream also communicates in a far more conversational tone that it did before -- one we use.

Meanwhile, the barriers to becoming a member of the fourth estate have been obliterated by these very same technologies. Look at Robert Scoble's writing this week as he tags along with John Edwards on the campaign trail.

So as we roll into 2007, it's fair to say that "social media" as a separate entity is dead ... There's no point in differentiating any more."

(http://www.micropersuasion.com/2006/12/social_media_is.html)

2. Ian Bogost:

"As the original name suggested, social networking involved connecting, not publishing. By connecting your personal network of trusted contacts (or “strong ties,” as sociologists call them) to others’ such networks (via “weak ties”), you could surface a larger network of trusted contacts. LinkedIn promised to make job searching and business networking possible by traversing the connections of your connections. Friendster did so for personal relationships, Facebook for college mates, and so on. The whole idea of social networks was networking: building or deepening relationships, mostly with people you knew. How and why that deepening happened was largely left to the users to decide.

That changed when social networking became social media around 2009, between the introduction of the smartphone and the launch of Instagram. Instead of connection—forging latent ties to people and organizations we would mostly ignore—social media offered platforms through which people could publish content as widely as possible, well beyond their networks of immediate contacts. Social media turned you, me, and everyone into broadcasters (if aspirational ones). The results have been disastrous but also highly pleasurable, not to mention massively profitable—a catastrophic combination.

The terms social network and social media are used interchangeably now, but they shouldn’t be. A social network is an idle, inactive system—a Rolodex of contacts, a notebook of sales targets, a yearbook of possible soul mates. But social media is active—hyperactive, really—spewing material across those networks instead of leaving them alone until needed.

A 2003 paper published in Enterprise Information Systems made an early case that drives the point home. The authors propose social media as a system in which users participate in “information exchange.” The network, which had previously been used to establish and maintain relationships, becomes reinterpreted as a channel through which to broadcast.

This was a novel concept. When News Corp, a media company, bought MySpace in 2005, The New York Times called the website a “a youth-oriented music and ‘social networking’ site”—complete with scare quotes. The site’s primary content, music, was seen as separate from its social-networking functions. Even Zuckerberg’s vision for Facebook, to “connect every person in the world,” implied a networking function, not media distribution.

The toxicity of social media makes it easy to forget how truly magical this innovation felt when it was new. From 2004 to 2009, you could join Facebook and everyone you’d ever known—including people you’d definitely lost track of—was right there, ready to connect or reconnect. The posts and photos I saw characterized my friends’ changing lives, not the conspiracy theories that their unhinged friends had shared with them. LinkedIn did the same thing with business contacts, making referrals, dealmaking, and job hunting much easier than they had been previously. I started a game studio in 2003, when LinkedIn was brand new, and I inked our first deal by working connections there.

Twitter, which launched in 2006, was probably the first true social-media site, even if nobody called it that at the time. Instead of focusing on connecting people, the site amounted to a giant, asynchronous chat room for the world. Twitter was for talking to everyone—which is perhaps one of the reasons journalists have flocked to it. Sure, a blog could technically be read by anybody with a web browser, but in practice finding that readership was hard. That’s why blogs operated first as social networks, through mechanisms such as blogrolls and linkbacks. But on Twitter, anything anybody posted could be seen instantly by anyone else. And furthermore, unlike posts on blogs or images on Flickr or videos on YouTube, tweets were short and low-effort, making it easy to post many of them a week or even a day.

The notion of a global “town square,” as Elon Musk has put it, emerges from all of these factors. On Twitter, you can instantly learn about a tsunami in Tōhoku or an omakase in Topeka. This is also why journalists became so dependent on Twitter: It’s a constant stream of sources, events, and reactions—a reporting automat, not to mention an outbound vector for media tastemakers to make tastes.

When we look back at this moment, social media had already arrived in spirit if not by name. RSS readers offered a feed of blog posts to catch up on, complete with unread counts. MySpace fused music and chatter; YouTube did it with video (“Broadcast Yourself”). In 2005, at an industry conference, I remember overhearing an attendee say, “I’m so behind on my Flickr!” What does that even mean? I recall wondering. But now the answer is obvious: creating and consuming content for any reason, or no reason. Social media was overtaking social networking.

Instagram, launched in 2010, might have built the bridge between the social-network era and the age of social media. It relied on the connections among users as a mechanism to distribute content as a primary activity. But soon enough, all social networks became social media first and foremost. When groups, pages, and the News Feed launched, Facebook began encouraging users to share content published by others in order to increase engagement on the service, rather than to provide updates to friends. LinkedIn launched a program to publish content across the platform, too. Twitter, already principally a publishing platform, added a dedicated “retweet” feature, making it far easier to spread content virally across user networks.

Other services arrived or evolved in this vein, among them Reddit, Snapchat, and WhatsApp, all far more popular than Twitter. Social networks, once latent routes for possible contact, became superhighways of constant content. In their latest phase, their social-networking aspects have been pushed deep into the background. Although you can connect the app to your contacts and follow specific users, on TikTok, you are more likely to simply plug into a continuous flow of video content that has oozed to the surface via algorithm. You still have to connect with other users to use some of these services’ features. But connection as a primary purpose has declined. Think of the change like this: In the social-networking era, the connections were essential, driving both content creation and consumption. But the social-media era seeks the thinnest, most soluble connections possible, just enough to allow the content to flow."

(https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/11/twitter-facebook-social-media-decline/672074/)

How Social Media affects Journalism

Miriam Meckel:

"Suddenly, the rules of the game have changed. Citizens have become “citizen journalists” and help to define the journalistic agenda through new communication platforms. They provide information, critical feedback and pictures to local events and global developments. Articles and op-ed pieces are shared, tagged, linked to, quoted and re-published across a large range of platforms. And journalists themselves are now faced with the need to take responses from their readers seriously. The media landscape is more diversified and more interactive than ever before.

But readers don’t just consume the work or professional journalists and respond to it. They set topics themselves. Story ideas often originate within communities that grapple with a specific question – and the subsequent research is crowdsourced in ways that are impossible to achieve within the rigid environment of the traditional newsroom. Thousands of people have helped the British newspaper The Guardian to analyze more than 450,000 receipts for expenses from parliamentarians to uncover potential instances of fraud. Hints for investigative stories result not only from journalistic work but also from information passed around in social networks (as long as journalists understand how to use them). Data from organizations such as Wikileaks even requires the re-conceptualization of journalistic work and the participation of many. Enormous amounts of data must be carefully combed and analyzed to reveal newsworthy facts and connections – a task that any single newsroom is poorly equipped to fulfill.

The consequence of these developments is paradigmatic change in nine different areas of journalism:

1) Journalists risk losing their authoritative voice.

2) New roles emerge. Journalists serve as aggregators or brokers; they collect and analyze information and serve as links between different communities.

3) There is no single audience. Readers can be grouped into communities that differ in the degree of their activity.

4) Corporate brands are replaced or supplemented by personality-driven brands.

5) No journalistic product will ever be “finished”. Articles remain in the beta stage; they are updated and changed over time.

6) The writer/reader hierarchy breaks down. It is replaced by the permanent interaction between different participants that can serve as either reader or writer at different points in time.

7) Journalists who ignore the collaborative and communicative potential of the Internet are sidelined by those who embrace it.

8) There is no “offline” opinion. The internet is the arena of opinion formation. It is arrogant for any journalist to assume superiority of intellect or knowledge over his readers." (http://www.miriammeckel.de/2011/01/14/embedded-2-0/)

9) The Internet reveals mistakes and carelessness. It deconstructs journalistic pieces for their poor quality.

The Social Media as a Facet of Neoliberalism

William Davies:

"The fact that it is social media that is facilitating this new form of state power, that it is social networks that are the object of its gaze, may indicate that neoliberal government no longer places quite so much emphasis on the market, as a mechanism for organizing knowledge, regulating freedom and achieving transparency. If we think carefully about the longer history of neoliberal thought and politics, this is a very significant change. Because from its origins, neoliberalism was a movement that was partly defined in opposition to the very idea of the ‘social’ as a distinct domain or logic of human activity.

The idea of the ‘social’ or ‘society’ has always been an enigmatic one. If it is to mean anything at all, it cannot be reduced to a logic of individual incentives or markets; that would be to render it ‘economic’ instead. But nor can it simply be identified with the state, which would be to convert it into some political or sovereign category such as the ‘nation’ (rather as Blue Labour might wish). States play an important role in making ‘society’ visible and measurable, through collecting and publishing large quantities of statistics. But the claim of social theorists and sociologists in the tradition of Emile Durkheim is that ‘society’ has some reality, over and above the particular statistics through which we come to know it.

The social hovers as a paradox, between a space of state coercion governed by law, and a space of market spontaneity governed by individual incentives and price. When acting socially we are both rule-bound and free at the same time. And it was precisely this mysterious and contradictory nature that led pioneering neoliberal thinkers, such as Friedrich Von Hayek, to pour scorn on the very idea. The term ‘social’, he argued, is a “weasel-word par excellence. Nobody knows what it actually means”.

In their sparring matches with socialist economists and intellectuals during the 1920s, 30s and 40s, Hayek and his compatriot, Ludwig von Mises, argued that socialists, social scientists and states were guilty of inventing ‘society’ out of thin air. The collective could not act spontaneously on its own, or make its subjective wishes known other than via markets, so it was having the values and ideas of socialist elites imposed upon it, with these subjective values masquerading as objective facts.

It’s important to stress – as Philip Mirowski does in his new book, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste – that neoliberals were never hostile to the state, which they understood as a necessary source of coercion, for the purposes of preventing political upheaval. But they were always hostile to the idea of some autonomous-yet-collective will of the form proposed, for example, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the ‘General Will’. ‘Society’, for neoliberals is a dangerous metaphysical nonsense, that states use to start pursuing their own ethical programmes, over and above their neoliberal function of creating and policing rules.

Hayek would be distressed to know that in recent years, there has been an explosion of new types of accounting, governance and policy intervention which come dressed in the rhetoric of the ‘social’. Social enterprise, social media, social indicators, social impact bonds, social neuroscience. The list goes on. What are we to make of all this? If neoliberalism is understood as a programme dedicated to ridiculing the very idea of the social, as a distinct sphere of activity, are we therefore witnessing neoliberalism in retreat? Or should we just dismiss all of these new socials as rhetorical flimflam? I would suggest that, lying between these two interpretations, is a third option: that neoliberalism is being reinvented in ways that incorporate social logic, as a means of resisting critique and delaying crisis.

One reason for thinking this is that neoliberalism is being threatened by the fact that individuals are quite manifestly unable to operate as isolated, calculating machines, with only the law and the market to guide them. Without other people to guide and support them, provide norms and examples, they start to behave in ways that are self-destructive and destabilizing. This is the central insight of behavioural and happiness economics, which are achieving growing influence in policy-making circles right now.

The ‘social’ is brought back in as a way of providing support, such that individuals can continue to live the self-reliant, risk-aware, healthy lifestyles that neoliberalism requires of them. The phenomenon of ‘social prescribing’, in which doctors recommend participation in local community activities as a way of improving wellbeing, is indicative of emerging policy techniques. Neoliberalism was launched as an attack on socialism, as a state-centric project; it is now being subtly reinvented, in ways that take account of the social nature of the individual.

What has changed fundamentally, since Hayek and Mises were attacking socialism, is that new techniques for the measurement and representation of the ‘social’ have emerged, which rebuff or accommodate a number of neoliberal critiques. Hayek and Mises argued that the social world was only knowable in the aggregate (that is, statistically) from the perspective of the social scientist or state. This, they argued, meant that the internal dynamism and dispersed individual preferences which occur within society are utterly ignored.

But social media, and a range of techniques for analyzing it (such as ‘sentiment analysis’ and various types of ‘social analytics’), make networks, relationships, communities and patterns visible, while working with the logic of individual expression. Moreover, these techniques can operate in real-time, revealing constant fluctuations in social activity, just as prices reveal constant fluctuations in economic activity. In these respects, this is a form of social-ism that overcomes the critique of socialism mounted by neoliberalism.

At present, the digital tools used to analyse social life are in their infancy, and are largely attracting interest from marketing firms. But new techno-utopian policy visions, of ‘smart cities’ and digital tracking of health behaviours, look set to make pattern recognition and relationship management a key purpose of government. This represents the coming of what Geoff Mulgan has termed the ‘relational state’, or what I have previously described as ‘neocommunitarianism’.

This all represents a supplement to neoliberal logic, rather than its replacement. The new form of sociality that is emerging may not represent a buffer between the coercive state and the spontaneous economic individual. Instead, it may be that this is precisely how the two are most firmly cemented together. Following the NSA revelations, the fear is that social media potentially offers a proximity between the spontaneous individual and the state, far greater than that offered by markets.

In view of this new mutation of neoliberalism, it is worth reflecting on one of the defences that was made by the telecom companies and social media firms, who were accused of co-operating with the NSA. This was that they had only shared meta-data, and not data itself. This plea tells us something about the historical juncture that we’re at. From a liberal and traditional neoliberal perspective, this defence is a good one: if the state can’t pry on individual activities, individual preferences and statements, then privacy is being upheld. No problem.

But this misses the logic of the emerging technical apparatus of government. Where neoliberalism integrates the logic of the social, it is precisely relationships between actors that are being observed and measured, and not the actors themselves. It is in correlations and patterns where value lies in a 21st century Big Data society, and not in the properties or preference of individuals, as was the case in a 20th century statistical and market society. And it is in the identification of hitherto invisible relationships that networked digital media holds out promise for security agencies. There is nothing innocent about meta-data.

In an effort to stave off their opponents, political movements can often end up stealing their clothes. Britain’s Labour Party arguably delivered a better version of Thatcherism than the Conservative Party was ever able to. Neoliberalism’s abiding passion was always to destroy socialism, but in practice it may have ended up with far more of the technocratic elements of ‘actually existing’ state socialism than its ideologues could ever imagine."

(http://www.opendemocracy.net/william-davies/neoliberalism-and-revenge-of-%E2%80%9Csocial%E2%80%9D)

The Evolution of Social Networking into Social Media is the end of Social Media

Ian Bogost:

"Social networks’ evolution into social media brought both opportunity and calamity. Facebook and all the rest enjoyed a massive rise in engagement and the associated data-driven advertising profits that the attention-driven content economy created. The same phenomenon also created the influencer economy, in which individual social-media users became valuable as channels for distributing marketing messages or product sponsorships by means of their posts’ real or imagined reach. Ordinary folk could now make some money or even a lucrative living “creating content” online. The platforms sold them on that promise, creating official programs and mechanisms to facilitate it. In turn, “influencer” became an aspirational role, especially for young people for whom Instagram fame seemed more achievable than traditional celebrity—or perhaps employment of any kind.

The ensuing disaster was multipart. For one, social-media operators discovered that the more emotionally charged the content, the better it spread across its users’ networks. Polarizing, offensive, or just plain fraudulent information was optimized for distribution. By the time the platforms realized and the public revolted, it was too late to turn off these feedback loops.

Obsession fueled the flames. Compulsion had always plagued computer-facilitated social networking—it was the original sin. Rounding up friends or business contacts into a pen in your online profile for possible future use was never a healthy way to understand social relationships. It was just as common to obsess over having 500-plus connections on LinkedIn in 2003 as it is to covet Instagram followers today. But when social networking evolved into social media, user expectations escalated. Driven by venture capitalists’ expectations and then Wall Street’s demands, the tech companies—Google and Facebook and all the rest—became addicted to massive scale. And the values associated with scale—reaching a lot of people easily and cheaply, and reaping the benefits—became appealing to everyone: a journalist earning reputational capital on Twitter; a 20-something seeking sponsorship on Instagram; a dissident spreading word of their cause on YouTube; an insurrectionist sowing rebellion on Facebook; an autopornographer selling sex, or its image, on OnlyFans; a self-styled guru hawking advice on LinkedIn. Social media showed that everyone has the potential to reach a massive audience at low cost and high gain—and that potential gave many people the impression that they deserve such an audience.

The flip side of that coin also shines. On social media, everyone believes that anyone to whom they have access owes them an audience: a writer who posted a take, a celebrity who announced a project, a pretty girl just trying to live her life, that anon who said something afflictive. When network connections become activated for any reason or no reason, then every connection seems worthy of traversing.

That was a terrible idea. As I’ve written before on this subject, people just aren’t meant to talk to one another this much. They shouldn’t have that much to say, they shouldn’t expect to receive such a large audience for that expression, and they shouldn’t suppose a right to comment or rejoinder for every thought or notion either. From being asked to review every product you buy to believing that every tweet or Instagram image warrants likes or comments or follows, social media produced a positively unhinged, sociopathic rendition of human sociality. That’s no surprise, I guess, given that the model was forged in the fires of Big Tech companies such as Facebook, where sociopathy is a design philosophy.

If Twitter does fail, either because its revenue collapses or because the massive debt that Musk’s deal imposes crushes it, the result could help accelerate social media’s decline more generally. It would also be tragic for those who have come to rely on these platforms, for news or community or conversation or mere compulsion. Such is the hypocrisy of this moment. The rush of likes and shares felt so good because the age of zero comments felt so lonely—and upscaling killed the alternatives a long time ago, besides.

If change is possible, carrying it out will be difficult, because we have adapted our lives to conform to social media’s pleasures and torments. It’s seemingly as hard to give up on social media as it was to give up smoking en masse, like Americans did in the 20th century. Quitting that habit took decades of regulatory intervention, public-relations campaigning, social shaming, and aesthetic shifts. At a cultural level, we didn’t stop smoking just because the habit was unpleasant or uncool or even because it might kill us. We did so slowly and over time, by forcing social life to suffocate the practice. That process must now begin in earnest for social media.

Something may yet survive the fire that would burn it down: social networks, the services’ overlooked, molten core. It was never a terrible idea, at least, to use computers to connect to one another on occasion, for justified reasons, and in moderation (although the risk of instrumentalizing one another was present from the outset). The problem came from doing so all the time, as a lifestyle, an aspiration, an obsession. The offer was always too good to be true, but it’s taken us two decades to realize the Faustian nature of the bargain. Someday, eventually, perhaps its web will unwind. But not soon, and not easily."