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Defining Social Media…It’s Complicated

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Designing the Social

Part of the book series: Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education ((CSTE,volume 11))

Abstract

This chapter deals with the seemingly simple but surprisingly complex task of defining social media. We begin with a discussion of what social media isn’t, working through some of the common and pervasive myths around social media and young people, before moving on to discuss some of the difficulties in offering a clear definition of social media. Given the continuing evolving nature of platforms, including the addition of new ways of interacting, the ever-growing diverse ways of engaging with and through platforms beyond social interaction, and the use of various social features on a wide array of platforms that may not traditionally be considered overly social spaces, we discuss where (if anywhere) the boundaries of social media sit. We then move on to discuss the importance of a platform-specific approach to understanding social media and then finally reflect on data drawn from a series of interviews with young people to discuss how they understand, define, and use social media.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The birth of the Internet is, like many aspects of digital history, nebulous. Some trace it to Leonard Kleinrock’s work in packet networking in the 1960s with the Advanced Research Projects Agency (Ruthfield 1995). Others credit Tim Berners-Lee’s work at CERN in the 1980s (Couldry 2012) with the first ‘website’ launching in 1990 (still live at http://info.cern.ch/). Some place it as early as the 1950s with the emergence of WANs (wide-area networks) and other networks like the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (Kim 2005), or to 1962 with J.C.R Licklider’s work at MIT on the ‘Galactic Network’ (Leiner et al. 2009).

    For the purpose of this book, we’ll be focusing on the internet from roughly around 2000 onwards, when there appears to have been a shift away from the Internet as a little used communication medium amongst those in the know to a heavily utilised method of mass communication and interaction. In 1993, only 1% of the information sent through two-way telecommunication networks was via the Internet. By 2000 this figure was 51%, and by 2007, it was placed at more than 97% of all information sent (Hilbert and Lopez 2011).

    This signifies a massive shift in the last 20 years towards mass communication via the Internet, followed by capitalist investment in infrastructure across a number of industries, such as the introduction of broadband and the huge boom in educational technology (themes that we will return to in Chap. 3).

  2. 2.

    At increasingly and notably early ages (Livingstone and Ólafsson 2018; Jones and Glynn 2019)

  3. 3.

    For a brilliant achieve of newspaper articles documenting fears of technology from horseless carriages and bicycles to headphones and radios, I would encourage you to explore the pessimists archive at https://pessimists.co/archive/.

  4. 4.

    See here https://www.psni.police.uk/news/Latest-News/250219-psni-statement-regarding-momo-challenge/.

  5. 5.

    https://twitter.com/LimestoneDSB/status/1100822007829024768

  6. 6.

    https://www.tmz.com/2019/02/27/kim-kardashian-youtube-kids-momo-challenge/

  7. 7.

    It should be noted that Twenge seems rather undeterred by this and has continued to explore links between low well-being and frequent social media use (see Twenge 2019).

  8. 8.

    https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/st-bedes-school-redhill-ban-16400248

  9. 9.

    For more information about digital divides, see Chap. 4 where social inequality online is discussed at length.

  10. 10.

    See Chap. 7 for a discussion of digital literacy in education and the need to teach criticality over compliance.

  11. 11.

    boyd and Ellison (2008, 211) make specific use of social ‘network’ site (SNS) rather than social ‘networking’ site, noting that ‘what makes social network sites unique is not that they allow individuals to meet strangers, but rather that they enable users to articulate and make visible their social networks’.

  12. 12.

    Synecdoche refers to the use of a part to refer to the whole or vice versa, for example, the use of ‘Hoover’ to refer to all vacuum cleaners or the phrase ‘boots on the ground’ to refer to military troops.

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  1. University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

    Harry T. Dyer

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Dyer, H.T. (2020). Defining Social Media…It’s Complicated. In: Designing the Social. Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education, vol 11. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5716-3_2

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