Approaching social media

Today, social media occupy an increasingly integral and taken-for-granted part of everyday life for growing numbers of people on an international scale (e.g. Tagg and Seargeant 2017: 213). Preceded by, as well as building on, a set of previous terms designed to distinguish digital “new media” from previous broadcast and print media (such as “cyberspace” in the 1990s or “digital media” and “Web 2.0” in the mid-2000s), the term “social media” became more widely popularized and integrated into colloquial language around the year 2008 (Walker Rettberg 2017: 435). It is not unusual for scholarly accounts to either directly or indirectly paint a picture of social media as something that constitutes a specific (and, at the time of writing, latest) “phase” in a broader, ongoing evolution of mobile digital communications. However, while new social media platforms obviously build on previous technologies and uses of the Internet for social and communicative purposes, there are “clearly as many discontinuities with prior uses of the Internet as continuities” (Miller et al. 2016: 11). For these reasons, Miller et al. (2016: 11) argue that social media need to be considered a topic of research in and of itself and no longer be considered the “latest point in a narrative” of developments in Internet and digital technologies.

While social media still tends to be most commonly associated with large and globally dispersed so-called “social networking sites” (SNS) such as Facebook and Twitter, the category of social media can be taken to encompass a much larger collection of different types and forms of sites, platforms, groupware, and mobile applications (Burgess et al. 2017: 3). In its broadest sense, the term “social media” can therefore be taken to denote “those digital platforms, services and apps built around the convergence of content sharing, public communication, and interpersonal connection” (Burgess etal. 2017: 1).

In their influential and oft-cited earlier work on developments in social media, Kaplan and Haenlein (2010: 60) highlighted the emergence and proliferation of platforms that were deliberately designed to facilitate the dissemination of various types of “user-generated content” (UGC), i.e. various types of creative content “published either on a publicly accessible website or on a social networking site accessible to a selected group of people” (Kaplan and Haenlein 2010: 61; cf. Leppanen et al. 2017: 8). While social media still continues to be widely used for such purposes, several more recently developed platforms have instead been purposely designed to enable the constant and collaborative modification of content by larger groups of users. While the design of new platforms tends to reflect the affordances offered by new technologies, it also tends to reflect how technological developments serve to bring about changes in the ways in which people actually use social media. For example, as will be discussed further in Chapter 2, following the proliferation of smartphones (Elwell 2014; Miller et al. 2016: 7), social media have developed into a constantly present and increasingly integral part of peoples’ everyday lives and activities, thus serving to further blur earlier distinctions between online and offline worlds. Following these developments, people are, as Floridi has aptly phrased it, “increasingly living onlife” (2014: 43; cf. Elwell 2014).

The rapid pace at which new social media platforms and technologies develop necessitates a constant revision of scholarly definitions, categorizations, and analytic categories. Although much of the vocabulary commonly used to discuss and conceptualize social media was already introduced in Castells’s The Rise of the Network Society (1996), the terminological repertoire of the field has also expanded considerably as social media and their associated technologies have continued to develop (Miller et al. 2016: 20; for an overview of research prior to 2007, see Boyd and Ellison 2007). A brief overview of some previous categorizations and key terms can therefore help us gain a better idea of the basic character and overall scope of the present-day social media sphere.

Following van Dijck (2013a), social media can generally be classified according to main types. A first main type consists of platforms that essentially function as SNS (e.g. Facebook, Twitter), which “primarily promote interpersonal contact” and generally “encourage weak ties.” A second main type is represented by sites and platforms that are primarily designed for the dissemination of UGC (e.g. YouTube, Instagram) and that “support creativity, foreground cultural activity, and promote the exchange of amateur or professional content.” Additional main types include “trading and marketing sites” (TMS), which are designed for the exchange, sale, and purchase of products (e.g. eBay), and “play and game sites” (PGS), which bring users together through various types of online gaming (van Dijck 2013a: 8).

Another way of distinguishing between different types of social media is to categorize them on the basis of 1) “the richness of the medium and rhe degree of social presence it allows” (low, medium, high), or 2) “the degree of self-disclosure it requires and the type of self-presentation it allows” (high or low) (Kaplan and Haenlein 2010). Similarly, Miller et al. (2016: 3) argue that different types or forms of social media can be situated along a continuum, ranging from the most public (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) to the most private (e.g. WhatsApp, WeChat), and from the largest groups to the smallest groups. However, as they go on to point out, it is important to recognize that the ways in which “new forms of social media map onto prior social groups, or indeed create new groups, varies considerably” (Miller et al. 2016: 7) from one social media platform to another. It is useful, therefore, to approach the present-day social media environment as a polymedia environment. Such a perspective would hold not that particular social media platforms are adequately understood in isolation but that different social media platforms and their use always need to be understood relative to one another (Miller et al. 2016: 4).