Social Media Communication. Bu Zhong

civilization

       THEORY HIGHLIGHT

      Technological Determinism

      Overview

      Social media matter more today than before as they are encroaching on all sorts of human activities, for better or worse. Look around and it is evident that social media have been imposing a revolutionary effect on numerous aspects of human society, bringing us a new life largely inconceivable to those who came before. Today our lives are so saturated with social media that few could afford not to use them. How much are our lives are being changed by social media? We may not come up with a good answer to the question until we pause for a moment and see how much we rely on them every day.

Each semester when I taught a social media course, the first assignment was “Without Social Media,” requiring my students not to use social media for 24 hours and to write a reflection on it. No Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, or Instagram, but they could still make phone calls, send emails or text messages, and of course, use traditional media like books, TV, and radio. Before the experiment, they were instructed to inform their parents and friends of this assignment so that no one got panicky in the hours when they were out of reach on social media.

      For this project, most students in past years chose to stop using social media on a Friday night before going to bed. This made it easier for them to survive the time without social media. When they woke up the next day, about one-third of the required time was gone. Each year the one-day social media ban still stunned most students. In their reports, the students wrote that they knew it was hard not to use social media, but never expected everything would be so different and difficult without them. Most of the complaints had to do with the inconvenience, stress, anxiety, and detachment caused by the social media ban. This assignment seemed even more trying for my recent students as more of them told me, honestly, that they failed the assignment – getting back on social media sooner than required, for no particular reason. Yes, during those hours, students could make phone calls, send emails, or text messages. “But without social media, much of my life is lost,” one student concluded.

      Social media, apparently, provide users with convenience in communicating with others, sharing, and accessing information. The convenience may be better viewed as a kind of freedom as many get so used to it in the twenty-first century. Without it, they no longer feel free in this networked society. On the other hand, an extensive use of social media results in dependence on technology. Once people are accustomed to the online life powered by social media, any slight disruption of the status quo becomes a major impediment. Similar dependence on prior technologies from mobile phones to cars has been well documented by researchers.

      Thus, social media are not so much about media per se but more about being social.

      Inherently, all forms of media are social because they store and transmit information and knowledge that originate in social relations in society (Fuchs, 2014). Social media are no exception, as they connect people and their social activities in technological artifacts by facilitating information flows between users. Sociality, in essence, is a key feature of media consumption and production. For instance, when you read the news, watch TV, send a text message, or update your Facebook status, these activities are social, as they are related to other people and their social activities. In this sense, everyone’s thinking is social as it relies on other people’s ideas.

      Like other media platforms, social media are profoundly transforming our society, from accessing news to doing business. While Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram get a lot of attention in the United States, Weibo, WeChat, and Line attract millions of daily users in Asian countries like China, Japan, and Taiwan. We should also not forget the popularity of Flickr, Slack, LinkedIn, Path, Pinterest, Tumblr, Vine, and many more. An important reason behind the popularity of social media is that they facilitate a social need for people, not only to connect with others in real-time at a marginal cost but also to create and share information in a similar fashion, which has never happened before in human history.

      Definition of Social Media

This book treats social media as a plural term, not a singular one, because the word media originating from Latin is the plural of medium. The word media is also taken as a plural noun not only in major English dictionaries, such as The Merriam-Webster Dictionary and Oxford English Dictionary, but in popular stylebooks used by news media, such as the Associated Press, Cable Network News (CNN), New York Times, and Wall Street Journal. Another reason is that social media in this book refer to not just one but various social network sites (SNS) and the related information and communication technologies (ICTs). Hence, this book uses a plural verb with social media despite some writers treating it otherwise, which is not necessarily wrong.

      A more significant question is: How do we define social media?

      Scholars have faced a recognized challenge in trying to define what constitutes social media. Researchers often adopt one or more characteristics to describe social media and other forms of new media. The characteristics they investigate include digitalization, interactivity, virtuality, dispersion, automation, variability, networking, and real-time access. Among the characteristics, digitalization is the key technology that reduces information to something that can be easily fragmented, handled, distributed, and shared, which enable networking, multimedia, collaborative, and interactive communication.

      The fact that social media continue to proliferate and evolve at a surprising speed is another reason why a widely accepted definition of the term is hard to find. Some of the features that initially distinguished various forms of social media have faded in significance, while others have been reproduced by new genres of social media (Fuchs, 2014). Yet, in much of what researchers and practitioners discuss, the answer is more often assumed, rather than specifically defined. To many, it is like a kind of good art. People may not know what makes good art, but they know it when they see it.

      Social media should not be called new media. Rather, they are part of new media that are powered by the advances of computer-based technologies, including ICT, mobile, and network technologies. Scholars tend to agree that new media refer to any media platforms that are not analog, like television, radio, magazines, newspapers, and books (Baym et al., 2012). New media thus consist of various digital media forms, such as online news (e.g., news content on CNN.com or NYTimes.com), user-generated content (e.g., blogs, personal podcasts), and social media (Zhong et al., 2014).

      The term “social media” often overlaps with “social network sites” as there is some connection and integration between them. Both terms refer to the same media platforms and technology involved. As a result, social media users and researchers often use the two terms interchangeably (boyd, 2009). To Rodriguez (2013), for instance, “Social media encompass a diversity of tools and platforms (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, Wikipedia, Tumblr, etc.) …” (p. 1053). Following Rodriguez and other scholars, this book uses “social media” as a catch-all term, referring to various social network sites.

      Since the late 1990s, a growing number of popular SNS have been created, first in the United States and later around the globe. Launched in 1997, Six Degrees was the first modern SNS allowing users to create a profile and make friends with other users. The site had attracted almost one million members at its peak, though it was shut down in 2001, although 2003 marked an important benchmark in social media development. During that year, scholars saw SNS start to rise to a cultural significance, such as when Friendster became a popular social network site that caught media attention (Ellison & boyd, 2013). Launched in 2002, Friendster was the first SNS with over 100 million registered users, though it was redesigned in 2011 as a social gaming platform. More SNS mushroomed after that: LinkedIn was launched in 2003, Facebook in 2004, Twitter in 2006, Instagram in 2010, and the rest, as we know, is history.

Generally speaking, social media are “the collection of software that enables individuals and communities to gather, communicate, share,