Discussion
I'm sure other people have noted this but at some point we went from talking about "social network sites" to talking about "social media sites".
At first, the network was the thing that mattered. Then, the media was the thing that mattered.
A quick Google Trends query shows the shift might have happened around 2012:
@darius I have feelings and opinions about this but you know that already
The suffix "site" was/is uncommon in my circles.
Without it, the data suggests that "social media" won by 2009, with "social network" only rising later in 2010, and then disappearing as quickly as it came by 2012.
The Social Network (2010 film) might have prompted that.
Oh that's interesting.
But I sort of agree, that's what the big corporate sites, FB, insta, tiktok, have become.
Let them have the name. And let's not do those things.
It's similar to the insight into why music, moving image, text, became "content". It speaks to nothing of that, but of them, but the *container*.
@darius Without the "site" part the trend is even more pronounced, perhaps due to a popular film of that name. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=social%20media,social%20network&hl=en
@darius Wouldn't have been anything wrong with a program that crawled for updates to my friends' .plan files and displayed it as a web page.
Except no-one would have made billions off it.
@darius I think I like my social network more than I like social media.
@darius feels like we should really be calling them "media marketplaces" these days
@darius Well, Marshal McLuhan did say that the medium is the message... 🤔
@darius I think this mostly comes from the influencer phenomenon and the UI sherpherding people from a "symmetric frienship" use-case towards an "asymmetric monetized fans" use case.
@darius That didn't happen in Spanish, we've always said «redes sociales» so far.
and I'm glad. public to the world. like a blog. decentralized social media is about the people deciding what gets attention. boosts. that's really important. it's a fix for owners of big media and advertisers dominating culture. imo we should embrace this. #DemocracyOfReach
social networking is humans connecting. important but not necessarily visible to a third party. it could also be a text or phone call.
to me, social media is OG twitter while a social network is more FB.
@darius Remember it was “social software” in the early 2000s, when the blogosphere was young and thriving. But that was always too geeky a term.
@darius I wonder what happened in 2012?
https://techcrunch.com/2012/04/09/facebook-to-acquire-instagram-for-1-billion/
04/09/2012 “Facebook Buys Instagram For $1 Billion, Turns Budding Rival Into Its Standalone Photo App”
@darius i'm old enough to remember when it was called "social software"
@darius Seriously interesting point!
It's very language-dependent. I've only noticed this in English. In Russian there isn't such a distinction — the only thing that happened over time was that "социальные сети" (social networks) got shortened to "соцсети". Which makes VKontakte's recent onslaught of enshittification all the more ridiculous, because we don't even have a term for a "social network" that puts the network (the friend list in the newly redesigned profiles) behind two extra clicks.
...I have not noticed that and you're right. Huh.
I wonder when people started calling all their work "content".
related -- "social web" is totally overused.
there is a social web, we just haven't developed very much of it, i think because we were intimidated by the silos. i'm not intimidated any more, i'm fed up and going ahead without them.
social network is way more empowering. saying it's media positions people as watchers. that is what it has become, but we should strive to make networks that enable us to work together.
@davew Yeah, the web became kind of Neil Postman-ized in the "Amusing Ourselves to Death" sense
@darius Remove "site" from both queries and the difference is even bigger and more glaring.
@glecharles yeah I actually added "site" because the results are pretty polluted by the popular 2010 movie The Social Network
@darius It's interesting that didn't have any staying power and social media dominated.
@darius that’s why I recently changed our site tagline from social media back to social networking. Taking it back! 😀
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