Post
"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."
#IanBogost, 2022
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/11/twitter-facebook-social-media-decline/672074/
This is the same distinction I was trying to draw a year or two back @smallcircles. At the time, you felt this use of the terms "social networking" and "social media" was too far from their established uses. What do you think about the way this article by @ibogost explains the distinction?
"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."
@ibogost, 2022
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/11/twitter-facebook-social-media-decline/672074/
(1/2)
Right. Only people with the reputational capital to publish in mass circulation publications like the Atlantic deserve to speak and be heard.
Blaming problems created by capitalist enshittification on the read/write web's democratisation of publishing is pure legacy media elitism. It reminds me of the "corporate media blockade" that motivated hundreds of us to create Indymedia projects.
(2/2)
I agree with it. Most problematic with "social media" are in what people associate them to be.
These days I define "social networking" tech-independently as "any direct or indirect human interaction between people", so we do it both offline (for ages) and now online (we're still learning).
You might then define "social media" against that definition to be "social networking with the intent to publish information to an audience" i.e. covers only a small subset of use cases.
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