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[media-psychology-minor-blog]

Social Media Defined

What is social media? What is the use of social media? Ask uncle google and you’ll definitely receive a great amount of answers and definitions. But which one serves best or is most accurate? They look all alike.

 In the book The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods edited by Luke Sloan and Anabel Quan-Haase was said: “the term social media has multiple meanings, its definition has become highly contested and it is not always clear what tools, platforms and social phenomena count as social media, though its integration into the daily lives of many is indisputable.” Reading this, it nearly feels impossible to find a right definition.

Andreas M. Kaplan and Michael Haenlein wrote a paper back in 2009 to clarify what social media exactly is. Back in those good old days the use of the Social Media platform Facebook was “limited” to a small group of 175 million users. To put things in perspective: the population of Brazil (in 2009) was 190 million. According to Statista the amount of monthly active Facebook users worldwide in the 1st quarter of 2017 is 1.94 billion. That is quite the difference. How many of these people are in doubt of which tools, platforms and social phenomena count as Social Media? That will probably be hard to find out.

But back to Kaplan and Haenlein, who named their paper Users of the World, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media, which shows us the stage the technology platforms where in, gave us three key points to make a definition:

First, it needs to be published either on a publicly accessible website or on a social networking site accessible to a selected group of people; second, it needs to show a certain amount of creative effort; and finally, it needs to have been created outside of professional routines and practices. The first condition excludes content exchanged in e-mails or instant messages; the second, mere replications of already existing content (e.g., posting a copy of an existing newspaper article on a personal blog without any modifications or commenting); and the third, all content that has been created with a commercial market context in mind.

 Please take a look at this video by Common Craft uploaded in 2008 on YouTube.

The makers of the video explained The People what Social Media is by comparing it to an ice-cream-company-town. Clever.

Making the ice cream became accessible for smaller businesses and even households (the public), the people of Scoopville got crazy creative with their flavours and everyone was able to create it with no commercial market context in mind.  

Scoopville and Kaplan and Haenein are, despite the statement of Sloan and Quan-Haase, able to create quite an understandable definition of the phenomenon. Social Media has to be publicly accessible, stimulate an amount of creativity to create a new flavour and in a certain way unique to others on the World Wide Web.

But, to make this all unsure again, The SAGE Handbook states that our understanding of social media is temporarily, spatially, technology sensitive – informed but not restricted by the definitions, practices and materiality’s of a single time period of locale. How we have divined Social Media in societies has changed, and will continue change (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2009).

And this is what makes defining such wonderful phenomena fantastically amazing. We barely can’t. The constant change of the world and its technology is hard to keep up with. People will always try to clarify The New and Unexpected to The People but will always have to adjust and change. But isn’t that what makes it all so very exciting? Let’s see what cyberspace will bring us in the future.

And because The People will high likely will for ever and always keep using Social Media here is a short video on safety on the internet. No matter what the future brings, safety first.