Reflection 1: What Are Social Media?

At the 2018 UKAIS (UK Academy for Information Systems) conference, Maxim Wolf, Julian Sims, and Huadong Yang presented an “early research paper” titled “Social Media? What Social Media?” As well as conducting a set of case studies exploring how a bank, a consulting company, and an outsourcing company use social media, the researchers gathered a range of social media definitions. “All definitions,” they concluded, “agree that social media implies use of online or internet technologies.”¹

Beyond that, they grouped definitions into “technocratic” – focusing on platforms and what they do – and “performative” – “concentrating on what the platforms are used for rather than what the technology was intended to support,”² and used Google Scholar to identify some of the most frequently cited scholarly definitions: boyd and Ellison’s 2008 definition “of social media as a ‘platform to create profiles, make explicit and traverse relationships’”³ leads with 13,000, followed by Kaplan and Haenlein’s 2010 taxonomy, which splits “the field into 6 distinctive categories (Blogs, Social Networking Sites, Collaboration Projects, Content Communities, Virtual Social Worlds, and Virtual Game Worlds)” with 11,000.⁴

As Wolf et al. noted, not only did the researcher(s) in their case studies have a different understanding of what constituted social media from the participants, but “the participants did not agree on the one single definition” either.⁵

For a very good reason, there is no Ego Media definition of social media.

When they began planning the project, the Ego Media investigators were aware that, as Max Saunders says, “Five years is a long time in cyberspace, and we knew right at the beginning that the field would change over those five years and that we built into the design of the project an attempt to monitor what the changes were.” In the original Document of Work submitted to the ERC (European Research Council), the team “focused not on defining the media but looking at the self-presentational forms that were developing.” They discussed “new media” in the plural, writing that “Given their rapid evolution, an attempt to provide a definitive mapping of the variety of computer-mediated self-presentations would not be viable. Instead, the project will conceptualise the field, developing the distinction between ‘Familiar, reconfigured, and emergent’ media forms (Herring 2012).”⁶

In other words, awareness of the pace of change of platforms/apps/media and the ways in which people interacted with them – and with each other through them – meant that any attempt to define “new” or “social” media could prove counterproductive: there was a danger that a definition that felt right at the project's inception could be obsolete by its conclusion and might end up channeling research down a path that, without warning, morphed into a dead end. “That point about ‘emergent’ was important in the planning discussions,” Max writes, “because we had a strong sense that … whatever we thought it was at the start, it would have turned into several other things by the end.”⁷

Why We Post, an ERC-funded project led by anthropologist Professor Daniel Miller at UCL (University College London) came up with a definition that simultaneously encompasses and eludes both the technocratic and the performative.⁸ In their first publication How the World Changed Social Media (2016) they explain how they “have defined social media as the colonisation of the space between traditional broadcast and private dyadic communication, providing people with a scale of group size and degrees of privacy that we have termed scalable sociality. However, we would not wish our definition to be seen as too tight or absolute … rather it is a heuristic device which helps to clarify the parameters of our study.”⁹ Like Ego Media’s, it’s a pragmatic approach, which anticipates emergent forms and practices, creating a definitional context within which they can be situated alongside and compared with earlier forms and practices. There are, however, significant differences. The Ego Media team considered the Why We Post approach extremely useful because of the

clarity with which it makes a case for observing an individual’s social media use holistically, using the concept of “polymedia”: i.e. understanding that what someone does on one platform needs to be seen in relation to what they do on others: in studying self-presentation online we need to understand how it gets spread across a number of platforms, and that this may even produce multiple online personalities. An interesting example arose from Rebecca Roach’s report on her interviewing of epilepsy sufferers, some of whom in addition to their personal Facebook pages had joined a private FB epilepsy group, to which they would post different material. The site About Me was discussed, which aggregates a user’s different social media accounts (though which presumably might miss such private group memberships?)

They could also see the justification for the UCL researchers concentrating on the content of online interactions rather than the platforms. However, they disagreed strongly with their claims that “Social media should not be seen primarily as the platforms upon which people post, but rather as the contents that are posted on these platforms,” and that “it is the content rather than the platform that is most significant when it comes to why social media matters.”¹⁰ The Ego Media team’s position is that content and platform affordances are inextricably entwined, and as Stijn Peeters’s research into IRC and Twitter demonstrates, each impacts on the other.

Like their first publication’s title, the Why We Post definition of social media signals a political stance, one which is made explicit in the opening chapter, “What is Social Media?”, where they introduce the “theory of attainment” adopted from earlier work by Miller and Sinanan.

“[N]ew technologies,” they write

are often accompanied by a kind of moral panic, frequently fostered by journalism. These suggest that as a result of this new technology we have lost some essential element of our authentic humanity. … At the same time others have a utopian view that new technologies make us in some manner post-human.

Our theory of attainment argues that these technologies make no difference whatsoever to our essential humanity. … It just acknowledges that this has now become simply part of what human beings can do, as has driving a car.¹¹

Miller and Sinanan’s “theory of attainment,” outlined in Webcam (2014), does more than “just acknowledge that this has now become simply part of what human beings can do.” It stands in direct opposition to approaches that present “new media … as an additional and problematic mediation in our lives,” and regard new technology “as something artificial that imposes itself between the conversationalists and mediates the conversation” (Sherry Turkle’s 2011 work Alone Together is cited as an example of this approach).¹² That, they suggest, quoting from Digital Anthropology by Miller and Horst (2012), is inimical to the discipline of anthropology, which works on the basis that: “there is no such thing as pure human immediacy; interacting face-to-face is just as culturally inflected as digitally mediated communication but … [as Goffman wrote] … we fail to see the framed nature of face-to-face interaction because these frames work so effectively.”¹³

While the statement that “this has now become simply part of what human beings can do, as has driving a car” might imply the theory of attainment is based on an assumption that technology is politically/ethically neutral, I don’t think the authors are suggesting anything that simplistic. As both their definition and the two “scales of sociality” along which they place various social media forms and practices (these run “from the most private to the most public” and “from the smallest group to the largest groups”) indicate,¹⁴ this is less about the tech, per se, and more about how scholars approach researching that intricate combination of technology/ies, how people use it/them, and what they use it/them for.

Nevertheless, electing to call something the “theory of attainment” accentuates the positive and situates Why We Post’s approach within a discourse of progress/growth/development that is, arguably, typically neoliberal. Attainment, according to the OED, is “[t]hat which is attained or acquired by continued effort; esp. a personal acquirement or accomplishment.”¹⁵ Acquiring a new attainment is an accomplishment. It is both something that we have worked to achieve and something which increases our capabilities, our resources, and/or our power-to-do. So, while a new attainment may make “no difference whatsoever to our essential humanity,” surely it must increase our ability to express/enact/perform it?

In Hello World: Travels in Virtuality, (2004), writer and academic Sue Thomas fantasizes about being able to sleep online: “The nearest I can get is to curl up close to the machine and doze through the tunes of mail popping in all night, but it’s not the same as actually sleeping online,” and wondered: “If I log on and then walk into the other room away from the machine, am I still logged on just because the machine is connected to the web?” She – or e: much of the book is written in the spivak gender – didn’t think so. While “it’s comforting to know the web is there, so close, so accessible, … I am not actually in it unless I am engaging with it.”¹⁶ Sleeping online, e concluded, would be impossible “until I can have a direct link through to my brain, until perhaps I am able to actually dream online, I cannot ever sleep online."

By the time Hello World was published, Thomas had been experiencing life online for a decade. E had “discovered” the internet in 1995 and immersed eirself in its places/cultures, “moving from websites to message boards to the exotic textual environment of LambdaMOO and back again into the comparatively vanilla world of plain email.” By the time of writing e felt that

The internet is my body. It’s an extra set of senses, an additional brain, a second pair of eyes.
I can’t function fully without it now. I mean, sure, I can ~function~ … but I can’t properly ~think~ ¹⁷

The internet was part of em but it was also a place. In the spring of 2000, Thomas traveled across Australia by train. The journey took four days, and it wasn’t long before e started feeling homesick: “Not for my house … but for the network which even then was unbelievably continuing on without me.” If e had been logged on, e would have had “several windows open. Email, plus a web-browser (probably several sites running); ICQ; maybe chat if I was in the mood; a couple of lists or three plus a community site and, all the time in the corner of the screen, the inhabitants of the Living Room at LambdaMOO nattering aimlessly away.” Later on in the journey e wakes in eir tiny cabin, to “a cup of tea and two tiny biscuits” and is “hit by a terrible absence… all of a sudden I missed my computer so much it hurt.” This virtuality, e argues, “has turned the notion of ‘being in a place’ on its head, and now we can be in a number of places at once, now that we have a presence in a way we could not have before, we have to ask questions about what being anywhere really means.”¹⁸ In other words, cyberspace changes the meaning of place.

Thomas returned to writing about virtual/meatspaces in Technobiophilia: Nature and Cyberspace, where she suggests “a connection between our passion for cyberspace and our affection for the natural world,”¹⁹ as “the language and concepts we use often reflect a strong sense of the online world as a real place.” She defines technobiophilia as “the innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes as they appear in technology”²⁰: a tendency reflected in both the truth that, as Gretchen McCulloch writes, “the most commonly used sets of emoji are the faces and hands, like the smile, the face with tears of joy, the thumbs up, and the crossed fingers,”²¹ the ubiquity of cat videos, but mostly, for Thomas, in how we use metaphors: “the cloud,” “surfing the internet,” and the idea of “cyberspace” itself²² being obvious place-related instances. She sounds a note of caution about whether any online environment can be a place, quoting Yi Fu Tuan (echoing Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding): “‘An object or place achieves concrete reality when our experience of it is total, that is, through all the senses as well as with the active and reflective mind.’ Ah, the senses. Can we really experience the physical senses in a virtual environment without some kind of digital augmentation to stimulate the brain?”²³

What is a place?

“I’m a linguist, and I live on the internet,” writes Gretchen McCulloch on page 3 of Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language (2019). Max Saunders and Clare Brant both point to a major change over the years that the Ego-Media project ran.

Max:

One of the … big changes which has pretty much coincided with the span of the project, is that it no longer really makes sense to talk about the distinction between online and offline. Being offline was understandable when you turned off your desktop, and went into another room or went to sleep. But if you take your phone to bed with you, or put it on the bedside table, in a sense you’re never offline. So we found that distinction really not working anymore

Clare:

the boundary between offline and online which we thought was conceptually present when we started [the project] has vanished, really. People just are dipping in and out of offline, and online is as real or more real. People are mediatized in profound ways.

Miller et al. agree: “When the study of the internet began people commonly talked about two worlds: the virtual and the real. By now it is very evident that there is no such distinction – the online is just as real as the offline. … Our research provides considerable evidence that social media should be regarded … as a place where many of us spend part of our lives.” However, they draw a line between social media and “what was thought of as the internet”:

Obviously social media builds on prior uses of the internet for social and communicative purposes. Yet there are clearly as many discontinuities with prior uses of the internet as continuities. It might therefore be better to grant social media its own status as a topic for research, and allow for the possibility that it is often the very opposite of what was thought of as the internet, even while sharing the same space.²⁴

In Because Internet, Gretchen McCulloch compares social media with Ray Oldenburg’s third places. For Oldenburg, “the first place is the home – the most important place of all. … It will harbor individuals long before the workplace is interested in them and well after the world of work casts them aside. The second place is the work setting, which reduces the individual to a single, productive role. … But it also provides the means to a living.” Third places are “the core settings of informal public life … [the] great variety of public places that host the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work.”²⁵ McCulloch paraphrases Oldenburg’s description of third places. They are “first of all social centers, distinguished by an emphasis on conversation and playfulness, regular attendees who set the tone for newcomers, the freedom to come and go as you please, a lack of formal membership requirements, and a warm, unpretentious feeling of home away from home.”²⁶

“When I've tried to articulate the appeal of Linguist Twitter to linguists who aren’t on it,” she writes, “I’ve talked in terms of hallways:

You know how the best part of a conference is the hallway? Imagine if you could have that hallway available at any time of the day or night! … Unlike an email inbox or a chat with a specific person, you can drop in on a social media feed at any time of the day or night and expect to see both regulars and newcomers.²⁷

She’s far from the first to draw that comparison. In his 2006 article “Computer-Mediated Communication as a Virtual Third Place,” Charles Soukup wrote that “the concept has been used to suggest that computer-mediated contexts have particular characteristics … [but] the idea of a ‘computer-mediated’ or ‘virtual’ third place has lacked systematic analysis and theoretical treatment.” He explores how scholars had, over the previous few years applied the concept, and concluded that while, in some ways, such online “spaces” manifest some of the characteristics of Oldenburg’s “third place,”

three key characteristics differ dramatically between traditional third places and social interaction online:

(1) third places emphasize localized community;
(2) third places are social levelers; and
(3) third places are accessible.

Oldenburg prominently and strongly advocates a return to geographically localized communities.²⁸

In other words, the fact that one of the joys of social media spaces – and of their precursors – is that they’ve “turned the notion of ‘being in a place’ on its head,” enabling us to “be in a number of places at once,”²⁹ allowing people to form or join geographically dispersed communities that feel more congenial than the one(s) within which individuals are physically situated, makes them very different from the third places Oldenburg envisaged. Oldenburg’s third places are firmly grounded in specific territories and local communities.³⁰ Interestingly, though, when he summarizes third place characteristics, Oldenburg omits to mention their grounding in a specific geography focusing, instead, on how “The character of a third place is determined most of all by its regular clientele and is marked by a playful mood, which contrasts with people’s more serious involvement in other spheres.”³¹

I’m not entirely convinced by the definition of social media as an Oldenburgian third place: be it real, virtual, or metaphorical. And not only because of the (largely) supra-geographical nature of social media. The idea, however, crystallizes the extent to which definitions of social media are highly context-dependent. See, for example, Dustin Stout’s Social Media Statistics 2019: Top Networks By the Numbers.³² Stout omitted two of the world’s biggest social media platforms from his analysis, because the people within his community of practice (mostly anglophone, mostly those whose jobs involve using social media to promote/market/sell goods and/or services) are unlikely to be using – or “targeting” users of – Chinese social media platforms WeChat and Weibo.

I’m not convinced, either, that the relationship(s) between social media and place can be reduced to identity with a particular kind of place per se. But as the absence of WeChat and Weibo from Stout’s analysis shows, we can’t ignore the relationships between social media and real-world geographies/geopolitics. Place matters and the relationships – literal and metaphorical – between online and offline spaces are complex, shifting, and resistant to mapping.

So, in Oldenburgian terms, are social media…

Oldenburg’s third places are partly defined by not being first (home) or second (work) places. The index of The Great Good Place has three entries for work:

attitudes towards, 51
as the second place, 16
third place as alternative to, 44 (my italics)³³

I have worked (mostly) outside the academy, and most often in a communications/public relations capacity, where social media use has, for most of the past decade, been both a fact of life and one which enabled those working with small budgets to dramatically increase effectiveness and reach.³⁴ For me, as for most of the people for whom Stout compiled his statistics, if social media is a place, it’s not a third place. Or, more accurately, it is … but it is also, simultaneously a second place. If that is, second and third spaces can be said to exist in the same way that they did when Oldenburg was writing The Great Good Place, first published in 1989.

Think of the growth of the gig economy, within which “creative” freelancers – the more privileged variety, for whom this mode of working, with its prioritizing of freedom over security, is experienced as liberation from a 9-5 routine rather than a descent into hand-to-mouth precarity – have often been depicted working in coffee shops (one of Oldenburg’s subtitular third places). Or widespread concerns about how people were – pre-Covid – routinely expected to respond to out-of-hours electronic communications from home.

It’s not only the boundaries between on- and offline worlds that are, for people with internet access, dissolving – with the caveat that, while dissolving, they are also shifting, reforming, and in some contexts and circumstances, being reestablished. I originally wrote this, for example, less than a week after, in a stark demonstration of how swiftly and completely these boundaries can be reintroduced, the government of India blocked internet access across Jammu and Kashmir. And I edited it on Saturday, October 17, 2020, the day Londoners began having to observe a series of more stringent limitations on in-person social interactions, as the British Government continued its strikingly inept attempt to limit the second wave of Covid-19. It’s also other boundaries: something pandemic lockdowns have highlighted. Oldenburg’s second (work)places have, for many of the more privileged among us, been absorbed into our first (home)places. Meetings conducted via videoconferencing platforms have, in many cases, given us (literal) insights into colleagues’ lives. These adaptations have also, for many people, played with time boundaries: many, previously office-bound parents (most often mothers) and carers of school-age children have found themselves trying to fit their work around their children’s learning times, instead of trying to cram it into their learning times, while other people have discovered that having their work laptop at home with them makes it much harder to switch off both literally and metaphorically: one change I have noticed over this pandemic year is that – now so many people who were previously office-based are wfh (working from home) – the extent to which out-of-“normal”-office-hours working has become normalized. My freelance life has always involved working weekends. Previously, however, they were the quiet times when I could focus on work requiring deep, uninterrupted concentration. Now, the flow of communications – email in particular – whilst somewhat attenuated, continues unabated.

Can social media be defined as one of the means by which we dissolve boundaries?

The metaphor of a map of undefinitions of social media makes perfect sense if we’re thinking about social media in terms of place(s). It enables us to encompass key concepts such as

• platforms: a term which signifies, if not always a geographic location, in that physical platforms can be moved, at least something that is, or can be, geographically located
• ownership: of platforms, posts – another term signifying location-based objects – and data
• situation: see our theme essay

But what about the other dimensions that we use to identify what social media are? Social media as a set of tools? Or an attainment?

What about the differences in the ways that people perceive and define social media? What about individual differences in attitudes towards social media that both arise from – and feed into – their perspectives and definitions?

People who earn a living from “doing” social media define it differently from those for whom it is a social space.

People for whom social media is a subject of research define it differently from those for whom it provides an opportunity to earn money and/or an environment within which to socialize.

Researchers from different disciplines define social media in different ways.

People from different generations, and with different degrees of enjoyment/interest in politics, types of social circle, orientations towards or against different technologies, define social media differently.

What might a map of definitions by these different constituencies look like? How meaningful would it be given that – as Wolf et al.’s case study shows – it’s likely that people within specific constituencies will differ amongst themselves?

If one of the dimensions of our map comprises various types of people divided into constituencies by their different kinds of relationships with and attitudes towards social media, which might be determined in part by their differing professions, statuses (no pun intended), and personalities – then surely we also need to think about how we define social media users?

In our theme essay on Forms and Practices Alex Georgakopoulou writes of how Ego Media team members moved from positing “a linear, unidirectional, time-bound relationship between forms and media influence [which] runs the risk of technological determinism and overstresses novelty … toward contextual approaches: these recognize the need to investigate forms not on their own but as part of the assemblage of media affordances, algorithms, and communicative practices on different platforms.”

It is, in other words, impossible to separate social media as “places” or “platforms” from the ways in which people use them, and the contexts within which they do so: which suggests that any map of definitions – or undefinitions – must be both multidimensional and constantly changing.

Perhaps, then, it’s a good job that digital media are impacting as much on the ways we represent terrain(s) and think about and interact with maps, place, and space as they are on the ways in which we represent ourselves and communicate with each other.

But that’s another – if closely-related – story…