When Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed legislation to make social media accounts illegal for under 14 year olds, it got me thinking.
How do you even define what a social media is? When does an app become a social media?
It seems there is some debate about what is and what isn't a social media.
Pixabay via Pexels
The archetypal social media has gotta be Facebook. It's so widespread it's ubiquitous. For most people, they probably heard the term "social media" when it was used to describe Facebook. But depending on your location or your age, it may or may not be a major social media for you.
And these days, there are many more social media, with the number increasing all the time. And as well as the new ones, I've noticed that a lot of apps that weren't social have moved into that sphere.
Your definition of what social media is may differ wildly according to your experience with technology - and that is largely influenced by your age.
Why do we call Facebook a social media?
It's because, the content on the site is made and posted by people who are not employed or paid by the social media company.
If you got your first phone after the advent of the smartphone and app store, this fact may seem obvious, but this is the defining feature of Facebook, because previous to the age of social media apps, we consumed most content from companies who paid the people that wrote for them.
In the very beginning, when Facebook was only used to connect and share with friends, we often used the term social network, but as the uses of the app have expanded, the term social media seems has become the common way to describe it.
So is social media basically somewhere anyone can share content?
In that case, we can include a bunch of apps like Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Pinterest, Youtube, Reddit, Quora, Tumblr, Medium, and also LinkedIn which walks the wobbly tightrope between social and professional. There are many many more. It also includes apps where we share bite-size content like Twitter/X.
But is this the only defining feature of a social media?
No. Let's take the example of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a media in which anyone can create and edit content. But we don't think of Wikipedia as social media. That's because we are not posting on Wikipedia with the aim of reacting to content, or the aim of receiving reactions from other users. So in addition to content creation by anyone, there is another key feature of social media. And that defining feature is that content is posted with the aim of receiving some kind of reaction from people. The above apps not only provide a platform to share content but they also provide ways for users to react to the content that they view. They provide a kind of social connection.
In that sense, many people include messaging apps under the umbrella of social media these days. The boundary between content sharing apps and messaging apps has become blurred, as people began creating larger and larger groups to chat in, to the extent that they began sharing content with people they don't know. Companies then also began using messaging apps as their interface with potential customers too. In these apps, you are sharing brief/long content with any number of people who you may (not) know and getting a reaction, so the boundary between social network apps and messaging has blurred and disappeared. Each app is not only used for messaging and has grown to have many different facets, such as video sharing. Some apps that were originally just for messaging also have follower counts now, making any distinction between social and messaging difficult.
Some examples of social media apps that came from the messaging category are WhatsApp, Slack, Messenger, iMessages, Teams, WeChat, Line, Viber, and Telegram. In these apps, you can put your reaction on a message or post. Some of these apps have groups in the tens of millions of users.
Does this cover all social media apps?
Not quite. The spread of social media has even reached business apps and we now see people complaining that their work apps have gone social too. As far as I'm concerned, if I'm using an app to share something and I have to care about peoples' reaction to it, then the app has gone social. A lot of people people have experienced that moment when their purely professional business app turned social. For me, the pivotal moment was when Jira decided to turn the corner and go social. Jira, which is a project management app for engineers, crossed into the domain of social on 1 July 2021 when you became able to give one of 6 reactions to every comment and message made in a project. After that, Outlook succumbed to the pull of social in October 2022, so we can now see how many people react to our emails and which emoji they choose. Slack also became more like other social media in 2023.
While we know that social media is bad for mental health and it increases anxiety, apps across many domains that we use on a regular basis are becoming more like social media and more anxiety inducing.
Will there be any apps left suitable for our children?
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