I only emphasized that as a response to polar bear, who raised an argument about “scholars” and their definitions. If he wants a scholarly definition, he’s got one.
That said, while the average schmuck doesn’t know what Web 2.0 is, he does perceive the increased responsiveness of these sites. Facebook et al feel more like real-time applications, not a static page that you have to refresh constantly. That’s even more true with their dedicated phone apps. The increased interactivity leads to very different user behavior.
Then why did I regularly see people receive glurge on their fax machines, pick a few friends, and send it on to them? It’s the same shit that happens on Facebook every day.
Obviously I don’t believe that fax machines are social media. Which is why I think any definition that doesn’t properly exclude them is a dumb one. Or email, if it really must be on computers. Though why is it ok to artificially add “on a computer” to the definition, but “social” and “media” are read literally?
Different people have different things in mind when they use the term “social media.” By some people’s definitions, the SDMB is firmly inside; by others’, it’s firmly outside; and by others’, it’s somewhere on the fuzzy border.
I don’t want to take that away from you. I really approve of that stance. But I’m as social here as I get anywhere. Maybe, like Schrodinger’s cat, it’s both social and unsocial in superposition.
People don’t get to post twitterpated* things without being called out. Does that make it unsocial?
I think my issue might be that message boards like the SDMB predate the term “social media” by many years and the term “social media” was specially coined for new more interactive phenomena like Facebook, Twitter, etc.
It’s almost like the machine that was invented called the “log splitter.” I could hand my son an axe and have him chop firewood and by some technical definition he would be a “log splitter,” but the term clearly is not meant to define him.
I haven’t been able to find out who coined the term “social media,” or when, or in reference to what; but some of the possibilities date back to the 1990s.
Nah, it just seems like everyone else does FB. But I don’t and I suspect there’s lots of people on this board that don’t either.
One disadvantage to not doing Real™ social media is when I tried to find a room to rent. Some renters wanted to see my FB page, others wanted me to sign up for some site that required a FB/Google/other social media account to log in. Since I didn’t have one of those accounts, I couldn’t do it.
I prefer to think of it as asocial media, since it lets me sit in my room and be asocial.
The test case for all distinctions, though, is Reddit, (that is, if the person drawing the distinction does indeed consider Reddit to be social media). They’re a bunch of fora too that are not just people’s personal feeds and are not focused on one individual.
I think what people are trying to convey by drawing a distinction is that the media are large enough that you can both actively try to connect people like Facebook or LinkedIn or more passively draw people together through the network effect.
I think a more appropriate term is “social network”, which I would admit that Reddit is because it is so large. So while the SDMB isn’t a “social network”, it is “social media”.
Wrong. Because the platform is established for generating exchanges even if a single user happens to be tedious.
And the big vehicles housed at fire stations shouldn’t be called “fire trucks,” because the trucks themselves are neither on fire nor delivering fire. But… maybe, just maybe… the English language assigns meanings to short phrases that turn them into compound nouns, where the meaning of the words is not an overliteral reading of the multiple words themselves!
[pause]
Naaaaaaaaaah! [/stevemartin]
When I think someone is wrong, but I can’t explain why, that’s usually a clue that I myself am in error.
If the board gets a slick new interface but maintains the same content and purpose, could it them become social media?
Faxes are not social media. Stipulated. Topic over.
Nobody has defined fax machines as social media. That’s a big honkin’ straw man that a few contributors made up out of whole cloth while everyone else laughed at them. I mean, I might as well be posting that under your definition, pornography on VR headsets is social media because… whatever.
Either you don’t understand what a strawman is, or you don’t understand the form of argument I’m using. Whatever. Let me approach this in a different direction.
You don’t accept the “scholarly” definition, apparently. Web 2.0 may have a fuzzy boundary, but it’s pretty damn obvious in this case. And you don’t accept the common usage definition, where if someone asks for your social media contact information, they’re expecting your Facebook/LinkedIn/Instagram/whatever IDs and not your fuckin’ SDMB username (let alone email). And the one definition you have provided applies to email, IRC, Usenet, BBSes, the Prodigy forums, and a ton of crap that is far, far removed from anything modern. Do you even think the web is a requirement? Or just computers, as you previously stated?
Can you please start responding to things I’m actually arguing, as opposed to making big deals of propositions that you and I both know are ridiculous (faxes) or ignoring things that I’ve already written (soda analogy) for which my position should be clear?
I think of the current crop of social media as an evolution that began with things like IRC and Newsgroups, then MSN and ICQ and Message Boards, then led to dedicated apps like Facebook etc. There are still some I do not get, like Tumblr and TikTok, and there are others I wish were not so popular because I can see how awful they are, but overall I am pro-Social Media as a concept, if not always its execution.
I can’t really argue that it isn’t, but when I use the term “social media,” I’m not thinking of message boards. Similar to how I recognize that a square is technically a type of rectangle, but when I talk about rectangles, I’m not thinking of squares. As others have said, I think of social media as something that primarily connects people online who already know each other in real life, while message boards tend to be premised on strangers coming together to discuss common interests.
“Technically” means “yes”. Think of, “Well technically she’s a murderer but…”
BBS’s long predated IRC and Usenet. I first directed my 300 baud modem to WWIVnet, MicroNet, or any local-access echo system. FIDOnet was a major international player; it was fun reading headers to watch the message relay hops. I was social-mediating a decade before the Net was widely available with anything beyond ftp and Gopher sites.
BTW, the dope falls 100% within the definition for web 2.0 that is given on Wikipedia (based on the work that first coined the term). I would link, if I weren’t on my phone.
No. The term came about to describe something different than a mere message board. The key features of social media are the ability to make friends, have likes/voting, and have a newsfeed that is personalized by an algorithm.
Saying a message board is social media is like saying that IRC is a form of instant messaging. Yes, the actual interactions are ultimately similar, but the way it came about and the function it is supposed to serve are different.
Now, there have been efforts to add social network features to forums. There are the friends lists here, which could be important if they actually did anything. And other forums will have like and such. Reddit is the furthest along, to the point that I can see technically calling it social media–though it is cited specifically as an outlier among social media.
Another way to grasp what I’m saying is this: Nothing on the SDMB will go viral on the SDMB, spreading further and further. Everything posted goes to everyone. The only way an SDMB post can go viral is for it to be communicated elsewhere online. But social networks allow “going viral” to happen within their own platforms. They are ultimately popularity based, and the SDMB isn’t.
I had forgotten about BBSes. My roommate during the 90s had his own that he ran. It was definitely social media, he made many friends that led to IRL socialising too. It was also my own easing into what the Internet was, though I only ever looked over his shoulder.