The explosion of social networking and Web 2.0 sites since the early 2000s gives us an opportunity to examine how we do everything – relationships, work, social life, politics, government, and even life itself – through social media. This can tempt us to the overwhelming conclusion that the study of social media means the study of everything, everywhere. Luckily, we can always return to the basics, beginning with what social media are by definition.

What are social media, really?

Consider the terminology. The term media is the plural form of medium, which is anything through which impressions or force are transmitted to affect things on the other side. Social describes the kind of media we are talking about, because they relate to people interacting. The term social media usually refers to digital technologies that help people interact. So it’s technically correct to write “Social media are [awesome, stupid, elemental, detrimental, whatever].” But it’s also ok if you write “Social media is [changing the world, turning my friends into zombies, etc]” because the singular form is in common usage. I will use the term “social media” as both plural and singular in this book.

This is the thing about social media: it is grounded in how people talk and behave, not in rules set by any authorities. Almost any standards at work in social media can be changed by users if enough of us start pushing against those standards. We create social media. Tech developers respond to us as they create software apps, also known as software platforms. Then we tweak their apps, using them in ways that developers never planned because these unforeseen uses fit our lifestyles. Or we choose other apps that fit us better. And then those developers respond to us again.

​And yes, social media does influence us too. But it can be surprising how much of what we do online was in practice in our society before social media became “a thing,” and how societal and cultural phenomena independent of technologies weave their ways into our online behaviors. Unpacking these influences requires explorations of history and theories in communication, sociology, anthropology, economics, and political science.

Case Study: What is Social Media?

Student Content

Social Media in Our Lives

On the outside, social media appears to be just another form of communication. We invest so much time in connecting with others across town, across the state, across the nation, even internationally. We post pictures that portray our daily lives whether it is the trips we go on or the people we spend time with. But social media, such as portrayed in the above story, is not always sunshine and rainbows. At least, not how it appears externally. Internally, most people have struggles and an identity that they would rather not share with the rest of the world, instead choosing to tell a happy story with no ups or downs. In a way, society has made it almost impossible for us to share the darkest parts of ourselves out of comfortability and for the portrayal of a perfect life.

My friend’s social media page has slightly altered since those years. She no longer unfollows people so her followers to following ratio is a wide range. She began to incorporate more pictures of not only her but of the accomplishments she is making and some struggles she has been having, and pictures with her friends and family. She no longer focused on the public to give her the attention and validation she so desperately craved and instead made deeper connections and reached out to her family instead. She switched her account to private while originally she had it on public in an effort to gain more attention, reminding me of the saying public by default, private by design. While her Instagram page may not completely reveal everything about her and her personal life, she no longer hides behind this utopian persona of love and laughter and has begun to understand the power social media has in the decisions made about what we want people to think about us.

When I think about my own social media page, I would like to think that I am not tricking anybody about who I am and what my life is full of. But when you think deeply about it, it is impossible for anyone to online to know everything about you, unless of course you are recording everything you do and everything you are feeling 24/7, but even though who is to say you are not acting differently because you are on camera, or lying about how you are feeling out of discomfort and wanting to appear a certain way. Is it that the affordances of social media allow us to only share so much, or is it that society has hindered our ability to share everything about ourselves?

My generation has grown up with the rise of social media. It seems as though it is part of our genetics in understanding how to use different apps or how to delete a comment we did not mean to post or even how to pretend like we did not see someone’s message when in reality we just did not feel like responding at the time it was received. We did not read any instructions on how to send a Snapchat. Instead, we clicked some buttons and figured it out on our own. It is strange to think about how social media is such an important part of our lives, but it is even stranger to think about why we let it. Why do we have these desires to post our pictures on Facebook from our weekend in Mexico? Why do we Tweet that message about how we just dropped our phone on our face while lying down? Why do we keep our Snapchat streaks with people we last talked to three years ago?

Eh, it does not need to be that deep! As long as you are using it safely and having a good time, who cares what you post!

 

About the author

Bella Villalpando was born and raised in the Bay Area in California. Currently she is a freshman at the University of Arizona double majoring in Care, Health & Society and Family Studies & Human Development. She is a drummer and is part of U of A’s Pride of Arizona Marching Band

Respond to this case study… This student wrote about some of the ways a user might curate their public facing identity on social media. How do the unique features of each platform inform the way users present themselves? Has social media changed the way we present ourselves and interact in the “real” world? If so, how?

Is this digital? Is this even new?

Technological determinism is among the broadest fallacies around social media use. Technological determinism is the belief that technologies are fully responsible for grand shifts in our world, instead of acknowledging the more complicated interplay of forces behind the phenomenon in question. While social media technologies have enormous effects on our lives, human cultural and societal factors are usually also at play. The following are two claims about social media that exemplify technological determinism and explanation of their more complicated realities.

Claim: Twitter “made” the Arab Spring

Misunderstandings about the Arab Spring, an explosion of protests against governments in the Middle East in 2011. Contrary to many claims in the media, Twitter was not responsible for the Arab Spring. Twitter was an important tool there, but relationships sustained in face-to-face interaction, and old-fashioned protest in public spaces like Tahrir Square, were the foundations of the Arab Spring, as researcher Paulo Gerbaudo found and presented in his 2012 book Tweets and the Streets. Zeynep Tufecki’s research in the Middle East and in activist movements with online components has also found that while speed and ease were benefits of organizing movements online, toppling regimes as protestors in the Arab Spring accomplished required substantial offline interaction including countless cups of tea. Video footage from the Egyptian protests in media including the song lyrics and music video #Jan2 reveal intensely organized physical encounters.

Claim: Youth are addicted to social media, and this is a new phenomenon

Today’s North American teenagers choose to spend much more of their time with friends online, according to Pew Research Center, while past generations socialized more in person. However, there are many factors responsible for this other than today’s ubiquity of digital technologies. One factor is that youth are not allowed to be out as much as they once were. Today’s youth deal with parents who hover more closely and give them less freedom in public spaces than their parents were given themselves, and curfews and other restrictions remind teens that they are unwelcome in public spaces. For her 2014 book It’s Complicated, danah boyd conducted qualitative research, including interviews with teens and observations of their homes and neighborhoods. She found that teens were responding through social media use to physical restrictions on their movement, pursuing social relationships in their homes, online.

To understand the human condition in a digital era, we must critically consider claims of human transformation by and revolution through digital technologies. In other words, it is important to study what social media are actually doing in our world, as opposed to human assumptions, hopes, and fears about them.

Rely on the science you understand

Scientific research is a crucial tool for understanding any phenomenon in our world, yet the scientific methodology behind many claims around social media is misleading or poorly understood by those spreading it. Here is an example: claims that social media is ruining people’s brains are often based on interpreted neuroscience from entities like the UCLA Brain Mapping Center to support these arguments. Yet neuroscientific findings require some understanding of neuroscience and a critical approach; without these, researchers have found that neuroscientific findings can be used to add support to any claim, regardless of truth. Many turn to neuroscience when they want to add weight to their beliefs about social media, but too often that weight comes at the cost of validity and accuracy.

It is important to learn the ways these media really impact how we communicate and behave, but we can achieve considerable new understanding by using observations and conversations or interviews as human research instruments – this is the practice of qualitative inquiry or qualitative research. We can ask ourselves and those in our lives how social media shapes our world, and pursue the answers through looking, listening, and carefully interpreting. What can we learn about this new world of communication by simply sharing our stories and impressions of our behavior with social media in our lives? When we collect these accounts and analyze across them for themes – that is, when we examine social media and ourselves using qualitative inquiry – we may not feel the need for neuroscience to confirm our new knowledge.

Infinite data, limited information bridges, and rare knowledge

Even if claims around today’s technological “revolution” may be overblown, our minds and information practices are certainly changing as we use social networking sites. Among the starkest of these changes is in how we deal with ways of knowing about our world, through concepts in the discipline of Information. To understand societal changes in which social media plays a role, it is best to first understand the concepts of data, information, and knowledge. Think of data as raw material in the world of ideas and information concepts: a list of millions of likes on Instagram. A glimpse of a scene you see walking down the street but do not yet fully understand. Information is the bridge to making meaning from that data:  a research article interpreting findings from a study, or a newspaper article making sense of observed phenomena such. Knowledge is what we should ideally do with information. We synthesize the information by considering it in our minds among all of our understandings of and experiences in the world, in order to truly know it as knowledge. The scene you saw on the street may be explained by the newspaper article you read. However, you may also realize from your own experience including conversations with friends around the topic that the newspaper article author presented a biased view of what you saw, or that you understand things about the scene now than the newspaper author did not.

The web allows us to take in limitless new data from many sources, and to seek out information to make sense of that data – although this will not always be good information. With so many streams of information coming in, we have trouble carefully forming knowledge, that deep sense of all we learn. Knowledge is both the most important and the most ignored stage of knowing in the digital age. In this interview for the podcast Hidden Brain, computer scientist Cal Newport describes deep work , or the act of sustained thinking and creation, as one of the few forms of human labor that computers cannot easily replace. Newport also discusses deep work in this Ted Talk.

Digital systems such as computers present us with a lot of new data points, such as pulling keywords from Twitter posts. Computers can sometimes even transform these data points into knowledge, such as by combining keywords from Twitter posts into news stories automatically emailed to you. However, to process what publics express on Twitter in the most valuable ways, posts must be studied critically – are they bots? Are they deceptive? – and carefully – what is the history behind this trend? What are the unseen forces shaping it? Journalists and analysts and many other interpreting forces online can help us make sense of this data as information, but can we trust them? Is the information true, and are their other ways of interpreting these findings that we should also seek to understand? Most importantly, what do we really know about this situation that can serve us moving forward? How can it be applied to more broadly explain phenomena in the world or predict interactions in our world?

Computers cannot create knowledge in the way it is conceptualized here, and they may never be capable of doing so. Humans can, but only if we just give ourselves time to think, study, question, and theorize. Knowledge requires processing across multiple sources of information to create new ideas.

In short, we are in an Information Age in which human knowledge is growing rarer, even as data and information proliferate. Your own knowledge must come through you. This is why in this book you will be asked to reflect on your own experiences, stories, and visions around social technologies. This will not only help you to understand how social media is impacting you; it will help shed light on a world that is often broadcast, yet little understood.