What is Social About Social Media?
Some believe that all forms of media are social because they allow people to make meaning together. This means that reading a newspaper, a print periodical, a book or even a postcard is counted as a social activity.
If reading is considered as social then nothing is more social than social media, because not only do we take in information but also generate content and share them to a large scale audience. Besides the circulation of information social media is a two-way conversation, people can communicate with each other and maintain or even form relationships, and that is evident through the several cases we see of couples who met on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, and eventually got married then reproduced. Thus social media doesn’t only bring people together but also has a role in increasing the population. Another example that doesn’t involve love and affection, is the “We are all Khaled Said” Facebook page that brought up a revolution in Egypt. The mentioned Facebook page gathered a great population of people through means of communication and brought up a major change in the political institutions in Egypt. Social media also enables human co-operation, which is obvious through the editing of articles on Wikipedia or the joint writing of a document on Google docs.
Thus we come to an understanding that social media has distinctive qualities that make it social and “being social” is not one of them. There are 4 forms of sociality that determine if a medium is social or not: Information and cognition, communication, community and collaboration. When we talk about social media being social we should specify the different media outlets. For example what makes Amazon social is not what makes Facebook social. Amazon for instance gives information about books and other products however Facebook has inbuilt communication features that are frequently used, it involves 3 types of sociality: information, community and communication.
Social media showed great benefits in communication, however if we were not critical enough, roaming around in virtual global networks, makes us less and less committed to our roles in traditional community formations such as the family, church/mosque, and neighborhood (everyone outside the screen becomes unfamiliar). In this case people would become historical subjects, once defined as citizens or members of a class possessing certain rights, have been transformed into subjects with agency, dynamic actors called “users,” customers who complain, and “prosumers.”
