What is Social Media?
Social Media has so many different components and platforms I don’t believe there is a good answer to this question – at least in the way this question is usually meant i.e. what is Social Media’s essence.
Don’t get me wrong. There certainly are many concepts which pop up frequently when talking about Social Media, including digital connections, linked communities, content democratization, and non-hierarchical distributed media networks.
All good and well, but when it comes right down to it, the specific definition of social media doesn’t really matter too much.
The lines between classic 1.0 technologies such as email and consumer websites, 2.0 Social Media technologies such as Facebook and Twitter, and 3.0 technologies such as Machine Learning, Neurolinguistic Processing, Artificial Intelligence and Semantic Search, have all been blurred and crossed to the point where they are no longer even recognizable.
Better to instead ask what does all this Social Media “stuff” actually do?
And best to ask what does this stuff really do to improve our lives?