People, Not Posts

Is Germ social media? I get asked this question once in a while and it’s led me to reflect on this term “social media,” or to notice more how and when we use it. I want to think through that a bit more here.

Germ is not, strictly speaking, social media. Why? Because it’s not media, it’s a messenger. You can send media in a message (ok, many things on the roadmap, I know), but it’s not about the media, it’s about the conversation. Does that make it not social media?

We use this term as a catch-all today. Everything is social media, sort of. Everything is also the internet. But where terms came from has insights for us. Why is it even called social media, anyway?

Here’s what I’ve osmosed along the way as a literacy theorist and dabbler in critical internet studies [not going to heavily cite this just go with me]: the term “social media” emerged from the adjective “social” qualifying “media.” So as “old media” (newspapers and TV) became “new media” (newspapers and videos on websites), they became “social media” when users (people) were able to leave comments and share via that little menu at the corner. So it was still the media, but turned social.

What happened with social media is people started meeting each other in the comments, and features grew that were as much about meeting the other people as it was about finding information.

MySpace comes to mind. I was not a huge myspacer but I remember the era. The purpose of myspace in theory is the music, but profiles were also very important. Girls were learning html to edit their MySpace pages. So what music you liked, who your top 5 friends were (was that MySpace?), what music played when someone navigated to your page, how it was visually stylized–social media became about expressing your individuality through the media you like and also about finding your people through the media you had in common. So the original form of social media gave way to a more emphasized social media, where shareable and annotatable media became an occasion for people to define their own individuality and build out their social graph.

I suppose what the story above suggests is that social media became the pretense for social networking. I’m reminded of this article I used to teach about the role menus played in restaurant interactions between servers and patrons. Basically the finding was that all of the conversations between servers and patrons were about the menu. “Is this good,” “Do you have this today,” “Can I tell you about our specials.” So the implication for literacy theory, the study of reading and writing, is that people use artifacts in conversation to structure what they talk about–the same way you and your friend from high school just Instagram DM memes back and forth to each other. People are awkward and need something to talk about. What I want to conclude is this pat thing: media is the excuse for us to talk to each other.

But then I remember how as a kid I was on AIM, and people always e-mailed, and… communication didn’t onlyemerge out of engaging with media. But there’s something there, right?

I went and looked at the Wikipedia articles for social networking and social media . The social networking article is much much shorter and locates the term with the behavioral sciences, suggesting a much narrower, academic usage. Basically it seems like social media is the mass-usage term for all the ways we engage with each other online, but there’s not a sharp difference drawn. The articles for social media and social networking service list the same websites as the largest such sites in the world, both starting with Facebook and followed by YouTube. Yet by what I’m unpacking here, I would’ve thought Youtube wouldn’t be considered social networking, only social media. So where I’m landing is that these terms meaningfully have no difference.

Maybe I want them to. Is that where I’m going?

I keep thinking about dating apps. Aren’t dating apps social networking? Or no, because you don’t grow a network, you just meet one person at a time? Or maybe they’re just left out of the conversation because everyone is prude and we don’t want to think about the fact that hundreds of millions of people every year meet on dating apps?

What about the messengers, are they social media? The Wikipedia lists say they are. They’re just listed in terms of size. Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, Tiktok. Would Tinder make it if they had enough users? LinkedIn? It seems like yes.

Maybe what I’m reaching for is that I want there to be a term that’s not social media because we need it to mean something. We need social networking to not be just an academic term or a boring activity from Office Space but actually the purpose of our digital technologies: to find each other and build our communities. Hell, the media part of social media has been ruined. Facebook is slop. Youtube is slop. Instagram, slop.

Does the term ‘social media’ still have any utility? Why have I not deleted Facebook account or even my Twitter? It’s not for the media, it’s for the networks I built there.

I have this new theory of social media I’m working on, which is really a theory of social networking: namely, that there are three separate activities we do online on a spectrum of what we still variously call “social media”

Discovery - find who you’re looking for across the different parts of your life

Coordination - respond, resolve, and make plans faster and more consistently

Actualization - track and improve your wellbeing and skills alone and with friends, professionals, and your devices

The “media” in social media helps with discovery because we want to talk to people who like the things we like–but it’s not the only way to find people. I’d say Tinder is also a social discovery service, and so is Craiglist and (bloop!) so is DoorDash.

Coordination services can look like productivity tools, like Superhuman’s email client, but can also be location-sharing based services that help you find your people and link up more quickly. We don’t think of FindMy or Life360 as social media, but when Ev Williams builds “Mozi,” we do.

Finally, actualization is about health and skills, whether you’re sharing Strava runs with friends or going to a group therapy session online.

Anytime we’re online together, that’s social media. So maybe the term is tired and needs some updating. Maybe that’s what I uncovered here.

I think I care about the term social networking because I care about us and our communities, and so does Germ. Of course I love media. But I’m not here for the media, I’m here for you.

I’m thinking about the AT Protocol, and how it empowers the individual user with all of their data, preferences, and social graph, to move around the Atmosphere as they see fit. Maybe what will finally turn social media into social networking is the primacy of the person over the primacy of the post.

Social media was once owned by the media, it was the media. A newspaper set up a website, and let people build accounts to be able to comment. Then platforms like YouTube and Facebook usurped the media’s role in our information ecosystem in order to let people socially engage with media from across the web, not just on one individual publication’s website at a time. As they bloated out social media, they built us the social features that are the heart of modern digital social networking: profiles, social graphs, groups, and DMs.

Maybe atproto’s architecture completes a transition from social media to social networking–and from media-owned relationships, via platform-owned relationships, to people-owned relationships.

What we do with those relationships is up to us. I suggest we discover. Coordinate. And actualize.