Definitions Podcast Transcript

Words matter, so before we dive in and explore the earliest online social media networks, we'll define our terms.

Taryn Ward:  I'm Taryn Ward, and this is Breaking the Feed: Social Media, Beyond the Headlines. 

We're taking a closer look at the core issues around social media, including the existing social media landscape to better understand the role social media plays in our everyday lives in society. 

To start, we'll look at where social media started and why and think about how it's changed. We hope to appreciate the current landscape and anticipate the decisions regulators, big social and consumers are likely to make moving forward more fully. 

Today, by way of introduction to our series in the social media landscape, will consider what online social networking means. We'll start as always with a question, what is an online social network? We'll try to answer two supplementary questions along the way. How are online social networks related to social media? And how are social networks different from online communities?

Let's start with the general definition of social network. We'll look to an article from the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication from 2007 as our starting point. According to this article, social networks are web-based services that allow individuals to:

1. construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system,
2. articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and 
3. view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.  

This is an imperfect definition. It's both too broad and too narrow. For example, this definition excludes a lot of messaging apps, even as they tend to focus more and more on groups and communities as we move forward. Because generally, users are not able to see connections their connections have. And in fact, this is more and more likely to be true for privacy reasons of other social media networks to in other words, the third component of the definition, which allows users to view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system, it doesn't quite hit that threshold. 

And while it's true, that in many ways WhatsApp and Signal ought to be treated differently to other social media platforms, they don't work the same way. This seems to be becoming less and less the case, both because of their increased focus on groups and communities, and a larger appreciation for user privacy and other platforms. So for example, if Twitter now X announced that users could no longer see who paid accounts are connected to X would not cease to be a social media network. Because of that change alone, we would also consider it to be a social network. Again, I want to emphasise that this is a definition that comes from a 2007 article. So things were a bit different. Even with this caveat, it's a really good place to start as we dive into these things a little bit more deeply. 

How does this all relate to social media? This is important because these terms get thrown around a lot. And sometimes they're used interchangeably, even by people who really should know better, because it's easy. And because it's generally accepted, and it doesn't really matter. In most cases. When we think about social media and talk about social media, it's an internet-based way to publish or broadcast digital content that others can fully interact with. So really, it's referring to how the content is shared and accessed. 

Social networking is the human connections online that allow for the disbursement of social media. Although these things are related, they're not the same. They're just really intertwined and connected. So if we start to combine these definitions, we get the following, which is then in four parts. So when we think about social media networks, we can say that they're web-based services that allow individuals to:

1. construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, 
2. articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection,
3. view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system, and
4. publish or broadcast digital content that others can consume. 

This definition will become really important as we start to look at how social media networks developed and where they started and figure out where is that threshold of how these communities really started to develop. 

In this series, we'll examine the existing social media landscape, starting with a look back at where it all started before TikTok before smartphones and even before dial-up internet will discuss the rise and fall of several social media empires from AOL and AIM to Clubhouse and think about whether Meta and Twitter or X could be next before we look at some of the newest socials and the potential for growth in the market more broadly. 

In the meantime, we'll post a transcript of this episode with references on our website. You can find this and more information about us at TheBrightApp.com. 

Until next time, I'm Taryn Ward. Thank you for joining us for Breaking the Feed: Social Media, Beyond the Headlines.