What’s Social About Social Media?

Abstract

All media are social, in the sense that they establish and maintain relations between and among humans as individuals and collectives, increasingly across space and time. No medium is more social than any other medium. But each medium is social in distinctive ways. So-called social media are distinguished by their potential for many-to-many communication, drawing on and feeding into networks of one-to-one and one-to-many communication, as well.