Week1B: Social Media Use Today

    The purpose of this blog is to capture and attempt to articulate some of my thoughts on social media use today.  The challenge with such an endeavor first lies within the definition of social media itself.  If I were to ask a hundred people to define social media, I imagine I would most likely get a hundred widely varied answers. However, according to webster’s definition of social media, it is simply forms of electronic communication through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages and other content such as videos.  Needless to say, webster’s definition is not necessarily so simple to me and it seems to create even more questions than a clear definition that most people could uniformly agree upon.

    To further define social media (or perhaps to create even more confusion), I find that many people define social media as a homologous thing that “should” be broadly understood…such as the questions: how long have you been on social media? or what are your socials?  If someone asked me one of the above questions, I would probably say something along the lines of “oh, I have been on Facebook for about a dozen years, but I don’t get on it very often.” However, asking my 20-year-old son, his response is that he is not on social media and that he only uses Reddit for finding and sharing information.  Wait a minute, isn’t Reddit a form of social media?  Asking my son again, he clarifies to me that Reddit is kind of like social media, but not really since he isn’t posting pictures or sharing personal stuff like on TikTok or Instagram.  Turning to the other side of the generational spectrum, my father says he doesn’t use social media at all, but he uses his Strava and AllTrails apps to gather and share the latest updates about trail and weather conditions on his mountain hikes…wait a minute, isn’t that an online community sharing information? 

    Maybe it’s a quirk in my family’s definition of social media, but I do also think that there is a much broader level of stigma that is often attached to social media.  I have found that many of my friends and family think that social media is an online popularity contest dominated by likes of popularity seeking socialites (did someone say Kardashian?)  or like-seeking influencers looking to peddle their next big thing to their throng of followers.  I think that many people often shun social media because it is sometimes perceived as being too vain, shallow, or simply an overhyped waste of time.  When I ask my wife, why she is scrolling on TikTok, she comments that it is “her guilty pleasure” …as if she knows its something wrong but she is spending time on the app regardless.  So, I think many people define social media very narrowly, and not necessarily in the broader context as defined by webster’s dictionary.

    Going back to webster’s dictionary, I think that the key word in the definition of social media is community.   Online communities are much broader than just the collection of a few big-name apps (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok), but they are found in the countless places on the internet and in apps where we leave our footmark or spend our time.  My father spending time posting the latest trail conditions on his AllTrails app suggests that he is in an online community of like-minded hikers, and my son sharing the latest game-cheat codes in Reddit is spending time with a like-minded community of gamers.  In my opinion, the more I think about it and as I write this blog, social media could in some regards be referred to as “community media”. 

    Which community we belong to, or identify with, goes a long way in defining who we are as individuals.  Additionally, people can certainly belong to as few or as many communities as they see fit.  I think that some social media apps and websites do a fairly good job of clarifying their community type, but the lines can also get clearly blurred fairly quickly.  For example, LinkedIn started out almost exclusively as an online community of professionals looking to make business connections or to perhaps land their next job.  However, over the years, I have found that LinkedIn can often be used by some as a place to share pictures of their latest family adventures, highlight personal non-work related achievements, or even espouse their strong opinions on upcoming elections.  What started out as purely business connection-related platform had somehow morphed into something much broader.

    Social media ultimately depends on how the user himself or herself wants to interact with their online community.  In the above scenario of LinkedIn users sharing personal information beyond its intended business use, one can choose to simply hide or delete users as they see fit so that they are no longer a part of their community.  Many of the other social media apps also have similar abilities for users to permit who they want to be associated with within their community.  If someone leaves a bad or crude comment on my Twitter page, I can now block them so that they are no longer a part of my defined community.  So ultimately, I think it is up to the user themselves to define what type of communities they want to be associated with to ensure that they are getting the most out of their social media use.