Social Media, what’s in a name… #2
In a previous post I tried to debunk the term ’social media’. I’ve claimed -in contrast to the Wikipedia-definition- social media has got nothing to do with technology or the internet.
As Dorien asked for more clarification I will focus on the telegraph as an example of social media.
The Hurrays (& Boo’s) each medium faces
“we are one!” said the nations, and hand met hand, in a thrill electric from land to land. (The Victory, 1872)
The Atlantic Telegraph – that instantaneous highway of thought between the Old and New worlds. (Scientific American, 1858)
These quotes remind me of the quotes you heard at the beginning of the popularization of the internet or when after an O’Reilly-conference the term web2.0 was coined. Typical terms for that time were “information superhighway” (see above, that instantaneous highway of thought) or the co
ncept of “global village” connecting distant places beyond the borders of space and time.
The ‘code language’
We all know chat language or SMS langauge. It is an abbreviated form of the English
language to speed up the process of communication.
Most known examples are probably LOL for ‘laughing out loud’ or thx for ‘thanks’.
With the telegraph they also used these code language for fast and easy social contact:
I I stands for ‘I am ready’. An operator would use SFD (’Stop For Dinner’) when he would take a break for dinner and one would use GM to wish the fellow-operators a Good Morning.
Human relationships
When the internet started to become mainstream we saw stories poppin up in popular press about
people meeting and eventually getting married via the internet. It was perceived as a miraculuous never-seen-before event that love emerged via your 56k-modem.
In his work “The Victorian Internet” Tom Standage refers to numerous stories of love over the wires. Most of them comes down to operators who in the after-hours started chatting (or playing board games like checkers) via the telegraph and eventually fell in love.
So, the only thing I wanted to tell in this and the previous post is that it’s not the internet or any other medium which is making us social, but it is the people using it (to have fast and easy communication, to find friendshiop and maybe even find love). All the buzz surrounding so-called web social media is not new and has been here before…
Source: The Victorian Internet
Tags: internet archaeology, social media, telegraph, victorian internet
[...] I’ve written a second post on this [...]
“So, the only thing I wanted to tell in this and the previous post is that it’s not the internet or any other medium which is making us social, but it is the people using it (to have fast and easy communication, to find friendshiop and maybe even find love).”
<– But isn’t the internet one of the first “always-on-fast-and-easy-means-of-communication” that people use to be “social”? Some things might have existed that in retrospect could be called “social media”. But modern technology made it grow into something that truly changed our world, me, thinks.
When you compare a telegraph with a cellphone, you must admit the difference is substantial. And maybe it’s just another academic fad to look bat at a telegraph ans say: “see, it IS a social media-form”. And when you compare an iPhone and a telegraph, i think the difference in size, reach to people AND possibilities gets painstakingly clear.
Thanks for your reply Blue_Boy.
Yes, you’re right when saying the use of the internet, the cellphone with mobile internet (take for example the iphone) or another technical evolution which emerged in the last decades can be seen as a revolutionary thing.
The barriers to entry to publishing tools and tools to connect with others (over the limits of time and space) have never before been so low (you can find numerous figures on that - for example the pew internet studies), but what I was intending to do is to put everything in a historical perspective: people have always tried to use media in a social way even if the technology wasn’t intended to do so. Take for example the use of text messages (sms) (which was in fact only a technology to receive automated service messages from your provider it was never seen as a social tool - hence the fact that in the very beginning providers would let you send messages for free…).
I do have a problem with saying that it’s since the internet that people are getting social in a mediated way: that’s giving too much credit to the medium. And, I do have a problem with all the empty buzz surrounding the term social media as one can still question all the “problems” of for example the digital divide surrounding the internet or so-called networks NEW social media.
So, I’m not saying that internet, advanced mobile phones,… aren’t helping us being social, but that it’s not the medium, but the people using it and since people will always have the urge to be social each time will have their social media (the telegraph, the internet, the … )