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

Clubbyclub is initiative from the Netherlands and can considered as a personal social network site. It is a closed website for existing groups of friends. A secured place where you don’t need to worry about the whole world looking over your shoulder when posting a new message or photo.

Clubbyclub is in fact a reaction on the popular, big social networks. Often one accepts friends that aren’t really friends (the well-know problem of social desirability bias) one wants to share embarrasing photos, personal messages or invitiations for parties with. The emphasis here lies on existing friends and not on meeting new people of reconnecting with old friends.

Source: Frankwatching.com, Clubbyclub.com

Nowadays, everybody is on Facebook. Recent cases have prooved that a Facebook-profile, that shows too much personal information, can get you in trouble. For instance, everybody remembers the case of Kevin Doyle, who called in sick after a night on the town. No problem if he didn’t post on Facebook that he had a hangover … and of course his boss could read it!

Sometimes the average Facebook-uses has to think twice before posting more personal information online. Since not everyone has good intentions and can be trusted. An illustrative example is the tragic case of Emma Forrester. She was killed by her soon to be ex-husband Wayne, after spreading the news on Facebook that she was single again and looking forward to meet other men. Although she removed him as a friend, he could still read the posts on the pages of mutual friends.

But also criminals make use of your personal information on Facebook. Maybe one of your six hundred friends isn’t that trustworthy as you want to believe. So when you are counting the days to leave on a skiing trip, he is also counting the days to drop by your house and leave with that brand new 65-inch television set. So a useful tip: don’t publish your address on the info-page! And beware of the Koobface-virus, that currently is harassing Facebook-users with e-mails that contain a link to a  video site that appears to contain a movie.  The video, however, doesn’t play, and the user is asked to update the video software by downloading a file. It’s this download that contains the virus!

But not only criminals use Facebook as a source for vital information. According to an article in the Flemish newspaper ‘De Standaard’, Belgian tax inspectors are also using Facebook to find out more information. For every file, they start with googling that person. And if they have a Facebook-account, the tax inspector invites him or her to become a friend, building on the fact that people get addicted to friendships and want to have as many as friends as possible. In this way, the tax inspector receives crucial information of the lifestyle of that particular person and can check if it corresponds with his declaration.

So the next time, you want to post pictures of the brand new BMW and your latest holidays in the Carribian … think again!

Source: De Standaard, 13 december 2008, p. 14

Apparently it’s sometimes necessary to sum up some rules concerning how to behave on social media sites. Although one might think that they are very different from the good manners we all have in real life … it’s not really the case.

On her blog, Tamar Weinberg, published a social media etiquette handbook. Apparently, there do exist people that act completely different on a social media site, than they would do in face-to-face relationships. In order to reeducate those, Tamar Weinberg created the handbook, with some specific actions for specific social media sites. For example, when talking about Facebook, one of the she talks about is adding users as friends without introduction. Maybe it’s helpfull telling people who you are … just like you do in real-life?

Some basic rules to survive in a social media universe can be found here

Source: Tamar Weinberg at Techipedia: The Ultimate Social Media Etiquette Handbook.

In my classes my students & I try to debunk & deconstruct the so called web2.0-terminology. The first item we dealt with was social media.

When searching on Google you get about 100 million search results. The first result which pops up is -not surprisingly- a link to Wikipedia which states that social media are primarily Internet- and mobile-based tools for sharing and discussing information among human beings.
I do think this definition -which is the one most commonly used- is lacking a bit of nuance as it stresses the ‘new media’ element too much. I much rather prefer the term (and definition) Sociable Media Judith Donath was using back in 2004 aka Web2.0-prehistory: Sociable media are media that enhance communication and the formation of social ties among people. She then refers to letter writing as one of the most commonly known and ‘old’ sociable media as it empowers you to be social via a medium.

In her opinion communication technologies are not developed to stimulate being social. As an example you could take the predecessor of todays internet, ARPA-net, which was indeed intended as a military & university network. Still, Donath continues, as we live and thrive on social interaction, all communication technology will eventually be used to be ’social’. The SMS-protocol was in fact intended for system warnings or techno-communication, not for a widespread and highly succesfull means of communication among ‘ordinary’ mobile phone users.

As a conclusion Donath remarks that it’s not about the type of technology you’re using, it’s about the features (rhythm, format, bandwidth, permanence and identification) that affect how the technology can be used.

Maybe a nice ancdote to conclude. When searching for definitions and critique on the term maybe the most interesting and down-to-earth remark I got was the one at the AOIR-list. I’ve asked them to give me a definition of ’social media’ and the first and only answer I got was Which media are asocial? .
True.

Source: Sociable Media

Update: I’ve written a second post on this topic.

A new year is around the corner … the perfect time for overviews and lists the summarize the past year. Also search engine Google just published the yearly Zeitgeist- report. With this Google want to reveal a certain zeitgeist (the spirit of the times) by analysing the millions of search queries people daily insert.

Most populair search queries were: ‘Sarah Palin’, ‘Beijing 2008′ and social media sites like Facebook, Tuenti and Wer kennt wen.