6 Social Media: What, exactly, is this thing?

It’s entirely possible that this is the chapter you are most interested in taking a look at.  This makes perfect sense.  Something that did not exist as we know it before the year 2000, we cannot go through a day without seeing the brand for any of our social media platforms, accessing it so we can look at someone’s information.  We are being added and removed (though we may never know that part) from other’s profiles.  We get caught absent-mindedly scrolling through our feeds or “doomscrolling” through profiles, hashtags, political posts … you get the idea.  We cannot escape it – even though we might try to take a break.  Similar to the line from Godfather Part 3 – “I thought I was out, but they pulled me back in.”

The goal for this chapter is to show where social media (SM) comes from, what happened when Facebook (aka META) moved from the Ivy League to – well – everywhere, how SM became a corporate investment rather than an independent space, and (if we can figure it out) where we are now.  You will find that the history goes back further than you might figure (I am not going ALL the way back here) and that we can see it as a logical progression.  At the end of the day, it is all around us.  We better understand what it is all about.

The Essentials

• Social media. We are stuck with it.  Whether you love it or hate it, we are now linked to it.  Chances are it will change and morph again and again, but the ability to connect with anyone at anytime … and the expectation that that anyone will respond to you “right now” is here to stay.
• As we work on our own literacy about social media, we need to think about how we got here. Not all of us were into computers in the 1980s.  Not all of us were hanging in computer labs on school campuses in the 1990s.  It would appear, though, that enough of us were and were influenced by those experiences (along with movies) so much that lives were devoted, careers were created, and our world was eventually changed to where we are now.
• As has been discussed previously, understanding the foundation is, well, essential to making sense of where we are now. Consider all of the movies and TV shows that revolved around computers, either as a symbol of “geeks and nerds” or as the future.  I suppose that, as we learned in Field of Dreams, if you build it, they will come.  We sure did.

The Start – “Shall we play a game?”

            If you are of a certain age, this quote from WarGames (1983) brings images of nuclear war, massive computer banks, and a very young Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy just trying to change some grades and ending up in a whole huge mess.  This was also potentially the first time many in the audience saw and heard the way we used to go “online” – dialing into a server system using our phone lines to access information, play games, and just talk with each other.  What might be surprising to some (it was to me when I learned it) is that email – specifically, the use of the “@” symbol as a way to create “addresses” – started up in the mid-1970s as a way for information to be quickly sent across networks.  Fun fact – it was found that, even with scientists, government employees, and military personnel, the vast majority of messages had nothing to do with work and were more aligned with recipes and “so … how are you?”

            Social media, obviously, is the offspring of the Internet.  It does not exist without the creation of the online network (ARPANet) in 1969.  From there, the network connects several universities, government locations, and military bases to provide redundancies in the event of (as stated earlier) war – specifically, nuclear war – to ensure that information is not lost.  As the network expands, so do the uses for it.  Communication, gaming, and community building began in the early 1980s.  Concurrently, whole areas of literature and other art forms emerge trying to understand what the intersection of humanity and technology looks like.  Movies like Blade Runner (based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick), the written work of William Gibson, and even the music of bands like Kraftwerk, Devo, and Front Line Assembly, all begin to explore what this “cyber” or “online life” might look like.  They present us with worlds where artificial beings are created as a slave race, a computer takes over our military and sees humans as a threat, access to computers is done through goggles, gloves, or even plugging a jack into the back of our heads (The Matrix was far from the first movie to suggest this), or we just cannot live our daily lives without access to a “network” or “web.”  If some of these fantasy spaces are starting to ring true to life now … you are not wrong.  In all of these cases, a common thread is that they all provide the ability to be, you guessed it, “social.”

From BBS to Websites – the first step

            The first thing to remember is that “social media” is as much a brand as a platform type.  In the broadest sense, we can consider any media form that allows for communication to be “social media.”  Telephone?  You are social.  Writing a letter?  Social.  Old school IMs on America OnLine (AOL)?  Yep, that is social as well.  The difference is the ubiquity and integration of what we see as social media now into our everyday lives.  However, it was not always that way.

            In the previous section, we talked about how our computer life moved into “social” capabilities rather quickly.  I want to spend a little time here talking about the web -based platforms that we all grew up on. Our first online experiences were through the web as it was experienced in the 1970s through the early 1990s – as a dial-in, text-only, space.  If you were on a college campus – or your friend’s dad happened to work for a non-identified organization that installed networking into a home (just sayin’) – you were dialing in even in the 1990s.  We all have heard the tone and, after that, perhaps you heard this.  If you were a little more savvy, you may have even located a sound file from Homestar Runner and installed this.  The tone was both an annoyance and an invitation.  We were invited into a space that co-exists with our “real” space.  It was a space where we could communicate with anyone anywhere (as long as you had access, of course.  Enter the Digital Divide conversation from above once again) from wherever you were.  It was presented as an open and free space – the hallmark of the “cyberpunk” aesthetic.  No rules – everyone takes care of everyone.  Near-ideal.  Of course, as anyone knows, and was being written about even by the mid-1990s (Mark Dery, with his book Flame Wars, wanted us to see what kind of dark rabbit holes could happen to us – in 1994!), humans will be humans.  Attacks, groups, misogyny, hacking, threats, bullying – it did not take long for this to become part of that (im)perfect cyber-life, even way back in the day.  Well before there was endless scrolling through our feeds, there was endless scrolling through bulletin board (BBS) posts, private messages, games, conversations – everything that we experience now just in a more “mundane” layout – and no real advertising to speak of (perhaps that is one bright spot).  We also had to be sitting in front of a dedicated space in front of a machine, with the sometimes-pricey technology to make this happen, rather than pulling out our little device (courtesy of our service providers) and tapping an app while sipping our morning coffee or evening libation.

The transition from the hacker aesthetic to corporate space.

            In 1998, the movie You’ve Got Mail normalized what had already taken hold in homes across the country – much to the chagrin of parents trying to get their children away from one screen only to find themselves in front of another.  It brought to everyone’s attention what would become ubiquitous to our world: online life.  Not the images of TRON or Hackers, where holographic versions of ourselves are running around in an immersive space (or we are sucked up into it completely … no thank you), though that is what SecondLife and other avatar space provide, Meta is presenting as the next step, and Ready Player One showed as a possible dystopic future.  Nope – this is the world that many of us experience every day (and you are probably doing right now) – us, sitting in front of screens, typing messages to people and waiting for them to respond.  The perennial signal “You’ve got mail” drove parents crazy. It also drove those of us that taught high school a little over the edge when students would log into their AOL messenger while in computer labs.  We had email in corporate and academic settings, but the leap to having it in the home was a true game changer.  This move into our commercial and personal spaces quickly extended to creating our own web pages (through editing software like Dreamweaver), while others (like me) decided to do it the hard way and work to learn HTML, the coding language allows us to create the basic pages we are used to seeing now.  Regardless of the approach, the digital world became part of our daily lives rather quickly, moving from an interesting thing to take a look at to a structural requirement for some industries and now near-essential to our lives.

            Now, you might be thinking “this does NOT sound like social media.”  And, in relation to what we use now, you are 100% correct.  Having said that, without this phase in our own media consumption and creation, a market and a space for social media to even exist would not be there.  Remember that Friendster, HotOrNot, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, SixDegrees, and the like all were web-based communities well before they were on our phones^[1].  It was not until the creation of the first app for the iPhone that we began to see the transition from sitting in front of the screen to having the whole thing in our pockets.

            This is the “in-between” moment.  Computer and online access was growing, but still limited.  The technology was still cost-prohibitive, though it definitely was getting cheaper, particularly once AOL started sending those CD-ROMs to everyone … and never seemed to stop.  The websites and their interfaces were basic but usable.  The ease of moving around was starting to get there.  You did not need to type a bunch of code or commands to move from room to move – you just needed to “click.”  Once the click became the thing, and actually moved from an action to a thing unto itself (how many times have you now heard “just one click away”?), the progression to where we are now was truly on the way.

Now … if we could just monetize those clicks.  Make them worth something.  Hmmm …

Where we are now

That is the question.  Where are we?  If there is any question that has been driving my own work, it is that one.  Specifically with social media, I wish I had a good answer.  With the current status of Twitter under the ownership of Elon Musk (as of 11/15/22 at 1104 AM CDT), I would say we are at a massive decision point.  Remembering what Twitter was created initially to be, the political and social implications of just that one platform are overwhelming. Whole governments rely on Twitter to get information out to its citizens because it is cheaper than trying to create TV ads or print copy (keeping in mind that the idea of the landline is antiquated in many parts of the world and simply does not exist in others, so the smartphone is THE way information is sent and received).  There are communities that use it to get their messages out.  Donald Trump would honestly probably not exist as he does now without Twitter.

The direct connection between a particular creator and audience via social media is unlike any other media system and cannot be underestimated.  As an example – TikTok has been used to not just promote dance routines and clothing styles but shut down political rallies and steal cars (which I am not promoting here at all!).  Twitter has been used to organize protests in real time around the world.  We see Facebook groups bypass advertisers and gatekeepers and get right to those audiences that are directly interested … and profitable.  Regardless of the medium being discussed (in this case, social media platforms), they only exist as long as an audience is not only there but consistent and, if all goes well, growing.  Platforms also have to be relevant to the technology of the day and the requirements of target audiences.  The online phrase “TL;DR” (Too Long/Didn’t Read) only exists because audiences are not expected to read through lengthy news stories or posts.  Just get to the point and move on.  Now, this is great for advertising and short term instant gratification from reading things that you agree with, but the implications are stark and easily seen, even this morning.  A member of Congress recently posted about organized retail theft around the country, blaming it on the current administration.  By reading the article, we learn that experts see correlations between the rise of organized and random crime during the Great Depression and today and the reasons for those rises (income disparity, class divisions, etc.).  The quick headline said one thing – the whole of the article explained the why.  By becoming used to 140 character headlines and misleading tags, the implications of an informed citizenry – or LACK of an informed citizenry – become apparent.  We can follow this result from the profit motives of commercial media to clicks as engagement and payment to the social and cultural implications of such message strategies.

Speaking of profit, we should probably talk about monetizing those clicks, right?  This aligns with how social media platforms, gaming, and even devices themselves are designed.  We use our devices for near-everything (more on that in the next chapter).  Specifically when we are talking about social media, we really are talking about a platform that has to keep you engaged with it.  How does this happen?  Clicks, swipes, and scrolls.  Each one of those (and, now, add eye tracking software to your phone apps) has been monetized.  Number of milliseconds you spend with an image, how many stories you click on, even where you look on your screen when scrolling through – all of these are tracked, merged with your dataset, compared against demographic and psychographic data (head back to the Advertisingchapter for more on this), and given a value.  This value translates to, you guessed it, money.  Now, your data at that moment might be worth a fraction of a cent.  But consider how many moments you have.  Now, multiply that by how many users are having that many moments (more or less) at any given time.  This is how your data is used by social media.  Remember the mention of Elon Musk buying Twitter above?  The biggest question he has been having to deal with is “how to come out profitable here?”  After all – he just leveraged 44 billion dollars for the platform.  No profit becomes a massive loss for him.  Every platform is trying to get more eyeballs on it in order to gain and then maintain profit.  There would be no sponsored posts or advertisements or links to your Amazon account scrolling alongside if that was not the case.  That is where we are now with social media – from truly social to commercial media.

So, I guess this might be one of the many answers to “where are we now.”  We are more connected than ever and yet more siloed and isolated within our own thoughts.  This is the paradox of how media can both bring together and separate consumers and producers at the same time.  It is this current state that leads us to the next chapter – Convergence.

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