Image for post
Image for post

Not too long ago, there was media. Then came social media. Media meant traditional media; those pesky suited types, you know THE PROFESSIONALS. [ I’m doing that finger parenthesis thingy]

Meanwhile, social has become the label to umbrella practices that traditionalists paint as non-professional. Yurk!

Today, social envelopes synchronous conversations using facilitated tools which allows everyone to become a publisher. Yay!

But while media is a heterogenous grouping of different entities, across radio, print, and broadcasting, and by that this means CNN is different to BBC, or NYT is not the same as the Hindu Times, social media generally embodies one universal group. WTF!

That’s what those clever traditionalists have done. By framing the etymology of the word to mean ‘not us’, they created a ‘you’, or was it the other way around. Who cares? The point is social means the other side... So, it’s not uncommon to hear radio announcers and broadcasters mention, ‘that on Social Media this and that is happening. Yeah!

If it wasn’t so clever, it’s mendacious at best. Let’s ponder for a moment how absurd the word, ‘social’ has become. The media, unable to comprehend an alternative discourse to themselves have created their ‘bogey’ platform — that group of the misunderstood. Hashtag your *** traditionalists.

Perhaps, in part it’s because it’s the early days of web connectivity, or that academics who plough this field haven’t risen to the challenge to explain: THERE IS MORE THAN ONE SOCIAL- IF YOU CAN CALL IT SOCIAL

Isn’t all media, social? We huddled around television and radios and enjoyed cinema together. No, what separates this age of engagement is synchronicity, as opposed to asynchronous comms.

Image for post
Image for post

Social is no more a homogenous group, than the BBC and CNN share similar values.

At best, and at times, people of different backgrounds may rally around the same cause, but more often than not social is a matrix, a fecking multiple hydra of people and opinions of different social groups sharing data.

The social likes and publishing environment of my next door neighbour, in spite of our proximity and shared values, is different to mine. But if we listened to what traditional media writes or broadcast, social is one big land mass of others — you!

This form of reductionism makes for an easy, recognisable target, but it also creates the original rage, and twisted schemata which leads me to hurl metaphoric rocks at the traditional media’s penchant for over simplification.

Image for post
Image for post

So, what’s the alternative? Perhaps it needs time so new taxonomies start to define groups within social media, so there is an understanding we’re not one mass movement. And the clustering can go any way; cultural, technological, etc.

May be we should start writing our own social groups, but at the very least let’s not repeat the sins of the past.

If anything the Net gave us the opportunity to be different, migrate across different socials — something worth celebrating.

Everything is Social, but you’re more complex than being part of a single amoebic entity.

Image for post
Image for post

Written by

Top Writer & Creative Technologist, Int. Award Winner. Cinemajournalist. Cardiff Uni @jomec. PhD (Dublin). Visiting Prof UBC, Ex BBC/C4News. Apple profiled.

Get the Medium app

A button that says 'Download on the App Store', and if clicked it will lead you to the iOS App store
A button that says 'Get it on, Google Play', and if clicked it will lead you to the Google Play store
https://viewmagazine.medium.com/traditional-media-would-have-you-believe-there-s-one-social-media-you-know-differently-41036f85bc69
viewmagazine.medium.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2020-50
130361
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:466EH2ZJPZQG62TFTCSPS64IPOUM56MY
<urn:uuid:216c430f-be6b-4cb2-b0b1-949b3d367b88>
2020-11-28T11:00:09Z
104.16.119.145
text/html
sha1:OZ2DJE6UDDU2G3MGJKQIP5BP34TU3VG7
<urn:uuid:6ea3ea70-25ca-46b2-b552-eb6fe49a59ed>
https://viewmagazine.medium.com/traditional-media-would-have-you-believe-there-s-one-social-media-you-know-differently-41036f85bc69
response
<urn:uuid:f49f29d5-a8f7-430a-8c1a-0f149694c896>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2020-50
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for November/December 2020
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-195.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.17 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/