The Social Media Debate

Unpacking the Social, Psychological, and Cultural Effects of Social Media

Devan Rosen, Devan Rosen

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000544183
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Media Studies

This accessible, student-friendly book provides a concise overview of the primary debates surrounding the impact and effects of social media.

From Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to Snapchat and TikTok, social media has become part of our everyday experience. However, its proliferation has brought a myriad of serious concerns about the long-term effects of social media on socializing and personal relationships and the impact on well-being and mental health (particularly in relation to children and adolescents), as well as issues linked to information and culture (such as privacy, misinformation, and manipulation). Featuring contributions by leading international scholars and established authorities such as Christian Fuchs, Henry Jenkins, Michael A. Stefanone, and Joan Donovan, editor Devan Rosen brings together key contemporary research from multiple disciplines in order to provide crucial insight into these debates.

This book will be an important resource for students and scholars of media and communication, as well as educators, parents, policy makers, and clinicians interested in the impacts of social media.

1
INTRODUCTION

The Rise of a New Media Paradigm

Devan Rosen

DOI: 10.4324/9781003171270-1

The Internet, from its outset, was a tool developed to digitally enable communication between individuals and to assist the electronic transfer of information between organizations. The evolution of digitally enabled social interactions eventually led to the information-dense platforms we now call “social media.” The business of providing and supporting social media applications is a multibillion dollar industry driven by some of the most profitable and powerful companies in the world. About half of the total population of the world use social media, a proportion that is rapidly expanding. Facebook alone has garnered over 2.85 billion global users (Statista, 2021), a saturation achieved in a mere 17 years.

Social media have become part of our everyday experience. From Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to Snapchat and TikTok, the landscape of options grows along with each generation of new users. However, its proliferation has brought a myriad of serious concerns about the negative effects social media have on our socialization patterns, social influence, spread of misinformation, and governing. There are also growing concerns about the long-term impacts of the use of social media on well-being, including social media addiction, privacy concerns, and a host of negative effects on our mental health. Moreover, social media present the most far-reaching and comprehensive navigable social network that has ever existed, allowing users to locate and interact with others and affiliation groups faster and more globally than any previous communication and information technology. It can give voice to those who were previously silenced, while simultaneously aiding the spread of distorted information with dire consequences.

However, as social media use has increasingly affected our politics, culture, and relationships, so have the debates over the causes and outcomes of these changes. The growing concerns over the effects of social media use have motivated vast amounts of research across many scientific fields, and this volume brings together leading international scholars to discuss the primary concerns relating to social media.

The historical analysis of social media and the principal definitions have been discussed extensively across a wide array of publications over the past 15 years, and many of the authors in this volume introduce key concepts of social media as pertinent to their respective fields. As such, this introduction chapter will very briefly review the history and definitions of social media and then introduce the structure of this volume.

Rise of a New Media Paradigm

The social uses of networked information and communication technologies (ICT) for human interaction and information access began long before the current era of social media and even before the World Wide Web went online around 1991. Early bulletin board systems (BBS) emerged in the early 1980s and allowed users connected to a Unix-to-Unix copy dial-up network and navigate interest groups and discussions. The release of Usenet in the early 1990s further accelerated the utility of distributed networked communications. Usenet allowed users to read and post messages to newsgroups and introduced the concept of a newsfeed and indeed was a very social media. The emergence of the World Wide Web, html, graphical interfaces, and web browsers brought about increasingly user-friendly platforms of online interaction and, thus, increasingly widespread use.

Web-based platforms for social interaction continued to emerge through the 1990s, with the release of early social network websites like Classmates in 1995 and Six Degrees in 1997, an array of blogging and microblogging websites, and an ever-increasing cache of websites that allowed users to share their own content. These emerging platforms grew to be a dominant form of social interaction and information access during the ballooning popularity of social platforms in the “Web 2.0” era of the early 2000s, whose novelty and attraction were fueled heavily by the capital accumulation of the corporate Internet economy (Fuchs, 2021). It was in this period that these websites and applications started to be referred to as “social media” and the widespread adoption and diffusion began, all while the corporations that were deploying these services were undergoing financial elephantiasis and becoming central players in the global flow (and control) of information.

Although there are a variety of ways that social media have taken shape, it was the growth of social network sites (SNS) that largely accelerated the use of social media. Ellison and boyd (2013) offer a useful definition of SNS as:

a networked communication platform in which participants 1) have uniquely identifiable profiles that consist of user-supplied content, content provided by other users, and/or system-level data; 2) can publicly articulate connections that can be viewed and traversed by others; and 3) can consume, produce, and/or interact with streams of user-generated content provided by their connections on the site.

(p. 158)

From the earliest SNS like Six Degrees and Friendster to current industry leaders like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, SNS have normalized the dynamics that lowered barriers to communication, facilitated the sharing of information related to identity, and allowed individuals to easily distinguish their common interests and affiliations (Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe, 2011). These key social dynamics helped users cultivate socially relevant interactions, established these new forms of socializing as normal, and paved the way for a torrent of social media platforms that have transformed the way we communicate, socialize, organize, and communicate.

Definitions of social media vary across fields and disciplines, but McCay-Peet and Quan-Haase (2017) offered a working definition of social media that is broad enough to be useful for an interdisciplinary volume like this one while also specific enough to elucidate the key concepts:

Social media are web-based services that allow individuals, communities, and organizations to collaborate, connect, interact, and build community by enabling them to create, co-create, modify, share, and engage with user-generated content that is easily accessible.

(p. 17)

Unpacking and Peeking In

It is not within the scope of this volume to include an exhaustive suite of all the issues and debates related to social media, not even encyclopedias and handbooks are able to accomplish that. What we can include are some of the most pressing and timely debates, including impacts on how we socialize, effects on our wellbeing and mental health, impacts on politics and governing, and shifts in how information is spread, shared, and accessed.

The remainder of this volume will unpack key debates across 12 chapters. The following three chapters (Chapters 2–4) focus on the social: social media as social infrastructures, social capital, and the antisocial. These are followed by five chapters related to information and culture: content moderation, misinformation and digital ethics, social media in Black digital studies, influencers and news media agendas, and finally social media, alienation, and the public sphere. Next are three chapters on mental health and well-being: an overview chapter, a chapter on child and adolescent social media use and mental health, and a chapter on how the interaction of content, situation, and person shapes the effects of social media on well-being. The final chapter takes a conversation-style approach to discuss participatory ethics and social media. The volume concludes with some brief conclusions and next steps.

As social media continue to expand and emerge into new forms with ever-growing saturation and reach, so will the need to understand the ways we use these media forms and the effects that they have on our personal life experiences, our relationships, communities, governments, and cultures. This volume gathers a portion of what we know about social media and their effects to catalyze a greater understanding of how our lives are impacted.

References

• Ellison, N. B., & boyd, d. (2013). Sociality through social network sites. In W. H. Dutton (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of internet studies (pp. 151–172). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Ellison, N. B., Steinfield, C., & Lampe, C. (2011). Connection strategies: Social capital implications of Facebook-enabled communication practices. New Media & Society, 13(6), 873–892. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444810385389
• Fuchs, C. (2021). Social media: A critical introduction. London: SAGE Publications Ltd. www.doi.org/10.4135/9781446270066
• McCay-Peet, L., & Quan-Haase, A. (2017). What is social media and what questions can social media research help us answer? In L. Sloan & A. Quan-Haase (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of social media research methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Reference. https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473983847.n2
• Statista. (August 27, 2021). Leading countries based on Facebook audience size as of July 2021. www.statista.com. Retrieved from www.statista.com/statistics/268136/top-15-countries-based-on-number-of-facebook-users/

2
SOCIAL MEDIA AS SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURES

Sarah Myers West

DOI: 10.4324/9781003171270-2

At the heart of the social media debate are age-old questions: What knits us together as parts of a community? What do we need to become active, engaged members of our society and knowledgeable, curious citizens of the world? What does it mean to be part of a public, and how do we know if we are part of one? Social media companies have sought to position themselves as critical to the answers to these questions by creating what one founder called social infrastructures – the socio-technical means through which we interrelate and form communities. Whether or not we take this term at face value, the notion of social infrastructure leads to other corollary questions: What is the proper role for institutions to play in helping us to build the infrastructures of our social lives? Building social infrastructure imbues those who manage it with a considerable amount of power, which also leads to a final, critical question: How do we ensure that those who hold this power remain accountable to us?

There are no simple or easy answers to these questions, as social media companies, their users, and the politicians seeking to regulate them have found. These platforms may not have been designed to be social infrastructure at the outset – they weren’t meant, necessarily, to be employed by millions of people, used to plan protests, leak secrets, livestream police brutality, or rally crowds to support extremist causes. According to Facebook’s founder, it wasn’t even created to be a company (though we can treat that statement with some skepticism).

But it is clear, in 2021, that social media companies have outsized power to influence how we access information, communicate with those around us, and develop our views of the world. As anyone who has lost a password or accidentally “liked” a post they didn’t intend to, small tweaks to a platform interface can have significant downstream effects. Even more fundamentally, the infrastructures created by these companies and the policies developed to manage our behavior on them navigate deep and existential questions about the information we can access, what we can share, and with whom we can share it, the answers to which have considerable influence on our lives.

It’s important to keep in frame that where there is power there is resistance, and that regardless of what is on offer from the tech industry, people have always developed their own means of creating the information environments that they need. From local newspapers to samizdat, people work together to share what matters to them through the accounts of the experiences of their lives. And the advent of networked infrastructures offered an opportunity to do this in a new way – through email, bulletin board systems, and Internet relay chat in the early days, then through the creation of blogs, and, eventually, on social media platforms offered by large multinational tech companies. Social media took on distinctive meanings in the growing number of places in the world where the state does not encourage freedom of expression, because these platforms fostered the creation of alternative media sources that could provide accounts from the ground that did not always align to the state’s views.

Though they often use rhetoric to distance themselves from this, social media platforms have always been political by their very nature. Sharing informa...