This week we’ve gone over the history of social media and at times used the terms “social media” and “social networks/ing” interchangeably. This has caused some confusion – are they are the same thing? This post is intended to clarify the definition of social media to better understand this new and popular medium.
According to Wikipedia, social media first and foremost “depends on interactions between people as the discussion and integration of words builds shared-meaning, using technology as a conduit.”
In other words, social media is primarily about user-generated content (where the public become publishers) and the conversations that exist within the communities that flourish and thrive around that content, whether it’s video, audio or text.
As social media evolved, websites that focused on media sharing began incorporating social networking features, becoming Social Networking Sites (SNSs) themselves (e.g. Flickr and YouTube). This networking aspect was a major factor to the growth of social media. (Source: Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship).
