In the introduction to this volume we have defined social media as the colonisation of the space between traditional broadcast and private dyadic communication, providing people with a scale of group size and degrees of privacy that we have termed scalable sociality. However, we would not wish our definition to be seen as too tight or absolute. There were many prior examples of group communication online, such as bulletin boards and chat rooms. It would also be pedantic to insist that WhatsApp is a form of social media when used for a group, but not when used between just two people. Our definition is not absolute, nor does it contain firm boundaries; rather it is a heuristic device which helps to clarify the parameters of our study. Our discussion includes sites such as Tinder where the communication is dyadic but accessed by a group, as well as gaming consoles that today can function as social media plat-forms. It is also possible for some blogs and YouTube to be considered, but they rarely appear here – partly because most on YouTube is posted as a form of public broadcasting, though by individuals as much as by companies. It is not as though we even chose the name ‘social media’.
When we started our research we thought we were studying ‘social net-working sites’. We have simply followed the colloquial term used by the general public. So this is not a scientific label, but a popular term always subject to the vagaries of public semantics, and we can only be responsi-ble for the way we use the term within this volume.
Furthermore ours would not be the generally accepted definition.
The clear pioneer in the study of social media has been danah boyd,1 and
the most influential paper2 to date was the 2007 publication Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship by boyd and Nicole Ellison.3 This provides not only a history but also a summary of aca-demic work prior to 2007. As boyd points out,4 the initial social network-ing sites in the US were places where people could actively network to find ‘friends of friends’ or, as in sites such as Friends Reunited, to recon-nect with friends.5 After a while these sites were transformed, largely by their users, into places of more constant interaction; this occurred more between established friends, so the sites became less concerned with expansive networking. In a way, therefore, social networking sites did become social media, if the labels are taken literally.
boyd was also a pioneer in trying to define and characterise social media. She described these as ‘networked publics’ and suggested that they possessed four main affordances which were persistence, visibil-ity, spreadability and searchability.6 The terms were certainly helpful for the time in which these ideas were being developed, on the basis of the huge success of Friendster and then MySpace, followed by Facebook, and these concepts remain helpful in understanding such platforms.
A recent book on Twitter expands the discussion to the various kinds of public that are networked, and the ways in which users have developed and directed these.7
Over the last few years, however, and during the period of our study, the main growth has been in platforms – not only WhatsApp and WeChat,8 but also Instagram and Snapchat. These platforms do not par-ticularly align with the affordances of earlier ones. They are not espe-cially searchable, persistent or even spreadable, but they do consolidate a trend towards scalable sociality. It is perhaps not surprising that as anthropologists we would favour a definition that focuses upon the topic of sociality, because that is what we study. Other disciplines will see things differently. For example, a recent book on social media from a scholar within communication studies develops an approach based on concepts of connectivity, including sections on YouTube, Wikipedia and Flickr alongside Twitter and Facebook.9 Different definitions are likely to suit the perspectives of different disciplines.
There is a natural temptation to see things historically, assuming that technology ‘evolves’ in neat and discrete stages. In this view social media appears to be merely the latest popular use of the internet, espe-cially when in some countries many people believe that Facebook and the internet are synonymous. There is now an established field of Internet Studies, which obviously would tend to assimilate the study of social media into the field.10 However, the debates concerning the internet that
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took place prior to social media11 were often the very opposite in their orientation to more recent debates over social media. When the inter-net first developed, for instance, most people viewed it as a separated out virtual world, able to facilitate the coming together of groups with specialist interests. There was also much concern with new kinds of social relations made possible by anonymity.12 By contrast, with regard to social media, the issue of anonymity has reversed into a concern over lack of privacy. Similarly the emphasis upon separate special-interest groups on the internet has also reversed into a concern with the way in which quite disparate social networks of friends, family and work are now juxtaposed in the same space on Facebook. Rather than being seen as a virtual ‘other’ world, social media stands accused of being embed-ded in the most mundane toenail painting and lunch- eating aspects of the everyday world.
Obviously social media builds on prior uses of the internet for social and communicative purposes. Yet there are clearly as many discontinui-ties with prior uses of the internet as continuidiscontinui-ties. It might therefore be better to grant social media its own status as a topic for research, and allow for the possibility that it is often the very opposite of what was thought of as the internet, even while sharing the same space. For these reasons we have generally avoided an historical approach that makes social media the latest point in a narrative, then viewed as the cause of what it is now. As noted in the introduction, social media is not just a step away from the study of earlier uses of the internet, but is also more embedded in everyday social life. As such, it provides a new opportunity to bring media and communication studies together with other forms of social science such as anthropology.
Another way in which danah boyd stands out as a pioneer in the study of social media is her establishing of an online bibliography, in which anyone studying social media can post the details of their publica-tions.13 At the time of writing (April 2015) there were 669 entries. These represent a wide variety of disciplines and approaches. In examining some of these it is quickly apparent that they represent several quite dis-tinct perspectives, often with little cross- fertilisation between. We do not want to dwell on this, but it is important to note that the bulk of stud-ies come from disciplines that are more directed to methods and per-spectives influenced by the natural sciences; they thus involve samples of users, the testing of hypotheses and models. This huge body of mate-rial is not dealt with here because the bulk of this book is concerned with comparison between diverse cultural contexts; evidence from one popu-lation cannot be extrapolated to the behaviour of any other popupopu-lation.
This volume should therefore be seen as complementary to and distinct from the dominant approaches to the study of social media.
The bibliography also provides a neat reason why in this volume we have concentrated on a comparative approach. The combined users of the Chinese sites QQ (820 million), QZone (625 million) and WeChat (355 million) are certainly comparable to Facebook (1.25 billion).14 QQ is also older than Facebook. Yet the titles of the 669 studies listed in boyd’s bibliography do not include a single mention of QQ, QZone or WeChat, while there are 157 references to Facebook.15 Even taking into account the language issue,16 this shows that exposure to the Chinese material for those working in English is limited. Such a discrepancy forms part of the justification of our study. Natural science is based largely on the study of substances with universal and unchanging properties that allow for such generalised extrapolation, so it really may not matter where the study is carried out. Social science is another matter entirely, however, and this book is a plea for greater sensitivity to regional and social dif-ferences and their consequences.
Furthermore there is a danger that natural science- based studies may proliferate investigations of platforms such as Twitter because the material is publicly available, and so potentially usable as large data sets.
It is far more difficult to make use of platforms such as WhatsApp, since you need to know someone very well before they will grant you access to their private conversations. boyd has a very extensive additional bib-liography of work on Twitter, but as yet neither of these sites features a title that makes reference to WhatsApp. We do not wish to disparage any approach. All genuine research provides valuable evidence. If our suggestion that some conventional methods produce their own biases and problems of generalisation is valid, then hopefully these concerns will be shared by those who regard themselves as involved in studies of social media modelled on the natural sciences.