It’s media. It happens to be social.
I know it might seem obvious. I know. However, “social media” is just media that happens to be social. Right?
Media is text, still images, moving images, and audio. It’s just media. We’ve had media in these forms for generations now.
In the past, few made media. Few distributed it. Many experienced it. Now we all can create it in all it’s forms. It’s easy. The barrier to entry is remarkably low. We’re all publishers now. Or rather, we all have the potential to be. Many of us are.
So what makes media social? To my mind the subject and the mechanisms for distribution are on the top of the list.
When the subject of media is a person’s life or relates to it or that of those they know it’s quite understandable that we’d want to share it. We’re social beings. But it’s still just media.
When the sharing apparatus — the distribution channel — is structured to make promotion easy it’s reasonable to expect the media to seem to amplify itself. But, remember, it’s just media.
So when media about people is easy to create and distribute in a way that makes it easy to share you get an explosion of media that happens to be social.
Maybe what is more important than the tool or the object of sharing is that we have an explosion of the inclination for social activity. That seems more core than the tools themselves.
Now the question is, how good are we at it?