Breaking Down Social Media
Maybe it’s time to do the same on the other side of the “internet and society” question. Maybe we should stop talking about “information and communication technologies” or “the Internet” or “new and social media” as a single constellation of technologies that have key characteristics in common (distinctively participatory, or distinctively intrusive, for example), and that are sufficiently different from other parts of the world that they need to be talked about separately. The Internet is still pretty new, so we tend to look at it as a definable thing, but digital technologies have now become so multifaceted and so enmeshed in other facets of our lives that such a broad brush obscures more than it reveals.
So here is an exploration of what some of the consequences might be, and a rough sketch of how we might break down “new and social media” into more manageable mouthfuls.
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