Is Social Media Anything New?

It’s now more than fifty years since Marshall McLuhan published his study, The Medium is the Message, about television as a new way to define human communication, so maybe in another fifty years someone will do a similar study about what is called ‘social media,’ which I guess means using media technologies to communicate in some social way.

And what makes communication ‘social?’ I guess it’s an attempt to differentiate between what individuals communicate to one another which is what they would say if they were just talking face-to-face, as opposed to communication which is either ‘official’ because it comes from some kind of government agency or is communication developed and disseminated in order for some company or agency to earn a buck.

I happen to believe that what social media represents is a technology which allows users to say things in a public way which they would never say to anyone on a face-to-face basis, particularly if it’s a comment they have been taught from infancy not to say out loud.

The first thing my father ever said to me when he broke a glass while doing the dishes and exclaimed “damn,” was that he had just used a word which I should never use. He repeated this admonition a few minutes when he spilled something on the floor and yelled “shit,” while he wiped up the mess.