Defining Social, Defining Media
Let’s look at each word individually. “Social” is really about the interaction of humans with other humans. Seems to make sense, right?
And media…well, that’s a bit tougher, but one of the most cogent definitions I could find (again, back to good ol’ Wikipedia) defines “media” (in the communications sense) as “technology used to store and deliver information or data.” Makes sense to me.
Remixing those two definitions yielded a sentence that seemed to make a lot of sense: “Social media are technologies that facilitate interactions between humans using information or data.” But that wasn’t there yet. After thinking about it for a little while longer, it struck me the definition is a lot simpler than I originally thought: “Social media” are really just technologies that facilitate conversations.
