Social media is mass media
Social media as a term and a construct has changed so much over the years that the term itself is outdated, with social media being more in line with mass media than the original social networking tool it began as.
The term social media first came about in the 90s to describe digital media which had a community element, like forums, or the ability to comment and interact with the media. A more modern take on the term would describe ‘social networking’ sites like myspace and facebook, that made social media accessible to more people. These sites allowed a true social networking experience where you could interact with friends, post about your day and most importantly upload 200 photos from your uni night out. In the early days of these social networkings sites we were still scared about internet strangers so mostly kept our friends list to people we had met.
There has been a lot of change to what we first knew as social media that our attitudes have changed too. The chronological feed changing to an algorithm based feed paved the way for social media platforms to start guessing what we would like to see and offering us more than who was in our following list. The influencer boom of the late 2010s and brands using social media for both paid and organic advertising meant we became more used to seeing curated content from people we didn’t personally know. This slowly started to prime us for not seeing our friends content as much.
This isn’t just a feeling we all have. A high percentage of what we see on social media comes from people we don’t know. It’s reported that only 18% of our social media feeds are people we know, with over 50% coming from brands and influencers. This shows you are more likely to see content from someone you don’t personally know. (link)
How did we get here?
The influencer space has aided this transition from media being social, to para social to now mass media and it has been a slow burn coming for some time. From the outside it seems like being an influencer is like winning the lottery; the dream of posting about your day and organically gaining a following then being able to monetise your platform is a great story to tell ourselves, but is never the case.
I’m closer to this story than most people, and have seen this coming for some time. In my early 20s while I was working in advertising I was also an OG influencer. This gave me a unique perspective from both sides of the rise in influencers and influencer marketing. It seemed like people were building communities and partnering with brands when in reality they were turning their instagrams into billboards and selling advertising space.
These small partnerships quickly turned into full blown advertising campaigns with professional photoshoots blurring the lines of what it meant to have a personal instagram compared with the curated brands feed. Budgets went up, more people were posting more high quality content and we just got used to seeing advertising in our feeds.
This paved the way for newer social media apps like tiktok to use an algorithm based feed to show you what it thinks you might like on the default ‘for you’ page. The emphasis is to entertain you and keep you in the platform as long as possible rather than giving you a space to socialise and interact.
What is mass media?
Social media suggests there is a social or community aspect to the media, whereas mass media is media that gets information to larger audiences.
Modern social networking sites operate more in line with the mass media definition; a small number of popular posts will go out to a large number of people. The likelihood that you and everyone you know will see a viral video is extremely high. Although your feed seems curated and hyper personalised, the better a post performs the more likely more people are to see it.
People go to social media to be entertained rather than social connections leading them to have more in common with streaming services like netflix rather than the OG social media sites like facebook. Technically there is still a community element as you can comment and interact with content but this feels more like screaming into the void than connecting in a meaningful way
This is what kinda led me here.
My thoughts on social media did lead me here, to April’s desktop. I have a lot of thoughts and want somewhere to put them and at one point that would have been social media, but it really does feel like shouting into the void— and if i am going to be shouting into the void anyway I may as well create my own little corner of the internet to shout into.
