Reading reflections: March 23rd

The book How the World Changed Social Media by Daniel Miller is built upon the work of several anthropology researchers studying social media in different communities.  In the first three chapters, Miller stated their basic view of social media and their research philosophy. Their definition of social media is based on the concept of scalable sociality, which includes the scale from the most private to the most public and the scale from the smallest to the largest groups. In their view, all social media platforms are at somewhere on this spectrum, whose two ends are dyadic conversations and public broadcasting. Therefore, the success of social media can be attributed to the Internet’s ability to break the incompatibility between dyadic conversations and public broadcasting. Importantly, social media allow people to form groups of the size they want, in which the group members have more or less equal opportunities to share information. I think this definition is interesting, but I wonder if it is able to exclude email, which we don’t usually consider a form of social media, from the set of social media, since email seems to allow people to form groups of any size and communicate rather equally. But anyway, the author admits that this definition could be too broad from certain perspectives.

While discussing academic research on social media, Miller emphasizes the distinctions between what the Internet brings people and what social media bring people.  Before social media, people were concerned about the issue of anonymity in online social relationships; after the boom of social media, on the contrary, people began to be more worried about the issue of the loss of privacy. Therefore, he is able to point out the important discontinuity between the Internet and social media.