What Is Social and What Is Mediated in “Social Media”?
No TL;DR found
Abstract
Reflecting the multiple ambiguities of its ordinary language use, the current scholarly use of the term(s) “medium”/“media” is fraught with contradictions. Starting out from the insight that the nucleus of any kind of communication is an act, in which an addresser presents an artefact and a task of interpretation to an addressee, which the latter is called upon to fulfil, anything else that accrues to this simple model (including “transport” and “encoding,” which defines the classic communication model) constitutes further levels of mediation and thus involves kinds of factors which come in between the addresser and the addressee. Any semiotically informed media theory needs to account for the different nature of these mediations, which can here only be done summarily. On this basis, the paper will embark on the task of making sense of the popular notion of “social media,” asking in what sense it is a medium (or perhaps several distinct media), and in what sense it is social.