Introduction xiv
Social Media and Social Networking Sites
The term social media currently has no accepted single definition; there are dozens
of proposed definitions, yet the term either means different things to different people
or gets boiled down to specific platforms such as Facebook or Twitter. In fact, in
spoken American English, Facebook and Twitter are sometimes used synonymously
with social media. In contrast, many definitions are too vague, in that they catego-
rize anything posted to the internet as social media. Other definitions explain so-
cial media by the back-end technology used to create specific platforms. Andreas
Kaplan (1977–) and Michael Haenlein (n.d.–) proposed a definition of social media
that bridges the two viewpoints, stating that social media encompasses “a group of
Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foun-
dations of Web 2.0 and that allow the creation and exchange of User Generated
Content” (Kaplan and Haenlein 2010, 60). In other words, social media is character-
ized by the tools, such as the platforms and/or apps that allow users to create and
transmit content. It is akin to broadcasting information to large groups of people.
In a technical sense, social media is like a broadcasting channel rather than a specific
site or location.
Occasionally, the terms social media and social networking site are used interchange-
ably. However, there are distinct differences between the two. Social networking
sites are online spaces, which could be platforms, websites, or apps, where users
go to join and communicate with a like-minded community of interest. Social net-
working sites allow people to converse and share information about specific top-
ics, such as a hobby, sports team, or other common interest. Whereas the emphasis
on social media falls on the apps that allow content creation and exchange, social
networking sites enable communication and unite people of similar interests. Some-
times there are even instances where a platform has the capacity to do both. Face-
book, which began as a social media platform in 2004, later added Facebook
Messenger, to enhance the platform with a social networking component. Thus,
Facebook could be considered as either social media or a social networking site,
depending on the elements of the site being discussed.
People have several primary motivations for using social media and social net-
working sites. According to the Global Web Index (2015), there are ten main rea-
sons that people use social media: (1) staying in touch with friends and family,
(2) keeping up with the news and current events, (3) passing time, (4) searching
Social media data, along with other information posted on the internet, comprise what
analysts now refer to as “big data.” If all the big data produced online in one day
were burned to recordable DVDs, the resulting stack of DVDs would be tall enough to
reach the moon twice (Nabila 2014). DVDs are 1.2 millimeters thick, meaning that
the stacks would total more than 640 billion discs. Every day, as the amount of data
posted online increases, those stacks would continue to reach even farther into the
solar system.
