We Have Always Been Social

. . . And we will always be social.

When SAGE first approached me with the opportunity to lead an open access journal, tentatively titled Social Media + Society, I have to admit I cringed. I have never been a fan of the term “social media.” Not only had I not been a fan of the term but I had also expressed this distaste frequently and fervently, in public talks and in writing, academic and not. The reason why I dislike the term, as I regularly explain, is that all media are social. All media foster communication and by definition are social. This is not that groundbreaking a position anymore, although it has been my mantra ever since I started studying the social character of the Internet in the mid-1990s. In fact, it is a position held by many of our Editorial Board members who have contributed to this issue, and you will encounter variations of it as you read through this first issue.

To term some media social implies that there are other media that are perhaps anti-social, or even not social at all—asocial. It also invites comparisons between media based on how social each medium is. But each medium is social in its own unique way and invites particular social behaviors, its own form of sociality. Finally, the term identifies as social platforms that are no more, and perhaps less so, social than media not characterized by that moniker, such as the telephone.

But, whether I like it or not, “social media” has become mainstream, and I have come to terms with that. As self-conscious as I was about potentially editing a journal containing a term in its title that I had so publicly criticized, I also thought, “Well, here is my opportunity to redefine it.” Let us make this journal not about social media, but about why and how all media, old and new, are social. We have always been social, and we will always be social. Even the rejection of social activity is, in effect, a social decision and behavior. Let us have this be a journal about the social character of media as they develop within the context of societies and everyday life.

While current social media architectures and research focus on trends presented by leading platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and others, the purpose of this journal is to examine tendencies that evolve within and beyond a particular era. Recognizing that social media are as old as communication itself, and that socially based communication has always utilized platforms, digital or non-digital, which were somehow networked, the editorial scope of the journal includes and extends beyond contemporary trends to invite scholarship that broadly studies media as social entities, environments, and architectures.

Social Media + Society is thus deeply committed to advancing beyond an understanding of social media that is temporally bound. Our understanding of social media is temporally, spatially, and technologically sensitive—informed but not restricted by the definitions, practices, and materialities of a single time period or locale. How we have defined social media in societies has changed, and will continue to change. Our use of the term social media is aimed at embracing the social character of media as it presents itself in media past, present, and future. The editorial vision of this journal draws inspiration from current research on social media to outline a field of study poised to reflexively grow as social technologies evolve. We foster the open access sharing of research on the social properties of media, as they manifest themselves through the uses people make of networked platforms past and present, digital and non-digital.

To this end, I invited members of our Editorial Board to contribute short essays that would serve to outline the scope for Social Media + Society, in defining how we understand social media. I asked potential contributors to think about what social media mean to them, what it should mean, what it could be, and what they do not want to see it become. But beyond that, I left it open for people to be as spontaneous, unorthodox, formal, personal, or scholarly as they wanted to be. I wanted people to write about whatever they may have been yearning to write about but had no previous outlet to do so in—as long as it pertained to the broad topic of social media and society. The result is a magnificent set of essays presented in the democracy of alphabetical order, serving as our first issue, and a manifesto for our journal. I hope you enjoy reading them and are inspired by them as much as I have been.