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This book treats social media as a plural term, not a singular one, because the word media originating from Latin is the plural of medium. The word media is also taken as a plural noun not only in major English dictionaries, such as The Merriam-Webster Dictionary and Oxford English Dictionary, but in popular stylebooks used by news media, such as the Associated Press, Cable Network News (CNN), New York Times, and Wall Street Journal. Another reason is that social media in this book refer to not just one but various social network sites (SNS) and the related information and communication technologies (ICTs). Hence, this book uses a plural verb with social media despite some writers treating it otherwise, which is not necessarily wrong.

A more significant question is: How do we define social media?

Scholars have faced a recognized challenge in trying to define what constitutes social media. Researchers often adopt one or more characteristics to describe social media and other forms of new media. The characteristics they investigate include digitalization, interactivity, virtuality, dispersion, automation, variability, networking, and real-time access. Among the characteristics, digitalization is the key technology that reduces information to something that can be easily fragmented, handled, distributed, and shared, which enable networking, multimedia, collaborative, and interactive communication.

The fact that social media continue to proliferate and evolve at a surprising speed is another reason why a widely accepted definition of the term is hard to find. Some of the features that initially distinguished various forms of social media have faded in significance, while others have been reproduced by new genres of social media (Fuchs, 2014). Yet, in much of what researchers and practitioners discuss, the answer is more often assumed, rather than specifically defined. To many, it is like a kind of good art. People may not know what makes good art, but they know it when they see it.

Social media should not be called new media. Rather, they are part of new media that are powered by the advances of computer-based technologies, including ICT, mobile, and network technologies. Scholars tend to agree that new media refer to any media platforms that are not analog, like television, radio, magazines, newspapers, and books (Baym et al., 2012). New media thus consist of various digital media forms, such as online news (e.g., news content on CNN.com or NYTimes.com), user-generated content (e.g., blogs, personal podcasts), and social media (Zhong et al., 2014).

The term “social media” often overlaps with “social network sites” as there is some connection and integration between them. Both terms refer to the same media platforms and technology involved. As a result, social media users and researchers often use the two terms interchangeably (boyd, 2009). To Rodriguez (2013), for instance, “Social media encompass a diversity of tools and platforms (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, Wikipedia, Tumblr, etc.) …” (p. 1053). Following Rodriguez and other scholars, this book uses “social media” as a catch-all term, referring to various social network sites.

Since the late 1990s, a growing number of popular SNS have been created, first in the United States and later around the globe. Launched in 1997, Six Degrees was the first modern SNS allowing users to create a profile and make friends with other users. The site had attracted almost one million members at its peak, though it was shut down in 2001, although 2003 marked an important benchmark in social media development. During that year, scholars saw SNS start to rise to a cultural significance, such as when Friendster became a popular social network site that caught media attention (Ellison & boyd, 2013). Launched in 2002, Friendster was the first SNS with over 100 million registered users, though it was redesigned in 2011 as a social gaming platform. More SNS mushroomed after that: LinkedIn was launched in 2003, Facebook in 2004, Twitter in 2006, Instagram in 2010, and the rest, as we know, is history.

Generally speaking, social media are “the collection of software that enables individuals and communities to gather, communicate, share, and in some cases collaborate or play” (boyd, 2009). As hybrid media platforms for both interpersonal and group communication, social media have key characteristics of digitalization, interactivity, and real-time access to information that can be easily created, distributed and shared by users. Specifically,

(Social media are) a networked communication platform, in which participants 1) have uniquely identifiable profiles that consist of user-supplied content, content provided by other users, and/or system-level data; 2) can publicly articulate connections that can be viewed and traversed by others; and 3) can consume, produce, and/or interact with streams of users-generated content provided by their connections on the site.

(Ellison & boyd, 2013, p. 158)

In other words, social media are the means of interactions among users, organizations, and businesses, in which users create and share information in virtual communities. In this sense, social media have relevance not only for users, organizations, and businesses, but also human society as a whole.

Applications that have developed within and around social media are endless in number and functionality, but all make sharing and searching information online easier. The result is an enormous amount of information that can be easily created, shared, distributed, promoted, and searched. Social media became an important source of information in the era of internet civilization. As a result, social media help create an endless number of niche social communities where members can gather around common topics, resulting in social movements from raising awareness of climate change in a local community to the Arab Spring, a revolutionary wave of demonstrations, and protests spreading to 19 Arab countries.

For individuals or businesses that do not invest time in understanding what social media are and their implications in society, they will have to make it up in the near future. Researchers contend that like other forms of new media, social media can be best understood and analyzed when they are positioned as ICT applications in various social contexts (Cheong et al., 2012; Lievrouw & Livingstone, 2006). For a better understanding of social media functions, we must ask: What is technology?