ABSTRACT
What is social media? Twenty years ago, the term did not exist. Emerging only around 2006 to describe social networking platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, social media has come to encompass the growing number of ways that people communicate—with each other and occasionally with companies—in a mediated environment. Yet, when we look back we also find a legacy of research about phenomena that we would now call social media. Social media is “a set of practices for communicating, usually collaboratively, and usually so that it is visible to more than one person” (Humphreys 2016, p. 7). As a set of practices, social media lies between forms of mass media communication such as television, radio, and film and interpersonal forms of communication such as the telephone or a face-to-face conversation (Humphreys 2016; Webster 2014). Although these practices have become more common as digital communication platforms have emerged, we can trace the origins of social media to letters to the editor, radio call-in shows, and by-mail fan clubs, all ways in which consumers communicated collaboratively through previous forms of media.
