Social Media Is Now Parasocial Media

> When practitioners used the term “social media” to describe the internet tools that emerged in the mid-aughts, they were giving a name to the kinds of platforms and protocols that allowed people to socialize with friends and communities of interest by using digital technologies. Twenty years later, users of social media are far more likely to scroll than post – and the content that they consume is often strategically produced and algorithmically curated. In this essay, I argue that the very essence of social media has changed. To more effectively interrogate what we are witnessing, we need to stop presuming that these tools are “social media” and begin recognizing that they are now “parasocial media.” Doing so raises new questions about digitally mediated sociality, not to mention the politics and governance of these platforms. > Shifting our orientation from social media to parasocial media is consequential. People can – and initially primarily did – use a wide range of social media to negotiate identity, strengthen relationships, build communities of interest, and find joy in the playfulness of interacting with others (Brock, 2020; Gray, 2009, 2018; Steele, 2021). In the process, they wove together a powerful social fabric, giving rise to tremendous dreams of social media’s potential to build solidarity, enable political movements, and connect the world. But those practices are no longer dominant, and because of that, what social media means has shifted. > ...I do think that we made a mistake when we collectively agreed to call this phenomenon “social media.” That linguistic frame biased how we normatively interpreted the practices on these platforms. > ...I want the field to contend with how and why our conversations around governance, inequality, and sociality must evolve to deal with how social media has evolved into an entirely new category. Simply put, this genre of social media is not the same as what prompted the label in the first place. And our tools of analysis need to evolve as a result.