On social [media] organisation and dancing/
I do sometimes wonder what we mean by social when we refer to social media. It feels today like the most anti-social thing we may ever have invented. Forgive my immediate slide into the hyperbolic. I’m not the only one, though. As mentioned elsewhere, computer scientist Stuart Russell (2021) suggested that social media had already caused more damage than Chernobyl; a comparison that for me does not quite work even though I probably agree that it has done tremendous and catastrophic damage. So maybe not so hyperbolic after all. Anyhoooo – a quick search on my browser for the etymology of the word social reveals its various meanings and histories.
There is nothing about organised dances for teens, which is how I first knew the word when I was a child. We youngsters got very excited about ‘the social’ even when it was not us but the older kids going, which would have been the case for most of our lives, until that is, it became our turn. A most successful social ended with a snog behind the gym. Years of hope and fantasy, only to end up – if you were lucky – with some gangly adolescent’s tongue down your throat. As you might imagine, there are several instances in my browser-search that relate the word social to companionship.
Nevertheless, the very first definition I find may be most on point, describing ‘social’ as the way in which human culture organises itself.
Today, it seems, we are a society organised around and through media. Duh… you may well say. Has it not always been that way? This depends on how you define media – which I will get to elsewhere in the Lexicon, and probably at length, since it is an extremely complex word. However, in short, if Marshall McLuhan (2010) includes the spoken word, the written word, clothing and money in his famous Understanding Media, then ‘duh’ indeed.
Putting the problem of defining media aside for a moment, but returning to ‘social’ and its relationship to media, the term ‘social media’ is typically used to describe platforms such as X (forever Twitter, no matter how much Musk would like it detached from that moniker), Facebook, TikTok and Instagram. Dating apps are also forms. And others remind us about Wikipedia (Smith-Ruiu, 2023), which I like as it reminds me to keep my rabid anti-social-media feelings in check. I think it is one of the best bits of online-stuff. I do, however, when discussing X and Facebook, sometimes find myself sounding as maniacal as those who would blame all the world’s current ills on so-called AI. Do not get me started on that term… well, I have started, if you are interested, and you can read my rant here. As with media, I will put something in the lexicon about AI (and it’s likely to say very little about speaking-machines), but again, it’s ever so complicated so will take time to figure out.
In short, I understand ‘social media’ not only as a definition of online platforms, but also and perhaps more saliently, as a description of how modern society is organised. That being so, I am suggesting that this little coupling of words, social media, says a good deal about how we organise ourselves, and how we see ourselves, perhaps even more than when its merely a definition of a digital platform where people say things and post images or share articles. A Society [first and foremost] of Media (and yes, for those who recognise the allusion, definitely a society of Spectacle). While contemplating book titles, I am reminded of a book I read some years ago called What Are Children For? (Not the 2024 publication on ambivalence about bringing children into the world today but a 2003 publication authored by father and son sociologists, Laurie Taylor and Matthew Taylor, whom, I remember more than anything else, seemed to enjoy writing and researching in each other’s company.) And I wonder if a similar title, What is Social Media For? might be of use to us 21st-century critters, following the disappointed dawning that social media – the collection of platforms rather than the description of how our world is organised – has, in the main, not fixed our hyper-individualised need and yearning for companionship but rather caused such intense fissures that we seem in danger of destroying ourselves entirely, one way or another. (And many individual lives have indeed been destroyed by the rancour, speculation, intense attention common to our unbounded, always online, titivating culture.)
Like many others, I sign a plethora of petitions and formal complaints that come my way via these platforms. Sometimes, I see projects advertised that are worth applying for. I’ve also been introduced to wonderful writing, hilarious voices and fascinating ideas that have gone on to inform my thinking. But otherwise, these streams of human consciousness and slightly-less-than-human – or are they terribly, terribly human, after all? – echoes of consciousness are now so dominated by advertising and, frankly, visual and verbal detritus, that I am less and less inclined to want to spend my precious, over-burdened time engaging with any of it all. And so I find myself needing to know, and if I’m honest, wanting others to consider the question too; what, what, what is the bloody monster for??? Is it for the billionaires to make ludicrous amounts of money as we upload the flushings of thoughts and sorry tales about our lives only for their bots to scrape and ingest before regurgitating it all via another bot a short scroll away? Is it for finding companionship? Is it for advertising?
We have read about people meeting their life partners on Twitter as it once was – yes, we are already nostalgic for social media Mark I – but I can’t help suspecting these instances must be fading as humans grow increasingly wary and skeptical of the bombardment of audio-visual trash, the manipulation, and seemingly intentional dumbing down that these platforms have come to represent: see my blog Notes: Mouths, anuses, and lectures in pubs (Or ‘Think less!’… really, are you sure?) from earlier this year, in which I query whether people really are tiring from the bite-sized nonsenses that flicker endlessly past our eyes.
Why stay on it at all then, you may ask, if I dislike the phenomenon so much? I am not sure. Is writing off social media altogether something only the very privileged can do? Will I disappear entirely if I leave the last short-form platform on my phone, Instagram, behind? (Hang on, it’s not the last. I was forced to download Substack recently to listen to someone speak, which made me feel somewhat aggrieved – no, not everyone is leaving or dwindling or turning to actual books and real live conversations with people in the flesh; in fact, so it turns out, some are re-embracing the bloody thing.) And what on earth do I think this blog is, if not the form of media I have spent too many words lamenting? Perhaps I simply cannot escape, even if I do decide to delete the apps (bar this one). Here, plainly, I am talking about the platforms; but more crucially, I am surely also referring to the social structure – if social media describes not the apps but the paradigm in which we live, it’s not possible to leave it behind, is it? We are the media, and it is us. Therefore, we either have to replace how those platforms work, or find a way to make them work for the good of humanity instead of splitting it apart from within. To counter the pernicious effects and foster the more positive ones, for perhaps some do still exist.
For now, I have concluded that social media platforms are advertising boards. I am not sure this solves anything. Did an advertising board ever gobble my output up in return for engaging with it? Perhaps it did, but not in the same way we understand algorithms might. (I was certainly transfixed by images of underweight young women in my youth, and the obsession gobbled me up while I refused to eat). 21st-century dynamic advertising boards can conceivably advertise anything, from political affiliation to artworks, from the latest diets to loneliness. They force us and our human traits onto a conveyor belt of products – little images that make all sorts of promises. We push those products out into the world. And Meta et al skim the profits. Sure, sometimes, an individual or company gets a look-in too; but mostly it is Meta or Google and the like who make the killing.
We have arranged our society almost entirely around present-day media: short-form videos, GIFs, attention-seeking, meme-ified goop. We are a society of media. But I suspect it has been this way for some time, and the platforms are a manifestation of our social media paradigm – a society organised around media. The situation is decades old. It was certainly not born with the smartphone or the internet. It emerged long before, perhaps with the onset of industrialisation. And found its dancing feet a few decades later when the photograph began competing with the illustration and then moving images crowded out the photograph. And then, lo and behold, the images started talking back to us as if they were us! And we could no longer tell who or what we were dancing with. My God, I really hope I don’t end up snogging an image, or worse, a device with an image on the screen behind some cyber-space gym.
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Endnotes
i ‘How Wikipedia has managed to synthesize all these strands so successfully, without taking the same troubling turn that social media in general have taken (for Wikipedia’s open editing platform makes it a variety of social media) toward disinformation and a general muddying of the distinction between truth and rumor, remains an important question.’ (Smith-Ruiu, 2023)
Bibliography
BBC Radio 4 – The Reith Lectures, Stuart Russell – Living With Artificial Intelligence (2021) BBC. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001216k (Accessed: 14 January 2026).
McLuhan, M. (2010) Understanding media: the extensions of man. Repr. London: Routledge (Routledge Classics).
Smith-Ruiu, J.E.H. (2023) The internet is not what you think it is: a history, a philosophy, a warning. First paperback printing. Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Of interest
‘The origins and meaning of the word “social”’ (2013) Historical articles and illustrations, 6 February. Available at: https://www.lookandlearn.com/blog/21416/the-origins-and-meaning-of-the-word-social/ (Accessed: 16 August 2026).
Gilbody-Dickerson, C. (no date) AI is bringing lost loved ones back to life – and experts are worried, Sky News. Available at: https://news.sky.com/story/digital-resurrection-a-coping-mechanism-or-exploitation-13572946 (Accessed: 16 August 2026).
Woolley, D., Dibb, S., Zawisza, M., Thompson, K. and Lefevre, M.Q. (2026) Online objectification: exploring barriers to digital civic participation through an anti-objectification intervention. Leeds: INCLUDE+. Available at: https://includeplus.org/feasibility-study/online-objectification/ (Accessed: 16 August 2026).