When we analyze social media, what are we comparing it to? What do we call the other kind of media?
A Wikipedia entry suggests industrial media, but that seems mainly based on the expense of old media production tools and the ownership of the means of production. I do like industrial meaning part of the media industry, implying professionally-trained content creators and managers. Professional media makes the same point.
Other familiar modifiers like traditional or conventional don't define what we're talking about in any concrete way. Mass media or broadcast media come close but suggest huge scale that's not always there. A book of poetry that sells 1,000 copies is definitely not social media and it's not mass media.
Most definitions of social media incorporate user participation, user-generated content. Participatory media is a nice term, but is non-participatory media the opposite? Besides, a lot of user-generated content is meta-data: the most emailed story, the most downloaded song, the most linked post. It's just surveillance, not true participation.
And how is a blog part of social media? Free blogging software is a de-skilled method of producing web pages, but is cheap and easy the mark of social media? Or is audience participation the key: does enabling comments or mashing-up an RSS feed make a blog social?
Here's a more controversial suggestion. Social media is a walled garden that includes my friends and generally excludes the public. Even in open feeds like Flickr and Twitter, my content is concealed in an avalanche of traffic from anyone who doesn't explicitly follow me or search my key words. Getting in with the in-crowd is definitely a big part of the social scene.
Maybe the opposite of social media is open media.
What do you think?
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