Communication

In the attempt of grasping what is distinctively social in what we are now used to call 'social media', the risk is to chance upon a circular tautology. Social media are commonly defined as a group of Internet-based technologies that facilitate social interactions between people by allowing to keep or further enlarge pre-existing social networks and to create and exchange user-generated content across variously articulated audiences (boyd, Ellison, 2007). Differently from mainstream media as print, radio and television, social media are characterized by their potential for many-to-many communication, which means that they draw on and feed into networks that can have the shape of both one-to-one and one-to-many exchanges (Jensen, Helles, 2011). This chapter will offer an explanation of the social in social media by arguing that the communicative practices that feed into them are not only new modes of communication but more deeply constitute new hermeneutic frames for intersubjectivity. The argument will be supported by the idea that technologies on which social media are based are sense-making objects that realize a symbolic re-coding of the intersubjective bases of lifeworld.