Facebook は meta じゃなくて para だった

Users are now lucky to see personal content that their friends are posting amid the slick content created by the advertisers and strategic creators who dominate most people’s feeds. What goes “viral” is now often manufactured in a lab, designed to appeal (Hund, 2023; Mears, 2023).

Social media stopped being primarily about connecting socially a long time ago. People still use a range of technologies to connect to friends and build relationships, but we don’t call those technologies – like texting and group chats – “social media.” Media shared on platforms may support social connections by creating a common culture, just as media shared via TV or magazines did historically (Meyrowitz, 1986). But that is not the same as creating a digital space for sociality.

その上でボイドは、「ソーシャルメディア」という前提で考える限り、プラットフォーム規制やガバナンスの議論もずれてしまうと指摘します。我々は未だ「ソーシャルメディア」という名前で呼んでいるが、主要プラットフォームの実態は、友人同士の社交の場ではなく、アルゴリズム的に編成されたパラソーシャルなメディア消費空間になっているのだから、分析の言葉も、規制の問いも、社会性の理解も更新しなければならないというのが彼女の提言です。

I have come to accept that the tools of the present are not what many of us hoped they would be, but I continue to struggle with the terms we are using to label these platforms. I think that it’s time that we deprecate the label “social media” and begin to recognize that we are dealing with an era of “parasocial media.” I’m not looking to mourn the loss of online sociality (although I do feel the feels of elder nostalgia). Instead, 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.