The dictionary definitions are rewriting history based on a word that hadn’t even been coined yet. They created a definition which retroactively lumped nearly the entire internet under that term. It’s incorrect and unhelpful to do so.

Exactly. The ‘academic’ source that roguetrick (not who you replied to) supplied that apparently ‘37 thousand citations’ are using, was written in 2009 and states that Usenet was a social networking site. Just a complete rewrite of history. Notably that ‘academic’ source was from a business school.

As someone who was around and heavily involved in tech during the bbs days, then walled garden services, then internet forums, THEN social networking and media, I agree not with you but with the prior comment.

Thank you for understanding my point of view. This is complete rewriting of history by (mostly) news corporations that serve only to make people mad. And ‘social media’ became an easy buzzword to refer to anything that had something wrong with it. This got very bad in the past 5-10 years (time passes weird now).

However, given that language changes and us old geeks don’t make the rules, “social media” now indeed includes the entire internet. I can’t argue with the dictionary, but I can explain the reasoning behind my disagreement with the term. I think that’s the same the last person was saying.

you can argue with the dictionary, that’s what I’m doing here. A term that refers to everything under the sun is a meaningless word, especially when it’s weaponized against its citizens, exactly like the UK is doing with ‘social media’ currently, by having it literally encapsulate every website out there, but making citizens think that it doesn’t. The only way you convince the dictionary to change is by telling people that social media doesn’t mean forums. That social media doesn’t mean YouTube. That social media doesn’t mean Wikipedia. (I have some other words I’d like to argue as well, but they’re completely unrelated to this thread).

So that’s what I’m doing here. Telling people that including these things in this all encompassing meaningless word not only devalues the word, but makes it so that politicians can fuck us over anytime they want by using the ‘social media’ boogeyman, and then firewalling Wikipedia, or anandtech.com, or fordf150ownersforum.com, etc.etc.etc.