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The web has always been social to me. One of the first things I did when I first started using it around 1996 was set up an email account with a small email service which was later going to be bought by Microsoft – Hotmail. Why? Because I wanted to communicate online with my friends who were also, around this time, setting up email accounts.

One of our favourite pastimes in those days was to go to the computer room at school and login to Aftonbladet Chatt, an online chat rooom hosted by one of the largest tabloids in Sweden. We’d chat to each other and strangers, often
pretending to be someone else. Then we discovered MIRC, and used the schools internal network to talk to each other there.

Later on, I was active on more online music forums than I can count, had a
persona on the Swedish ’90s social networking site Lunarstorm, chatted on MSN Messenger, spoke to people on Skype, made friends with bands on Myspace, then moved on to Facebook and Twitter.

The whole history of the development of networked communication has been driven by the desire to be social – from scientists at MIT wanting to share data and developing ARPANET, to Tim Berners-Lee using the alt.hypertext
newsgroup to talk about the invention of the world wide web.

So what do we really mean when we talk about ‘social media’? Often I get the feeling that we’re just talking about ‘Facebook and Twitter’, perhaps with a bit of Youtube and Flickr thrown in. But how are these sites more social than the the social technologies – email, chat rooms, forums, listservs, newsgroups and so on -  that have been around for 20 years or more?

If we do include these technologies as social media then they are part of the natural infrastructure of the web and nothing new. The only thing that is new is that more people are on Facebook.

Steve Bridger says that in ten years’ time we’ll be just as embarrassed about the term social media as we now are about words like cyberspace and informtion superhighway.

But I don’t think we need to wait ten years.  Let’s stop using it now.

Let’s just call it ‘the web’.