Social media changed the channel of communication, not its purpose

The argument

Proponents of this position argue that the arrival of social media altered the medium through which people talk to one another while leaving untouched the reasons they talk at all. On this account the purposes of communication are stable features of social life: people coordinate, they maintain standing with others, they ask for help, they amuse, they complain, and they test their sense of things against someone else's. None of these purposes was invented by a network, and none has been retired by one. What changed is the channel, and a channel sets the cost, the speed and the reach of a message rather than the motive behind it. The position draws support from the observation that each earlier shift in the means of communication attracted the same claims of transformation. Writing, printing, the post, the telephone and broadcast each let people reach further and faster than before, and each was described at the time as remaking human relations. Proponents hold that what actually followed in each case was the familiar repertoire of human exchange conducted at a new cost: gossip, courtship, argument, instruction and consolation all survived the change of medium and adapted to it. From this, proponents conclude that judgments of better or worse are misplaced, because they attach a moral verdict to what is really a change in logistics. A person who sends many short messages to a wide circle is not thereby a worse communicator than one who wrote few long letters to a narrow one; the two are meeting the same needs under different conditions. Where harms appear, this position attributes them to how particular people use the channel rather than to the channel itself, and where benefits appear it makes the same attribution. The honest verdict, on this view, is that communication has been rearranged rather than improved or spoiled.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Those who reject this argument hold that it concedes too much by treating reach and speed as merely logistical. A medium that makes an audience of strangers available at no cost does not simply carry an existing motive, it creates new ones: the wish to be seen by that audience is a purpose people did not previously have and now routinely act on. On this objection the analogy with writing or the telephone also fails, since neither made broadcasting to thousands the default setting of an ordinary private exchange. If the channel reshapes who is listening, it reshapes what is said, and a verdict of neither better nor worse begins to look like a refusal to judge.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Critics hold that purposes are not fixed: the wish to be observed by a large audience of strangers is a motive the medium supplied rather than merely carried. [Rejecting P2] A medium that changes who is listening changes what is said, so cost, speed and reach are not separable from motive. [Rejecting P3] The comparison with earlier media is weak, since none of them made addressing an unknown audience the default condition of ordinary private talk. [Rejecting C] If the channel generates purposes of its own, the change is not a rearrangement and can be assessed as an improvement or a loss.