The humanisation of media? Social media and the reformation of communication

Abstract

This article explores the extent to which social media are overcoming the limitations of mass communication and restoring the humanising elements of interpersonal communication to modern communication. It examines how the technology of social media alters the ability to communicate, the nature of what is communicated, and the extent to which social media lives up to its promise as a humanising and democratising factor. It argues that technological structures and processes of social media incorporate artificiality and lack genuine authenticity and asserts that the power arrangements and the magnitude of messages carried by social media reduce its abilities to provide quality public communications, promote elite control, and leave us vulnerable to hysteria and moral panic. Social media at best represent a slight improvement to public communication over the legacy media of the past. At worst, they are replicating legacy media as a means of social control.

Keywords:

• social media
• interpersonal communication
• technology
• political economy
• culture
• media effects

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robert G. Picard

Robert G. Picard, PhD, is Director of Research for the Reuters Institute in the Department of Politics and International Relations at University of Oxford, a research fellow at Green Templeton College (Oxford), a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and an adjunct professor at University of Canberra. A specialist in political economy of media, media economics, and policy, he is the author and editor of 30 books, including Value Creation and the Future of News Organizations, The Economics and Financing of Media Companies, Media Clusters: Spatial Agglomeration and Content Capabilities, The Internet and the Mass Media, and Media Firms: Structure, Operations, and Performance. He has been editor of the Journal of Media Business Studies and the Journal of Media Economics. Picard received his PhD from the University of Missouri, Columbia, and has been a fellow at the Shorenstein Center at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.