I, personally, don’t see why it’s necessary to coddle those who are unable to remember a time before garbage “social media” sites, by adopting the term “social

I, personally, don’t see why it’s necessary to coddle those who are unable to remember a time before garbage “social media” sites, by adopting the term “social internet.” It’s just The Internet. None of these sites or apps have done anything new, with the technology we have. It’s the same shit that existed in 1999, but scaled up to more bandwidth, faster client-side hardware, and warehouses full of servers. Facebook really isn’t an improvement on AOL. Snapchat is just a means of forcing people to delete the lewd emails you’d like to send. Twitter is SMS text messaging, plus a mailing list web UI. Since maybe 2004, people got sold on the idea of turning their address book into a home page, exposing their contact list as content. But it wasn’t anything new or incredible, it was just user behavior that changed. Only now, when everyone is desperate for a political scapegoat, are we claiming that it was used to rig elections. But the only difference between the time before “social media” up until now, is that when we just had 900 page paper phone books, the phone book never drew lines to graph connections between phone numbers. We have smart phones now, and smart phones have been the real game changer. In 1999, an ad campaign would have conflated these devices as supercomputers banned by export treaties, pointing to Game Boys getting used as missile guidance computers or military grade cryptographic hardware. But again, it’s just scaled up network bandwidth and more computing power packed into smaller packages. The real game changing aspect of smart phones is the cameras, hot microphones and uniquely identifiable, trackable radio tags we’ve been brainwashed into carrying. Insisting on calling it a “social internet” simply treats people like children. Platform monopolies are not The Internet. The Internet does not require a prefix or qualifier. It’s not the “social” internet. It’s just The Internet.