'Being Social' in the Brave New World: How Social Media Influence the Way We Relate to One Another

‘Being social’ is inherent in the human desire to understand, influence and interact with the environment. In the modern era, we have witnessed how media serve as an agent that facilitates human interaction. One of the most dominant types of media today is social media. As with the introduction of written, conversational, recording and broadcasting media, social media have brought about changes in the way we interact and engage with each other. In this theory development paper, we investigate how social media influence the way we are social. We pursue this research question in order to develop contributions on how we can understand the merging of social and media. Based on a comprehensive literature review investigating the literature from sociology and media studies, we explore how ‘being social’ happens through mimicking, responding and stimulating, and we identify five affordances of media in terms of distribution, amplification, contextualization, integration and preservation of information. The theoretical findings are related in an outline of the influence of media affordances on ‘being social’. We explore the relationship through the development of five propositions that show how social media affordances relate to the way we are social. Illustrating the propositions in the example of Twitter allows us to generate additional insights and propose further research.