Traditional media tended to divide between public broadcast to anyone who could gain access, such as radio, and private conversation, such as the telephone. Social networking sites such as Friendster, QQ, and later on Facebook, represented a move downwards from open public broadcasting to the creation of groups where people could also interact with each other. Recently platforms such as WhatsApp and WeChat take private communications such messaging services and scale them upwards to form small groups where anyone in that group can post to anyone else.
As new platforms are continually invented, they fill this gap between the private and the public. Today we have greater choice over the degree of privacy we want or the size of group we may wish to interact with. This is why we call social media ‘scalable sociality’. By sociality we mean the way people interact with each other. To consider this idea of scales see this infograph based on the use of social media in four English schools.
