From social media to social energy (ενέργεια) : the idea of the ‘social’ in “social media”

My interest in this paper is to explore how the current extensive use of ‘social’ in its adjectival qualification of media, and transformation into a compound noun, has replaced a complex term and its preferred meanings. Within the current usages of “social media” such as with the popular platform Facebook, the ‘social’ collapses into a term of mediation and stands for the range of connecting instances in which media perform linkages across platforms and virtual places. In more recent journalistic contexts, the use of social media has been tied to the activation of political and grassroots movements: in the case of the so-called Arab Spring and the 2011 London Riots. Despite the clear differences in political motivation and organisational tactics, it is the use of social media that binds these events in the mainstream media account of them. I would argue then, that while the ease of formulation of messages within these platforms and applications constructs a wholly different and distorted idea of the social, the use of social media as a communalising tool is continuous with the intellectual traditions that made the ‘social’ a powerful concept for theorising and thinking about civilisational change. Using Laclau’s work on the logic of populism, I link the examples of the Arab Spring, the London Riots and the use of social media to ambiguities of populism identified by Laclau. I adopt the term “social energy” to suggest a way of mobilising a broader complex of public emotions associated with populist expression.