Benefits of social media: a source-based guide

The case for networked communication is usually made badly, by people selling it, and the case against is made loudly, by people who have already decided. Between the two sits a set of real advantages that hold under specific conditions and fail outside them. The conditions are the useful part, and they are the part that gets left out.

This page states each benefit as a rule with its conditions attached, so that a reader can tell when a claimed advantage applies to them.

What to take away

• The strongest benefits are the ones that come from reach to people you do not already know: weak ties, rare peers, distant expertise.
• Every benefit has a condition under which it holds, and the condition is usually about the size and composition of the audience, not about the technology.
• Most benefits are strongest for people whose situation is unusual, and weakest for people whose needs are already met offline.
• Nothing here quotes a study, a figure or a service, because the evidence on this subject is contested and the benefits are visible without it.

Rule one: the useful connections are the weak ones

The people who can tell you something you do not know are, almost by definition, not the people you talk to every day. Your close circle shares your information. The people at the edge of it, met once, followed loosely, remembered vaguely, are connected to circles you cannot see. The sociology of weak ties predates the internet by decades; what changed is that maintaining a large number of weak ties became nearly free.

Condition: the benefit holds when the network is large and varied. A network of people who already share your background reproduces your close circle at scale and adds nothing. A network built by following whoever is recommended will converge on the same few sources everyone else follows, and the ties will be weak without being useful.

Rule two: rare needs meet rare peers

For a common situation, the people around you are enough. For an uncommon one, an unusual illness, an obscure craft, a minority language, a specialized job, the people who share it may be spread so thin that no town holds two of them. Networked communication is the only mechanism that has ever reliably let these people find each other, and the communities they form are among the most durable described under internet communities.

Condition: the benefit is proportional to how unusual the need is. It is enormous for the person whose situation is one in a million and negligible for the person whose situation is one in ten, which is why the people most enthusiastic about it and the people most dismissive are often both right about their own case.

Rule three: coordination that used to need an institution

Organizing a group of people to do something at once, a protest, a fundraiser, a search, a clean-up, a response to a disaster, once required an organization with a list and a way to reach everyone on it. The list and the reach are now available to anyone, and the pattern of mutual aid that used to depend on a standing institution can be assembled in hours and dissolved when it has done its work.

Condition: this holds for things that are simple to explain, urgent, and do not need sustained commitment. Coordination that requires people to keep showing up after the urgency has faded still needs the institution, and groups that form fast tend to dissolve fast.

Rule four: the record you did not know you were keeping

A conversation that happens in text, in public, persists. Questions get answered once and the answer remains for the next person with the same question. Problems get solved in the open, and the solution is findable years later by someone who was not there. A great deal of practical knowledge now exists only in this form, in old threads, in comments and in answers, and it was never written up anywhere else.

Condition: the benefit requires the container to persist and to be searchable. Conversation in ephemeral or closed containers produces none of it, and the shift toward those containers is quietly destroying this benefit while the others survive. The problems this creates for anyone trying to reconstruct the past are set out under early social networks, where the record has already mostly gone.

Rule five: access to people who would not take your call

Someone with real expertise, who would never answer a letter or a phone call from a stranger, will sometimes answer a public question, because answering in public reaches everyone with the same question and costs them the same as answering one. The distance between a beginner and an expert has never been shorter, in the specific sense that the beginner can put a question where the expert will see it.

Condition: the question has to be good, public, and asked where the expert is. The same mechanism that lets one reply reach many also lets one expert be flooded by many askers, and the experts who answered freely in a field's early period mostly stop once the volume rises. Standing, in the sense described under online status and identity, determines whose question is seen, and it is not distributed by merit.

Rule six: reach without permission

Anyone can publish. No editor, no gatekeeper, no cost. A person with something to say and no institution behind them can, occasionally, be heard by a very large number of people, and the mechanism that produces this is the same one described under memes and virality.

Condition: occasionally. Reach without permission is real and it is a lottery. Most of what is published reaches almost nobody, and the distribution of attention is more unequal than in any medium with gatekeepers. The benefit is that the door is open; it is not that anyone in particular walks through it.

Reading a benefits claim

• Ask which of the rules it rests on, and whether the condition is met for the person it is being applied to.
• Ask who is making the claim and what they sell. The strongest claims about benefits come from people whose business depends on them, and the strongest denials from people whose reputation does.
• Ask whether the benefit is one that the person's offline situation already provides. A benefit that duplicates what someone already has is not a benefit for them.
• Distrust any figure. Counts of users, hours, connections and posts are defined by whoever counted them, and they measure activity, not benefit.

Common questions

Are the benefits worth the costs?

For whom, under which condition. For the person with a rare need and no local peers, almost certainly. For the person whose needs are met and whose weak ties are already plentiful, possibly not. There is no answer that does not depend on the case.

Why do the benefits seem to have shrunk over time?

Two of the six rules depend on conditions that have weakened: persistence and searchability of the record, and the willingness of experts to answer in public. Both were strongest early and have declined as containers closed and volume rose.

Is a bigger network always better?

Larger and more varied is better for weak ties. Larger and more similar is not. Growth by recommendation tends to produce the second.

Why does this page not cite research?

Because the research is contested, mostly correlational, and used selectively by every side. The benefits described here are mechanisms a reader can verify from their own experience, which is a better foundation than a figure that will be disputed next year.