Abstract

The nature, location, and dynamic of discursive power in Social Media, or broadly speaking the participatory web, is fluid, changeable, and non-static (KhosraviNik 2014, KhosraviNik and Unger 2016). Social Media provides all forms of offline communication and beyond through mediation of electronic devices. I view and define Social Media by the communicative affordance they provide at the intersection of mass and interpersonal communication, i.e., as a new paradigm of communication. Social Media Communication is viewed as electronically mediated communication across any platforms, spaces, sites, and technologies in which users can: (a.) work together in producing and compiling content; (b.) perform interpersonal communication and mass communication simultaneously or separately – sometimes mass performance of interpersonal communication and; (c.) have access to see and respond to institutionally (e.g., newspaper articles) and user-generated content/texts.