If you were asked the question “Is WordPress a blog or a social networking site?”, what would you say?
To me? I think it is in a nice little spot that I like to call the grey area.
We know that WordPress is a blog site. “Build a site. Sell your stuff. Start a blog. And so much more” (WordPress.com, 2020) is their website tagline. But the real question is, is it a social networking site too?
Stereotypically, you may say that no it isn't. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter; they are all social networking sites and apps, but WordPress does not seem like one of them. However, when digging (and thinking) a little deeper, you come to realise that maybe it is. What do all three of those social media/networking apps have in common? They all allow people to communicate and connect, share content, and bond over common interests – you get the gist. Now, can’t WordPress do all of that too?
By definition, Boyd and Ellison (2007, p. 211) and Murthy, (2013, p.7) explain that social networks are a “public or semi-public profile” which can “articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection”, and with 5.8M users a month (Cowling, 2020), WordPress have a lot of people to share a connection with. Just like Facebook. Just like another social networking site.
Despite what we want to believe, WordPress is becoming more and more like a typical social networking site every day. With new technologies such as Live Chat options, you can connect with your followers and readers the same way you connect with your friends on Facebook. We can now integrate our social media accounts within our blog, showcasing our Instagram feed and our latest tweets on our homepages.
Blogs were and still are a place to share personal stories, collaborate on different content, and to come together for a method of social networking (Burns, 2017). Plus, according to Rettberg (2013), blogs were social media before social media even existed and the term was invented. According to them, “blogs still form the backbone of social media”.
Maybe we don’t think of blogs as social networking sites simply because of the base definition. The online dictionary defines a blog as “a website containing a writer's or group of writers' own experiences, observations, opinions, etc” (Dictionary.com, 2020). And yes, that is definitely what a blog is, but as I have mentioned, it is also about connecting with people. This is the same thing that Facebook, Instagram and Twitter all do.
When you think about it, can’t the blog definition also be applied to Instagram, Facebook or Twitter? Every day we are seeing lengthier captions on Instagram posts, in 2017 was saw Twitter increase its character limit from 140 to 280 characters (Tsukayama, 2017), and we have definitely seen our Facebook friends sharing their opinions.
Maybe the real question is: Is Facebook, Instagram or Twitter a social networking site or a blog?
References
Boyd, D & Ellison, N 2007, ‘Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship’, Journal of computer‐mediated Communication, vol. 13, no. 1, pp.210-230.
Burns, K S 2017, Social Media: a Reference Handbook, ABC-CLIO, LLC, Santa Barbara.
Cowling, D 2020, Social Media Statistics Australia – February 2020, SocialMediaNews.com.au, viewed 15 March 2020, <https://www.socialmedianews.com.au/social-media-statistics-australia-february-2020/>.
Dictionary.com 2020, Blog Definition, Dicitonary.com, viewed 15 March 2020, <https://www.dictionary.com/browse/blog?s=t>.
Murthy, D 2012, Twitter: Social Communication in the Twitter Age, Wiley, Oxford.
Rettberg, R J 2013, Blogging, Oxford.
Tsukayama, H 2017, ‘Twitter is officially doubling the character limit to 280’, The Washington Post, 8 November.
WordPress.com 2020, 36% of the web is built on WordPress, WordPress.com, viewed 15 March 2020, <www.wordpress.com>.