I saw a very interesting question on an internship application today: “How would you describe social media to your grandparents in 3 sentences?”

My first instincts for this were to make an analogy to a village. I don’t have a version of this answer saved, but it compared Facebook to a village square, and other social networks to common gathering places like the local school, the pub, and the home. It was an interesting analogy, but after reading it, all I could think is “Great. But what’s social media?”

While that answer sort of encompassed the mechanisms of social media, it wasn’t very helpful for introducing novices to social media.

So I started again.

This time I asked “What affordances can I use grandma knows and are most closely related to social media?”

Communication mediums. My grandma knows the telephone, and the letter, and the newspaper, and even email to an extent (though I felt this might be a stretch for grandmas, so I decided not to rely on them knowing what email was).

By using these, I was able to craft an answer that was less reliant on connecting some weird analogy and reality. I’m still going to work on it some (I’d like it to be 80 words or less), but I think it’s a lot better than it was.

Here are my three sentences:

• “Social media” is nothing more than the internet’s combination of all the communication tools you’re used to, sped up and personalized to your tastes. The most popular “social network”, Facebook, is a bit like a real-time newspaper written for you, with photos and stories from your friends, family, and favorite celebrities. You can contribute to this by sharing your own photos or stories, or you can use one-to-one social networks ( which are more like a letter or a phone call) to chat privately with your friends.