Guest Editorial

Different About Social Media Networks?A Framework and Research Agenda" in the MIS Quarterly in 2014, the digital landscape was already undergoing a profound transformation.Social media platforms had rapidly evolved from niche novelties into powerful forces reshaping organizational life and individual interactions.At the time, much scholarship implicitly treated these emerging online networks as mere digital extensions of offline social structures.Our paper challenged this view, arguing that the unique technological affordances of these platforms necessitated a distinct theoretical lens.Our goal was to provide a conceptual toolkit for understanding how technology was fundamentally altering network dynamics and to outline a research agenda that explored these shifts.Receiving the MIS Quarterly Davis-Dickson Impact Award 10 years later presents a welcome opportunity for reflection, prompting us to revisit our 2014 framework, critically assess its enduring relevance, and acknowledge its limitations following a decade of relentless technological and societal change.While the core distinctions highlighted in our original paper remain valuable, developments over the subsequent decade underscore areas where our initial framing requires significant extension.The rise of sophisticated AI-driven content curation and the evolution of the platform economy, synthetic media, and decentralized architectures demand an updated perspective, one that builds upon our original foundation.At the time of our first paper, social media platforms focused more on the social and network aspects of user interactions.They were built around fostering relational states, which are enduring and defined connections, such as friendships or professional contacts (e.g., LinkedIn).Today's platforms have expanded significantly by facilitating relational events.These are discrete, often ephemeral or transactional interactions, such as consuming a piece of content, completing a transaction with a stranger, or viewing an advertisement.This shift has led to a greater emphasis on platforms' media and content sides.For many users, algorithms now largely dictate both "who" and "what" they encounter, making the platform less a "network" of self-chosen ties and more an engine for orchestrating relational events, such as content consumption or fleeting interactions, often with limited or no underlying direct social connection (e.g., TikTok).In essence, today's social media has become the media for many users.1 This Guest Editorial is invited as part of the terms of the 2024 Davis-Dickson MISQ Impact Award.