Should we call the system of highways and roads a social network?

Over on Tumblr, in a reblog and response to Tom, I said that places such as Facebook and Tumblr and ilX shouldn't be called "social networks," this for the same reason that we shouldn't call highway systems and phone systems and bars and coffee houses "social networks." But thinking about it more, I'm not so sure that we can't call such things "social networks," if we want to. People will do so whether we want them to or not.



What we need to keep in mind, though, is that "Facebook" isn't analogous to "Tom and the people whom he has conversations with about music," most of the latter constituting what I consider a genuine social network, if not a strictly identified or clearly bounded one — that is, "Tom Ewing" may be a node that connects a lot of people in my rock-critic/musicwrite world, and it makes sense to call these people a network, say "Tom's music-convo network"; but that doesn't mean that we're always clear as to whether someone is in the network or not in the network, the network being a set of fairly loose associations. The term "network" is useful nonetheless. My point is that the terms "social network" and "social media" don't explain themselves, so we have to be alert to what in particular we're talking about when we use them in particular situations.