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I am confused as to which way to say the following:

"Does social media benefit people?"

or

"Do social media benefit people?"

finstats
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  • I would go for the first one, but I don't think the second one is incorrect. – Amir Šabanović Mar 03 '15 at 16:58
  • It's almost certainly been covered here before, but Grammar-Monster explains what's going on. – Edwin Ashworth Mar 03 '15 at 17:00
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    @EdwinAshworth Grammar-Monster is over-hasty in declaring "data are" to be "outdated." See ngram: "data are" continues to edge out "data is" in frequency. – Brian Donovan Mar 03 '15 at 17:11
  • @Brian Donovan There is an argument for choosing plural count-noun or mass-noun usage on merit. However, both a raw Google search (3 : 1 in favour of 'data is') and The American Heritage® Dictionary of Student Science, Second Edition. Copyright © 2014 by Houghton Mifflin ('Usage: In scientific writing, data is usually treated as a singular in much the same way as the word information is.... But because the word is historically the plural of the Latin noun datum, it is sometimes used as a plural ... The plural use is less frequent than the singular.') are at odds with the Ngram results. – Edwin Ashworth Mar 03 '15 at 23:18

1 Answers1

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Purists will insist that media be treated as a plural (the plural of medium), but the tribunal of use has long authorized its use as a mass noun. Both usages are established, then: see ngram.

(Frankly, what puzzles me more is how social can modify medium/media—for how can a communications medium not be social?)

Brian Donovan
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  • I can't see anything particularly "social" about a growing medium (artificial soil, etc.). And that one pluralises to media just the same. I can imagine "antisocial growing medium" being used to describe a product that smells like horseshit, so maybe a social medium might be one that doesn't smell bad! :) – FumbleFingers Mar 03 '15 at 17:24
  • +1 But a computer communicates with a milling machine using media that is social only in that it exists within a society. – bib Mar 03 '15 at 17:36