The self-promoters, 90% of the time, are either operating an entertainment business, advertising products, or both. So we can still just call it connecting businesses to customers, otherwise known as marketing.

It should all be called social marketing, not social media, as it really just a thin veneer over the Google and Meta ad monopolies.

Your attention was once in other places and it moved onto the Internet. The ad monopolists figured out a way to turn the Internet into a marketing platform, by purchasing their competitors and then gradually changing the features their services offered. They then converted you from a human being into a unit of advertising inventory. Doctorow's reverse centaur aptly describes the phenomenon; the simian body is slaved to the ad machine brain and now follows its command through the magic of cheap psychological tricks.