Maybe the comparison is made more in terms of the contemporary context for each medium, instead of in a pure 1 to 1 relation.<p>Nowadays I would say that Facebook is more of a &quot;format&quot; of sorts than &quot;just a service&quot;, in that it has tremendous power to sway the opinion of large groups of people all over the world, kind of how the TV was a &quot;format&quot; with a lot of impact during its time.<p>Maybe in the past you could&#x27;ve argued the same in e.g. a comparison between TV and theaters (or other previous format). Maybe people more used to going to the theaters could&#x27;ve made the same comparison saying that TV is just a &quot;show in a box&quot; and it&#x27;s not delivering the same impact as a play.<p>I could even make the same distinction between Facebook and say Snapchat. To me, when I use Facebook, &quot;at least&quot; I can get some interesting stories, some interesting discussions among friends (very seldom but they are there), vs Snapchat which to me looks like &quot;just a service&quot; to take pictures, but I&#x27;m pretty sure that a teenager could give me a full dissertation on how Snapchat is much more than just a service and is instead the prime communication media of their time.<p>My point being that I believe you might be biased due to age or due to being born with the TV as the main world-wide reaching medium vs today&#x27;s kids for which that medium is now FB&#x2F;Snapchat&#x2F;whatever the new thing is, even though in strict terms you are correct in saying that FB is a service (i.e. it&#x27;s &quot;just a webpage&quot;) but in the end, taking account the contemporary context for that, it&#x27;s really much more.