It's equal to "the internet" for people who don't work in IT. Super sad actually.

There are entire counties where Facebook is "the internet".

I too get irrationally annoyed when writers fail to make the distinction. There was an episode of Reply All a while back where they analyzed the "emotions of the Internet" ... using Twitter. Twitter literally exists to maximize negative emotions! In no way was it representative of the experience (unless you're a tech writer).

I still feel like the social web has sucked in a lot of things that used to exist outside of it.

Like blogs. I feel like the blog world was much healthier before most of the content moved out of independent websites to a unified dump of social shit.