the history of social media essay

History Cooperative

The Complete History of Social Media: A Timeline of the Invention of Online Networking

Social media has become an integral part of all of our lives. We use it to connect with friends and family, to catch up on current events, and, perhaps most importantly, to entertain ourselves. This is why just under 70 percent of Americans, and more than 2.6 billion active users globally, use social networking sites.

In addition, the average user spends around 2.5 hours on social media each day .

However, this wasn’t always the case.

Back in just 2005, social media penetration in the U.S. was just 5 percent, and most of the rest of the  internet  didn’t even know what it was. All of this means that the history of social media is a brief yet tumultuous one, and studying it can help us better understand just how much, and how quickly, the world around us is changing.

We’ll answer the question of when did social media start in a second, but before we do, we need to define what is social media?

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What is social media.

Before going too far into the history of social media, it’s important we first discuss exactly what we mean by social media. For most of us, we can spot social media when we see it, but we should work to be a bit more specific. A quick Google search for “social media definition” will reveal countless results, but they will all reflect the following definition in one way or another:  

Social media is understood as the different forms of online communication used by people to create networks, communities, and collectives to share information, ideas, messages, and other content, such as videos.

Two things stand out from this definition:

• Social media must include online communication, meaning the history of social media cannot begin before the invention and widespread adoption of the internet; and
• Social media depends on user-generated content. This is why typical websites and blogs do not get included in the world of social media. Only certain people can post to these sites, and there are significant restrictions on the types of content that get uploaded.

Using this definition, we can understand social media platforms to be a wide range of things, such as messaging apps like WhatsApp and Viber, profile-based platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn, video portals such as YouTube , and also email clients such as G-mail. However, there are many other social networking sites out there, especially once you start looking at how people use social media platforms around the world.

READ MORE: Who Invented Facebook? The Birth of a Social Media Revolution

History of Social Media

Many people like to link the history of social media to the growth in communications technology that has been occurring since the end of the 19th century. A common starting point is Samuel Morse’s first telegraph , which he sent in 1844 between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore.

However, going off our definition from before, this type of communication does not qualify as social media. First, it did not take place “online,” and second, telegrams do not contribute to any larger community or collective. Instead, they are used to send individual messages between two people. So, while it’s interesting to think of social media history as being part of a much larger continuum, the real history of social media starts in the 1970s with the emergence of the internet.

The Rapid Growth of the Internet

The internet has its roots in the 1960s and 1970s when various private and public organizations were working to try and find ways to get computers to communicate with one another. In a sense, this can be considered as the beginning of social media. However, it wasn’t until the 1980s, and really the 1990s, that personal computers became more normal, which set the stage for the emergence of social media.

Additionally, the emergence of blogging and the bulletin board system in the 1990s helped usher in the age of online social networking sites. The idea that an average person could log on to the internet and write about what they were thinking, feeling, and doing, and that these posts could be read by anyone at any time , and responded to, helped people begin to understand the full significance of the internet.

Social Media History

Many people like to link the history of social media to the growth in communications technology that has been occurring since the end of the 19th century. A common starting point is Samuel Morse’s first telegraph, which he sent in 1844 between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore.

However, going off our definition from before, this type of communication does not qualify as social media history. First, it did not take place “online,” and second, telegrams do not contribute to any larger community or collective. Instead, they are used to send individual messages between two people. So, while it’s interesting to think of social media as being part of a much larger continuum, the real history of social media starts in the 1970s with the emergence of the internet.

The internet has its roots in the 1960s and 1970s when various private and public organizations were working to try and find ways to get computers to communicate with one another. In a sense, this can be considered as the beginning of online social media. However, it wasn’t until the 1980s, and really the 1990s, that personal computers became more normal, which set the stage for the emergence of social media.

Additionally, the emergence of blogging in the 1990s helped usher in the age of social media. The idea that an average person could log on to the internet and write about what they were thinking, feeling, doing, and their personal news, and that these posts could be read by anyone at any time, and responded to, helped people begin to understand the full significance of the internet.

Old Social Media Sites

Using our definition of social media above, the first two social media platforms were Six Degrees and Friendster, both of which are no longer around, despite playing an influential role in starting what has become a social media revolution.

Six Degrees

The website credited as being the “first online social media” site is Six Degrees. It’s named after the “six degrees of separation” theory, which states that everyone in the world is connected to everyone else by no more than six degrees of separation. This is often called the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” theory, although Kevin Bacon himself is irrelevant to the phenomenon.

The reason Six Degrees is considered to be the first of the social networks is because it allowed people to sign up with their email address, make individual profiles, and add friends to their personal network. It was officially launched in 1997, and it lasted until about 2001. It’s number of users peaked at around 3.5  million. It was bought out by YouthStream Media Networks in 1999 for $125 million, but it shut down just one year later.

A few years later, in 2002, the site Friendster emerged to compete with Six Degrees. Like Six Degrees, it allowed users to sign up with their email address, make friends, and save them as part of a personal network. People could also share videos, photos, and messages with other users, and they were also able to leave comments on other people’s profiles, so long as they were part of each other’s personal network.

A few months after its launch, Friendster had over 3 million users, and this number continued to grow, eventually reaching over one hundred million.

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In 2011, Friendster was rebranded as a social gaming site that was focused mainly on the gaming community. This helped it stay relevant alongside competiting sites like Google, Yahoo!, and Facebook, but in the end, Friendster was doomed to fail. In 2015, it suspended all of its services, and on Jan. 1, 2019, it ceased all operations and officially closed its doors.

When Did LinkedIn Start?

LinkedIn was one of the first social media sites in history. It was founded on December 28, 2002 by Reid Hoffman, Allen Blue, Konstantin Guericke, Eric Ly, and Jean-Luc Valliant. Initially, it was a site focused on professional networking, allowing people to connect with business and school contacts, as well as companies.  Today, this is still the primary purpose of LinkedIn. It has stayed true to that purpose to this day. Currently, LinkedIn has more than 575 million registered users, and it’s ranked number 285 on the Alexa Ranking for most-visited sites.

When Was MySpace Created?

Of the original batch of social networking sites, MySpace was perhaps the most popular and influential. Launched on August 1, 2003, MySpace quickly became the largest social media site in the world, connecting millions of active users all over the world. It started as a file storage platform, but it quickly transitioned to an online social network, which contributed to its meteoric rise in popularity.

By 2005, it was clear to the world that MySpace was here to stay, so some larger companies began to show interest in acquiring it. This resulted in the sale of MySpace to News Corp., the U.K-based media conglomerate run by Rupert Murdoch, for $580 million. Shortly thereafter, in 2006, MySpace surpassed Google as the top visited website in world.

The Decline of MySpace

After the sale, MySpace continued to grow, and by 2009 it was generating around $800 million in revenue, making it one of the more profitable social networking sites out there. However, as Facebook began to expand beyond its initial audience of just college students, MySpace began to decline, and Facebook replaced it as the top visited site in 2008.

Another reason MySpace began to decline was its use of on-site ads to generate revenue. Many argue that its deal with Google 2010, which consisted of a $900 million, three-year advertising agreement, overloaded the site with ads and made it difficult to use. It’s popularity was soon eclipsed by other sites like YouTube and Facebook that offered a more ad-free environment.

However, MySpace, despite its decline, continues to operate to this day. In 2016, it was bought out by Time Inc., and in 2018 it was bought again by the Meredith Corporation. Currently, it’s still ranked 4,153 on the Alexa ranking of most visited sites in the world.

When Was Facebook Founded?

Facebook was founded on February 4, 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, as well as Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollom, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. Facebook started as a social media site exclusive to Harvard students, although it quickly spread to the rest of the Ivy League, as well as Stanford and MIT. However, after 2006, Facebook was available to anyone claiming to be above the age of 13, regardless of whether or not they had an affiliation with a university.

After its launch and subsequent expansion, Facebook grew quickly, surpassing MySpace in 2008 as the most visited site in the world. Today, it ranks #3 on the Alexa traffic rankings, behind only Google and YouTube.

Facebook went public in 2012 and it received a valuation of $104 billion, making it one of the highest IPO valuation’s of all time. It currently generates over $40 billion a year in revenue, and it is considered as one of the most important tech companies in the entire world. Facebook has also acquired other sites like Giphy, instagram and Whatsapp in a bid to propagate its reach.

Currently, Facebook has just over 2.6 billion active users, a number that has grown consistently since its launch. This amounts to just under 30 percent of the entire global population. Facebook is the most popular social media platform in the world.

When Did Twitter Start?

Twitter was created on March 21, 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams. It distinguished itself by limiting users to only 140 characters, a policy it held onto until 2017, when it doubled the character limits in all languages except Chinese, Japanese , and Korean. Twitter went public in 2013 and was valued at $14.2 billion. Today, it has around 335 million monthly active users.

READ MORE: Who Invented Twitter? The Origins of a Revolutionary Social Media Platform

In 2009 China launched a social media platform called Weibo. A Facebook and Twitter hybrid that has grown to be one of the largest social media sites with over 400 million active users.

When Did Instagram Start?

Instagram was launched on October 6, 2010 by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. It separated itself from the becoming a smartphone -only app focusing exclusively on photos and video sharing, and by only allowing photos to be framed in a square (a restriction which was lifted in 2015). ‘

Instagram grew quickly after its launch, surpassing one million registered users in just two months. Currently, it has 1 billion active users, which makes it the sixth most popular social media platform in the world. In 2012, Facebook bought Instagram for approximately $1 billion in cash and stock.

When did Snapchat Start?

Snapchat was launched by Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown in September 2011. Its distinguishing feature was that it allowed users to send photos to one another that would disappear shortly after being opened.

Today, in addition to this service, Snapchat also allows people to chat with one another as well as share a “24-hour story,” which gives users the chance to post photos and videos and save them for one full day. Currently, it has around 186 million active users, although it is particularly popular among young people, leading many people to believe Snapchat’s influence will grow in the coming years.  

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Social media today.

Social media history is relatively short in terms of time, and while there’s no doubt about it’s positives and negatives (just ask Dean McCrae ), this doesn’t make it any less exciting or influential. Today, social media is an integral part of how people connect with friends and family. Overall, there are some 2.62 billion social media users around the world, and this number is expected to grow to over 4 billion by 2025.

In general, today’s market is dominated by a handful of companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagam, but their pursuit of new users in an increasingly competitive market has ensured they continue to innovate their offerings. When you combine these innovations with the emergence of professional-quality online social media tools such as Instasize , the type and professionalism of posts on social media have changed dramatically since Facebook first entered the market.

If we can learn anything from the history of social media, it’s that this will continue to change. New companies will emerge, and, as people’s preferences change, old ones will die or merge into something else, rewriting the history of social media as they do.

READ MORE :

The History of Marketing

How to Cite this Article

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1. To cite this article in an academic-style article or paper , use:

<a href=" https://historycooperative.org/the-history-of-social-media/ ">The Complete History of Social Media: A Timeline of the Invention of Online Networking</a>

46 thoughts on “The Complete History of Social Media: A Timeline of the Invention of Online Networking”

Y’all know your title page has three Os, right? History Coooperative? You might want to fix that. Thanks for the info though 🙂

Hey, do you have any idea who wrote this article?

It says that it was written by Benjamin Hale

Where does it say that? All I see is “by Keith”.

I am the G.O.A.T

You modern day people think your so good,

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u guys are both trash

When and how did social media start becoming a controversial problem to mankind

Nah Bruv I Don’t want to shank yee

You forgot to mention friendster ?

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So many sentence run-ons, spelling mistakes, etc. Phrasing is awkward.

Grammar nazi?

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what was one of the first social media sites invented in 1997?

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“Although it is impossible to know what the future of social media holds, it is clear that it will continue.”

I can tell you what will be the future of social media: DLT technologies, among which the Blockchain. A decentralised network, that :

– Can not be controlled or arbitrary censored by any central authority (i.e. politically correct thought police and dictators). – Will put back the user at the center of the equation (the so called UX that should be called PX from Product Experiment, because users of Facebook et al are clearly the “products”) – Will allow user to monetise his/her personal data him/herself thus taking back control over said data – Will pay users when they sponsor new members and publish useful contents – Will allow users to trade with their friends thanks to token / crypto-currencies

Voilà for the future of social media

A frenchy who is about to launch that kind of next-gen social media for We the People

u need to write good things man this is not all of the things

you cant espect him to know every thing in the world give him a break

Don’t make them change it

Thanks for the information!

Your funny Sharon

This is awesome stuff

Nice Article! Social Media is widely used all over the world and It ruining the entire world. It’s really appreciable for reading the social media history.

I used it in an essay in my ELA class! It was extremly useful!!!

what Keelin your grounded

Whoms’t’d’ve wrote this article? Kieth? Kieth who? What validated this article?

Great Article! Keen to read more article like this.

The best way for a brand to grow nowadays is Social Media Marketing so I think it’s very much essential for brands to go for digital marketing which will increase their awareness and elevate its sales

when was this??????

what is ur last name keith.

When was this article written?

I was having a fight with my friend about when Facebook was invented and it turns out I’m right! Thanks 🙂

is that really something to fight about though

So they just going to forget BlackPlanet like that wasn’t big shit. Or is it because its a Black company that shit don’t count? Everybody was using it well 15.8 Million people, it was founded in 1999 but no mention of it at all. That’s odd

Great info thanks for the help

Without any doubt, Social Media is one of the most blessings in our technological life. But it has spoiled our life on the other hand. :/

I had a fun time reading this at school

That was informative and it was super helpful for my six pages english homework so thanks to the one who made this wesite

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The history and evolution of social media explained

From the early days of aol and myspace to today's giants youtube, facebook and tiktok, social media has evolved into a critical part of modern culture worldwide..

• Madeleine Streets, Senior content manager

Humans have been searching for new ways to communicate since the dawn of time. Forms of communication have included grunting, cave drawings, speech, letter writing, sign language and email.

Then along came social media.

Social media platforms focus on communities and mass participation. Instead of knowing an individual's private contact information in advance, social media users can find old friends and new like-minded people. Today people can contact each other from opposite sides of the world in less than a second, share files through the cloud and watch the same video simultaneously despite being miles apart. Through these platforms, entire digital ecosystems can form.

In just a short time, social media has revolutionized the way humans communicate with each other. In 2005, just 5% of Americans used a major social platform; by 2021, this number increased to 72%, according to findings from the Pew Research Center. Globally it's estimated that 4.89 billion people are using a form of social media in 2023, according to statistics from Statista.

What is social media?

There are many forms of digital communication, but not all are considered social media. Social media refers to websites or applications that support content sharing, user interaction and the exchange of messages within a collaborative framework. The emphasis here on sharable content and social interaction is key. While many platforms support uploading content, social media enables greater engagement and collaboration between users.

The context for these interactions can be broad or niche depending on the purpose of the platform. For example, some networks may be focused on business connections and furthering professional development, such as LinkedIn. Others may target image sharing over text, such as Instagram, or cater to a specific demographic .

Increasingly, social platforms are facilitating new mediums, such as live video streams or digital retail. Many celebrities and notable professionals also use these networks to communicate directly with fans and supporters in a more intimate format than traditional media allows.

The definition of social media may evolve as the platforms themselves do, but the central component of community engagement should endure.

Precursors to social media

While social media itself has only been around at scale since 2003, there were some initial platforms that paved the way for this kind of digital community. Early adopters of the internet quickly recognized the technology's capacity for communications. Bulletin board systems let people connect to software that hosted public message boards, which displayed news and bulletins to all users. Some bulletin boards offered multiplayer gaming, while others enabled direct messaging or chat rooms.

Prodigy was an individual online service that quickly amassed subscribers thanks to its vast content offering of news, weather, messaging boards, stocks and travel. While the email system was originally launched to support digital advertising and online shopping, it quickly became a peer-to-peer messaging tool.

The other two popular services of the day, America Online (AOL) and CompuServe, followed a similar trajectory and grew such large subscriber bases that they collectively became known as the "Big Three." However, despite seeing substantial popularity in the 1980s and 1990s, none of the Big Three programs could successfully compete against affordable dial-up internet and newer web browsers, with each service fading out of popular use in the late 1990s.

Internet relay chat was another precursor to modern social media. IRC is a form of text-based instant messaging that was designed for group conversations as opposed to one-to-one connection. While IRC remains in use today on servers such as Libera Chat and OFTC, it requires a client connection to an IRC server. Users began to migrate toward more user-friendly chat options. Today the top 100 IRC networks only host a combined total of 230,000 connected users at peak times .

AOL Instant Messenger was introduced to the landscape in 1997. It was spun out of America Online and eventually became a standalone messaging application. Yahoo! Messenger and MSN Messenger quickly followed in 1999.

These tools helped people stay in contact from the convenience of their living rooms -- a foreshadowing of the convenience of smartphone communication.

Early social networks

After this initial wave of applications, the first true wave of social media networks emerged on the market. SixDegrees launched in 1997 and was based on the idea of the six degrees of connection. Users could list their contacts and invite nonmembers to join, with the ability to message first, second and third-degree connections. Bulletin board functionality ensured the presence of community-wide interaction. The site shut down in 2001.

Less of a traditional social media platform, LiveJournal paved the way for the self-documenting side of social media. Launched in 1999, LiveJournal lets users create a personal blog, journal or diary and share these posts with their friends and community. Users can also list other members as "friends," but this has limited functionality and doesn't need to be reciprocated as on Facebook. It is more like following someone on Instagram or Twitter. Posts have a comment section, which encourages engagement between community members. The platform is still functioning today.

Next came Friendster in 2002, one of the sites most directly comparable to modern-day social media platforms. This site supported photo sharing and video sharing, alongside more traditional text posts and link posts, that would direct users to other locations on the internet. It was also used as a platform to discover new media and events. Users could search for each other and communicate directly or within larger networks.

Friendster was so popular that it reached 3 million members in its first few months. After failing to compete with the social media giants that came after it, Friendster was rebranded and relaunched as a social gaming platform in 2011. It eventually shut down in 2018.

In 2003, MySpace launched and quickly became a global phenomenon. MySpace was the most popular social media platform in the world between 2005 and 2008, becoming the most visited website in the U.S. in June 2006 -- as calculated by internet tracker Hitwise, now defunct. One of MySpace's most popular features was the ability to embed music and YouTube videos into a user's profile, which could also be customized using basic HTML code.

Music played a key role in the platform's success thanks to the MySpace Music feature, where artists could upload their music for greater discovery. This was a precursor to Instagram and TikTok for finding new music. Although popular for years, MySpace was ultimately just not able to keep up with its closest rival, Facebook, which finally outpaced Myspace in terms of unique monthly visitors in April 2008.

Other platforms around this time also launched to various degrees of success, including game-based social platform Habbo in 2000, Hi5 in 2003 and Bebo in 2005. However, none of these have achieved get the same cultural foothold as the following platforms, which continue to dominate the industry nearly two decades later.

Modern social media platforms

Although many social networking sites shut down over the years and faded into obscurity, there are still many social media apps for modern users to choose from. No longer the domain only of the youth, some of these networks have been able to maintain a strong hold over older demographics even as they win new users. The most successful ones have become ubiquitous, with major businesses, famous individuals and everyday users maintaining accounts.

LinkedIn (2003)

The only professional-focused community on this list, LinkedIn was the original business networking tool and has maintained its social position throughout the last 20 years. Both users must agree to be first connections, but anyone can "follow" another member and see their public posts. In-platform messaging tools, comment sections and an interactive job board help professionals develop their networks and follow the careers of those they know.

LinkedIn has been owned by Microsoft since 2015 and has become a popular place for people to showcase their work histories and publicize their achievements.

Facebook (2003)

Perhaps the most well-known social networking app of the modern age -- with an average of 2 billion daily active users -- Facebook was created by Mark Zuckerberg in his Harvard dorm room. Originally only available to Harvard students and then those with an American college address, Facebook quickly expanded and was the third-most visited website of 2022, after Google.com and YouTube.com.

The platform lets users "friend" each other, share pictures and videos, engage with each other's posts, and create events. Small businesses and community pages are also a big draw for users, creating miniature networks within the larger Facebook network.

Facebook is free to use but has made money through ads and selling user data. It also now offers a paid verification option, which proves a user's identity. The company has faced criticism for its handling of private information and a few data breaches.

YouTube (2005)

YouTube is the go-to platform for video content, counting more than 2.5 billion monthly visitors who consume as much as a billion hours of content collectively each day. It launched in February 2005 and was bought by Google a year later . YouTube is now the second-most visited website in the world, after Google Search.

While predominantly a viewing platform, YouTube's comment section, interactive livestreams and "Community" feature enable the kind of collaborative engagement that defines social media. Users can subscribe to channels, create their own and respond to each other's content. A comprehensive advertising model has also made it a popular revenue stream for individual creators and businesses alike, with many millionaire influencers originating on the YouTube platform.

Reddit (2005)

Reddit is beloved for its old-school aesthetics and simple, text-heavy aesthetic. This website encourages users to upvote or downvote other people's posts, in addition to commenting on them. These votes dictate how visible a post is on the platform. Redditors can also create "subreddits" within the community and share posts, pictures, videos and links, with a mix of administrator- and member-moderators.

There is a greater sense of being run by the community rather than other social media networks, which has made Reddit popular with niche groups that want a safe place to convene online. However, Reddit has recently come under fire for charging for access to its API.

Twitter (2006)

Twitter has been the platform of choice for many writers and creatives due to its focus on microblogging; each post has a set character limit of 280, so users must be concise. Twitter also replaced the mutual friends model with the follower model, where anyone can opt in to see public posts -- or tweets -- of other users in a central newsfeed. This made it easier for people to grow a following and establish a public identity while still allowing for private messages and tweets. Images, videos and links can also be shared, but the emphasis has always been on text captions.

Billionaire Elon Musk acquired the platform in 2022, and it is currently undergoing some changes, such as replacing its legacy "blue check" verification system with a new paid subscriber system.

Learn about some Twitter alternatives here.

Tumblr (2007)

Tumblr is another microblogging platform, popular with younger demographics and fandoms. Users can create and follow each other's blogs, in which they share text or multimedia posts. Instead of a newsfeed, Tumblr members have dashboards that highlight recent posts from people they follow. Users can also ask questions of other blogs anonymously and not associated with their account.

Pinterest (2010)

2010 saw the emergence of photo-dominant platforms, beginning with Pinterest. This site lets users bookmark, or "pin," images from the internet and collate them into different themes and boards. A digital version of a traditional pinboard, Pinterest also added a community aspect by letting users "re-pin" each other's posts and follow each other's boards. Users can upload content from elsewhere on the internet and use Pinterest as a personal catalog. They can also browse existing images that others have uploaded.

Instagram (2010)

Although originally the domain of photographers and artists, Instagram quickly became popular across all ages and backgrounds. Like Twitter, following people on Instagram can be a one-way relationship, which has made it popular with celebrities and other public figures. However, users can also set their profile to private, which requires them to approve any potential followers.

On each post, followers can like, comment or save the image. The photo-heavy platform has a "Stories" function where all content only lives online for 24 hours, similar to SnapChat's temporary content. More recently, Instagram launched a dedicated short video product, Reel, to compete with other video-first networks.

The platform has been owned by Facebook -- now Meta -- since 2012.

Snapchat (2011)

Snapchat's appeal is short-form content, with peer-to-peer and public "Stories" functions. This emphasis on temporary communications and inclusion of various fun filters has made it popular with a younger crowd. Snaps can be pictures or videos, and users can add text, visual effects or drawings to both. While it is possible to take a screenshot of a temporary message and therefore make it permanent, doing so will alert the sender.

Most recently, Snapchat introduced a new AI chatbot called My AI, which can respond to queries. My AI is a generative AI tool powered by OpenAI's ChatGPT .

Discord (2015)

Discord is a little different from the other platforms on this list, with an emphasis on voice calls as well as written communication. Discord supports real-time instant messaging, video calls and voice calls across all the major platforms: MacOS, iOS, Windows and Android.

The site has a large gamer membership due to the voice call technology, but it has also found popularity among smaller communities who want to set up their own private servers within Discord. Each server can support up to 800,000 members, and the platform is free to use.

TikTok (2017)

Despite being the newest addition to this list, TikTok quickly became one of the most popular social media networks for a younger audience since it launched in the U.S. market. Although the platform recently adjusted its settings to accommodate longer videos, the premise is short-form video content and the ability to duet with other users on the platform, increasing interaction between members. Each video post lets users like, comment, save and share. Users can also layer saved audio tracks over their videos, which helps users find related content. An AI algorithm delivers suggested content to members' "For You" page, leading to a highly curated experience.

Learn about some alternatives to TikTok here.

Though those titans of social media all found success, other apps have struggled to find the same audience. Clubhouse was a brief addition to the market in 2019, which offered an audio chat room experience -- a sharp difference to the visual focus of competitors. Despite the growing market for podcasts and other audio content, Clubhouse never quite found its niche, and in April 2023 the company cut its staff by 50%. Vine was a short-form video platform that Twitter bought in 2012 but ultimately discontinued in 2017.

How does social media affect society?

Social media has many uses, including sharing personal updates with friends, brand marketing and publicizing professional work.

Some pros include the following:

• Users can connect instantly with an audience, fostering relationships and building valuable communities.
• Brands can grow an audience and compete with larger rivals.
• Jobseekers can find new career opportunities.
• Local communities can organize around politics or social issues.
• Users can seek out like-minded people as well as connect with family and friends.

But there are also some cons to social media:

• Users can hide behind anonymous accounts and attack other members online.
• Users can spread disinformation .
• Users can exacerbate their insecurities by seeing unrealistic portrayals of their peers.
• The platforms are at risk of data breaches.

How has the role of social media changed?

Initial social media platforms were targeted at the public and designed to help people connect digitally with friends. Over time, they have become spaces welcoming commercial business, brand marketing and the collection of user data. As userbases grew, small communities developed within these larger networks, making them resources for local organizing and finding new connections. The high levels of engagement also made these social networks valuable channels for public figures to share their messages with a large audience without going through traditional media.

The future of social media

Social media has only been around for a couple of decades, but it has already undergone several evolutions. As end users change, so do the ways they use these platforms. In response to these behavioral shifts, technology adapts to offer new features and ways to connect.

One possible clue to figuring out what's around the corner is to look at social media trends in Asia, which tends to be an early adopter. There, livestream shopping is much more prevalent on social media, and micro-influencers are frequently used for brand marketing instead of celebrities. This shift is already starting in the U.S.

AI will also likely become more prevalent across the main social media platforms, whether in the form of chatbots or in more advanced curation algorithms.

While businesses will continue to use these platforms to better connect with customers, there may be a backlash to this consumerism among users who enjoy the more pared-down experience of Reddit or Discord.

Learn some best practices for reaching Millennials and Gen Z through influencer marketing .

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Home / Blog

The Evolution of Social Media: How Did It Begin, and Where Could It Go Next?

May 28, 2020 

Table of Contents

• A Brief History of Social Media ○ The Launch of Social Sites

Social Media: End Users and Businesses

How marketing pros utilize social media.

• What’s Next For Social Media

The evolution of social media has been fueled by the human impulse to communicate and by advances in digital technology. It is a story about establishing and nurturing personal connections at scale.

According to Merriam-Webster , social media is defined as “forms of electronic communication (such as websites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos).” The 2019 Pew Research Center report on social media use in the United States showed that 72% of American adults use some form of social media. In 2005, the year after Facebook went live, that number was 5%.

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What follows is an examination of the origins of social media, its relatively rapid growth as a sociological and commercial force, and the change it has brought to the marketing world.

A Brief History of Social Media

In less than a generation, social media has evolved from direct electronic information exchange, to virtual gathering place, to retail platform, to vital 21st-century marketing tool.

How did it begin? How has social media affected the lives of billions of people? How have businesses adapted to the digital consumer lifestyle? How do marketing professionals use social media? It’s all part of the story of social media’s ongoing evolution.

Pre-internet Roots

In a sense, social media began on May 24, 1844, with a series of electronic dots and dashes tapped out by hand on a telegraph machine.

The first electronic message from Baltimore to Washington, D.C., proved Samuel Morse understood the historic ramifications of his scientific achievement: “What hath God wrought?” he wrote.

A recent article in The Washington Post , “ Before Twitter and Facebook, There Was Morse Code: Remembering Social Media’s True Inventor ,” details the history and relevance of Morse code, complete with early versions of today’s “OMG” and “LOL.”

While the roots of digital communication run deep, most contemporary accounts of the modern origins of today’s internet and social media point to the emergence in 1969 of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network — the ARPANET.

This early digital network, created by the United States Department of Defense, allowed scientists at four interconnected universities to share software, hardware, and other data.

In 1987, the direct precursor to today’s internet came into being when the National Science Foundation launched a more robust, nationwide digital network known as the NSFNET . A decade later, in 1997, the first true social media platform was launched.

The Launch of Social Sites

In the 1980s and ’90s, according to “ The History of Social Networking ” on the technology news site Digital Trends, the internet’s growth enabled the introduction of online communication services such as CompuServe, America Online, and Prodigy. They introduced users to digital communication through email, bulletin board messaging, and real-time online chatting.

This gave rise to the earliest social media networks, beginning with the short-lived Six Degrees profile uploading service in 1997.

This service was followed in 2001 by Friendster. These rudimentary platforms attracted millions of users and enabled email address registration and basic online networking.

Weblogs, or blogs, another early form of digital social communication, began to gain popularity with the 1999 launch of the LiveJournal publishing site. This coincided with the launch of the Blogger publishing platform by the tech company Pyra Labs, which was purchased by Google in 2003 .

In 2002, LinkedIn was founded as a networking site for career-minded professionals. By 2020, it had grown to more than 675 million users worldwide. It remains the social media site of choice for job seekers as well as human resources managers searching for qualified candidates.

Two other major forays into social media collapsed after a burst of initial success. In 2003, Myspace launched. By 2006, it was the most visited website on the planet, spurred by users’ ability to share new music directly on their profile pages.

By 2008, it was eclipsed by Facebook. In 2011, Myspace was purchased by musician Justin Timberlake for $35 million, but it has since become a social media afterthought .

Google’s attempt to elbow its way into the social media landscape, Google+ , launched in 2012. A rocky existence came to an end in 2018, after the private information of nearly 500,000 Google+ users was compromised by a data security breach.

Back To Top

Modern Social Media Outlets

Today’s social media landscape is populated by a suite of services that jockey for the attention of more than 5 billion mobile device users worldwide . Here is an overview of the most prominent social media networks of 2020:

Launched in 2004 by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg, it has nearly 1.7 billion users — including 69% of U.S. adults, according to Pew Research .

• HubSpot: Facebook Marketing

Launched in 2005 by Massachusetts 20-somethings Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian as a news-sharing platform, its 300 million users have transformed Reddit into a combination news aggregation/social commentary site. Its popularity is based on the ability to “up-vote” and “down-vote” user posts.

• Social Media Examiner: How to Market on Reddit: A Guide for Businesses 

Founded in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and others as a microblogging site, by 2020, 22% of U.S. adults were Twitter users, according to Pew Research .

• Hootsuite: Twitter Marketing: The Complete Guide for Business

Founded in 2010 by Stanford graduate Kevin Systrom as a photo-sharing site and purchased by Facebook in 2012, Instagram has more than 1 billion users worldwide.

• HubSpot: Instagram Marketing: The Ultimate Guide

Founded in 2010 by iPhone app developer Ben Silbermann as a visual “pin board,” Pinterest became a publicly traded company in 2019 and has more than 335 million active monthly users.

• Sprout Social: Your 5-Step Pinterest Marketing Guide

Founded in 2011 by a trio of Stanford students — Evan Spiegel, Reggie Brown, and Bobby Murphy — this video-sharing service introduced the concept of “stories,” or serialized short videos, and “filters,” run for informative digital effects, often based on location.

• Hootsuite: Snapchat for Business

Founded in 2016 by Chinese tech company ByteDance, this short-form video-sharing site was merged with the U.S.-based mobile app Musical.ly in 2018 and became popular with American teens and young adults. As of early 2020, it had more than 800 million users worldwide.

• Business Insider: TikTok Marketing Trends & Predictions for 2020

What began as a desktop or laptop experience shifted to mobile phones and tablets as cellular service expanded; the capabilities of cellular phones expanded, turning them into “smartphones”; and high-speed wireless internet became more readily available in homes, businesses, and public spaces.

With the advent of social media apps that could run on smartphones, end users could take their communities with them wherever they went.

Businesses took advantage of this new consumer mobility by serving their customers new, simpler methods of interacting — and new ways of buying goods and services.

The End-User Experience

At first, social media existed to help end users connect digitally with friends, colleagues, family members, and like-minded individuals they might never have met in person. Desktop access to bulletin board services such as CompuServe and Prodigy made it easier to grow free online communities without ever leaving the house.

The invention of the smartphone liberated social media from the desktop and laptop computer. Apple’s first iPhone, launched by Steve Jobs in 2007, helped shift the focus of online community building to mobile. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, and other social media services thrived in the mobile app environment.

Technological improvements — specifically, powerful in-phone cameras — shifted the focus of mobile apps to video and images. In addition to written messages, end users could now broadcast in real time.

Instagram, in particular, became the app of choice for social media users interested in travel, entertainment, fashion, and other visually oriented topics.

The Business Experience

As social media companies grew their user bases into the hundreds of millions, the business applications of Facebook, Twitter, and other social platforms began to take shape. Social media companies had access to some of the richest trackable user data ever conceived.

A recent article on IAS Insider, “ The Evolution of Social Media Advertising ,” sums it up: “Users don’t just log in and browse, they tell the platforms their name, and where they live, what they like and who they know, painting the most vivid picture currently possible for marketers looking to target specific consumers.”

Facebook began to place ads on its platform as early as 2006. Twitter enabled ads in 2010. LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, and TikTok all have attempted to monetize their services through various forms of sponsored advertising.

In addition to placing ads on social media platforms, companies discovered the potential utility of cultivating an active, engaged social media presence. Whereas social media advertising must be paid for, the act of creating and sharing informative or entertaining content on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other platforms is an attempt by brands to grow an audience organically, in other words, without paying for it directly.

According to HubSpot’s “ Social Media Marketing: The Ultimate Guide ,” companies use organic social media marketing to:

• Increase brand awareness
• Generate leads and increase conversions
• Develop and nurture relationships with customers
• Learn from competitors

The combination of advertising, or paid social media marketing, and organic social media outreach evolved into the digital marketing specialty known as social media marketing.

• Sprout Social: How to Build Your Social Media Marketing Strategy for 2020
• Forbes: How Social Media Can Move Your Business Forward
• Social Media Examiner: The Guide for Social Media Marketing for Businesses

As the ability to reach consumers expanded thanks to social media, marketing professionals quickly adapted. Social media’s evolution provided measurement tools that gave marketing professionals unprecedented access to valuable, actionable data about consumers’ demographics, buying habits, and more.

With marketers no longer limited to traditional forms of media — TV, radio, print, mail, billboards, magazines, etc. — the social media marketing industry was born.

Taking Advantage of Social Media’s Popularity

The most efficient way to take advantage of social media’s popularity is to leverage existing audiences. To that end, digital marketers engage social media “influencers” to share messaging and product offers with their followers.

According to an article on Sprout Social’s website, “ What Is Influencer Marketing: How to Develop Your Strategy ,” influencer marketing is defined as “a type of social media marketing that uses endorsements and product mentions from influencers — individuals who have a dedicated social following and are viewed as experts within their niche.”

These social media influencers spend time building trust with their audiences. With more than 3.2 billion social media users worldwide, finding influencers whose audiences fall into the company’s niche of consumers helps cut through the noise by targeting specific potential buyers.

While influencers provide companies a layer of built-in consumer trust, social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn provide in-depth analytics that allow digital marketers to target specific demographic groups with ads. This can be useful for building brand awareness among potential long-term customers, as well as for generating leads for specific products or services.

• Influencer Marketing Hub: What is an Influencer?
• Social Media Today: 4 Influencer Marketing Trends That Will Dominate in 2020
• Influencer Marketing Hub: The State of Influencer Marketing 2020: Benchmark Report

The Importance of Engagement and Integration

Social media engagement consists of the various ways users respond to a post. This can include comments, follows, shares (retweets on Twitter), and clicks on a shared link. All of these actions are measurable thanks to analytics provided by the social media platforms (Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, LinkedIn Page Analytics, etc.).

Each of these engagements presents an opportunity for marketers to influence a customer or group of customers. For example, a company that monitors its Twitter feed in real time — either through an automated service or in person — is positioned to respond quickly to a customer’s request or comment.

In addition, data that reveals users’ habits over time can be integrated into a long-term social media strategy. For example, Facebook Insights shows when users are most active on the platform. This information can be used to determine when is the best time to post new content, giving it a better chance to be seen.

Another way marketers use social media is to monitor cultural trends and, if applicable, incorporate brand-specific concepts that build on those trends to entice customers to engage with the company’s content.

Personifying the Company

Another Sprout Social article, “ 5 Actionable Strategies for Social Media Branding ,” provides guidelines for how social media can be used to develop a company’s public “voice.” The bottom line when it comes to social media branding is authenticity. Today’s savvy digital consumers expect a robust and “real” personality from brands. Sprout Social’s tactical advice includes:

• Develop and use consistent visual branding across all social media platforms
• Use a tone that reflects the brand’s public persona
• Cater to marketing personas based on social media metrics

Companies that fail to develop a consistent, engaging social media presence are not taking full advantage of the marketing tools available in today’s competitive marketplace.

The Future of Social Media

What happens next in social media almost certainly will be shaped by the evolving business model, as well as by advances in storytelling technology. How will mega platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and others make money? How will end users adapt? How will businesses spread their messages and use social media to build audiences? The answers to these questions will determine the next stage of social media’s evolution.

Premium Social Media Services

What does the future hold for social media? According to a recent article in Entrepreneur , “ 11 Ways Social Media Will Evolve in the Future ,” consumers will gravitate toward services that allow them to:

• Personalize content at a granular level
• Reduce the amount of vitriol and conflict commonly found on public social media feeds
• Increase focus on protecting privacy
• Take greater advantage of the utility of mobile devices
• Focus more on community building

This could mean a movement toward paid subscription services on social media, according to Entrepreneur . The challenge for marketing professionals will be to meet the shifting demands of social media users while maintaining an authentic brand voice.

Social Media Video

Another growing point of emphasis for social media in the future, according to Entrepreneur , will be video content. Video marketing already has a substantial presence in the U.S., where it is a $135 billion industry in 2020 , according to Social Media Today.

According to HubSpot’s “ The Ultimate List of Marketing Statistics for 2020 ,” video became the No. 1 form of media used in content marketing in 2019, surpassing blogs and e-books for the first time. Video’s prominence as a marketing tool is expected to continue to grow, based on the latest information in Wyzowl’s “ The State of Video Marketing in 2020 [New Data] .”

This survey found that 88% of marketers received positive returns on investment through video. Perhaps most significantly, 59% of marketers who said they had not previously used video intended to do so in 2020 and beyond.

What’s Next for Social Media?

The future of social media is limited only by the imagination of its stakeholders. The brief history of the industry has proven that the rapid change — advances in technology, more-strident financial demands, shifting cultural dynamics — will transform the current social media landscape.

Will Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other major platforms go the way of Google+ and MySpace? Will the entrepreneurial heirs of Twitter creator Biz Stone and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg build on the success of their predecessors? Can social media maintain its relevance as technology evolves?

Human beings are social creatures. Commerce is driven by human interaction. These two facts will continue to shape the evolution of social media into the next decade and beyond.

Recommended Reading

How to Become a Social Media Manager

What Can You Do with a Marketing Degree?

Why Should You Major in Marketing?

Digital Trends, “The History of Social Networking

Encyclopedia Britannica , Myspace

Entrepreneur , “11 Ways Social Media Will Evolve in the Future

Forbes , “How Social Media Can Move Your Business Forward

The Guardian , “Google Buys Blogger Web Service

HubSpot, “Social Media Marketing: The Ultimate Guide

HubSpot, “The State of Video Marketing in 2020 (New Data)

IAS Insider, “The Evolution of Social Media Advertising

LiveJournal, About LiveJournal

Maryville University, “How to Become a Social Media Manager

National Science Foundation, “NSF and the Birth of the Internet

Pew Research Center, 10 Facts About Americans and Twitter

Pew Research Center, Smartphone Ownership Is Growing Rapidly Around the World, but Not Always Equally

Pew Research Center, Social Media Fact Sheet

Social Media Today, The History of Social Media

Social Media Today, Video Marketing Statistics for 2020

Sprout Social, “5 Actionable Strategies for Social Media Branding

Sprout Social, “What Is Influencer Marketing: How to Develop Your Strategy

Statista, Percentage of U.S. Population with a Social Media Profile from 2008 to 2019

Statista, Pinterest — Statistics & Facts

TheStreet, “History of Snapchat: Timeline and Facts

TechCrunch, “Looking Back at Google+

Infographic Sources

CNBC, “Digital Ad Revenue In The US Surpassed $100 Billion For The First Time In 2018

IAB / PricewaterhouseCoopers, “IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report: 2018 Full Year Results

Pew Research Center, “10 Facts About Americans and Facebook

Pew Research Center, “Share of U.S. Adults Using Social Media, Including Facebook, Is Mostly Unchanged Since 2018

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The rise of social media

Social media sites are used by more than two-thirds of internet users. how has social media grown over time.

This article is an archived version of an article published in 2019. Due to data availability, the article and charts will not be updated.

Facebook, the largest social media platform in the world, had 2.4 billion users in 2019. Other social media platforms, including YouTube and WhatsApp, also had over one billion users each.

These numbers are huge – in 2019, there were 7.7 billion people worldwide, with at least 3.5 billion online . This means social media platforms were used by one in three people worldwide and more than two-thirds of all Internet users.

Social media has changed the world. The rapid and vast adoption of these technologies is changing how we find partners , access information from the news, and organize to demand political change .

Who uses social media? When did the rise of social media start, and how has the number of users changed over time? Here we answer these and other key questions to understand the history of social media worldwide.

We begin with an outline of key trends and conclude with a perspective on the social media adoption rate relative to other modern communication technologies.

Social media started in the early 2000s

MySpace was the first social media site to reach a million monthly active users – it achieved this milestone around 2004. This is arguably the beginning of social media as we know it. 1

In the chart, we plot monthly active users across various platforms since 2004.

Some large social media sites, such as Facebook, YouTube, and Reddit, have been around for ten or more years, but others are much newer.

TikTok, for example, launched in September 2016, and by mid-2018, it had already reached half a billion users. To put this in perspective: TikTok gained, on average, about 20 million new users per month over this period.

The data also shows rapid changes in the opposite direction. Once-dominant platforms have disappeared. In 2008, Hi5, MySpace, and Friendster were close competitors to Facebook, yet by 2012 they had virtually no market share. The case of MySpace is remarkable, considering that in 2006 it temporarily surpassed Google as the most visited website in the US.

Most social media platforms that survived the last decade have shifted significantly in what they offer users. Twitter, for example, didn’t allow users to upload videos or images initially. Since 2011 this has been possible, and today, more than 50% of the content viewed on Twitter includes images and videos.

Facebook dominated the social media market for a decade, but five other platforms also have more than half a billion users

With 2.3 billion users, Facebook was the most popular social media platform in 2019. YouTube, Instagram, and WeChat followed, with over a billion users. Tumblr and TikTok came next, with over half a billion users.

The bar chart shows a ranking of the top social media platforms.

Some social media sites are particularly popular among specific population groups

The aggregate numbers mask a great deal of heterogeneity across platforms. Some social media sites are much more popular than others among specific population groups.

In general, young people are more likely to use social media than older people. But some platforms are much more popular among younger people. This is shown in the chart where we plot the breakdown of social media use by age group in the US.

For Snapchat and Instagram, the ‘age gradient’ is exceptionally steep – the popularity of these platforms drops much faster with age. Most people under 25 use Snapchat (73%), while only 3% of people over 65 use it.

Since these platforms are relatively new, it’s hard to know how much of this age gradient results from a “cohort effect”. In other words: it’s unclear whether today’s young people will continue using Snapchat as they age. If they do, the age gradient will narrow.

Let’s now look at gender differences.

This chart shows the percentage of men and women that used different platforms in the US in 2021—the diagonal line marks parity. Sites above the diagonal line are more popular among women, and those below are more popular among men.

For some platforms, the gender differences are substantial. The share of women who used Pinterest was 3 times as high as that of men using this platform. For Reddit, it was the other way around: the share of men was twice as high.

In rich countries, almost all young people use social media

From a back-of-the-envelope calculation, we know that if Facebook had 2.3 billion users in 2019, then at least 30% of the world was using social media. 2 This is just an average – usage rates were much higher for some world regions, specifically for some population groups.

Young people tend to use social media more frequently. In fact, in rich countries where access to the Internet is nearly universal , the vast majority of young adults use it.

Our chart shows the proportion of people aged 16 to 24 who used social networks across various countries. As we can see, the average for the OECD is close to 90%.

If today’s young adults continue using social media throughout their lives, then it’s likely that social media will continue growing rapidly as Internet adoption expands throughout lower-income countries .

The rise of social media in rich countries has come together with an increase in the amount of time spent online

The increase in social media use over the last decade has, of course, come together with a large increase in the amount of time people spend online.

In the US, adults spend more than 6 hours daily on digital media (apps and websites accessed through mobile phones, tablets, computers, and other connected devices such as game consoles). As the chart shows, this growth has been driven almost entirely by additional time spent on smartphones and tablets. 3

According to a survey from the Pew Research Center, adults aged 18 to 29 in the US are more likely to get news indirectly via social media than directly from print newspapers or news sites. They also report being online “almost constantly” . 4

Evidence shows that in other rich countries, people also spend many hours per day online. The following chart shows how many hours young people spend online across various rich countries. As we can see, the average for the OECD is more than 4 hours per day; in some countries, the average is above 6 hours per day.

Some perspective on how fast and profound these rapid changes are

The percentage of US adults who use social media increased from 5% in 2005 to 79% in 2019. Even on a global stage, the speed of diffusion is striking: Facebook surged from covering around 1.5% of the world population in 2008 to around 30% in 2018. 5

How does this compare to the diffusion of other communication technologies in today's everyday life?

The following chart provides some perspective.

Social media’s growth in the US is comparable – in speed and, to some extent, reach – to most modern communication-enabling technologies, including computers, smartphones, and the Internet.

The rise of social media is an extraordinary example of how quickly and drastically social behaviors can change: Something that is today part of the everyday life of one-third of the world population was unthinkable less than a generation ago.

Rapid changes like those brought about by social media always spark fears about possible negative effects. Specifically, in the context of social media, a key question is whether these new communication technologies are harming our mental health – this is an important question and we cover the evidence in another article on Our World in Data.

There were, of course, earlier, much smaller predecessors of social networking websites. The first recognizable social media site, in the format we know today, was Six Degrees – a platform created in 1997 that enabled users to upload a profile and make friends with other users. At the core, the features that define a social media platform are (i) profiles for users, (ii) the ability for users to upload content constantly, and (iii) the ability for users to discuss content and connect with other users.

To be precise, Facebook had 2.3 billion ‘active users.’ There may be some discrepancies between the number of ‘active users’ and the number of people since one person could, in theory, maintain multiple accounts. In practice, these discrepancies are likely small because most social media platforms, including Facebook, have policies and checks to avoid multiple accounts per person.

Digital media contrasts with print media (including books, newspapers, and magazines) and other traditional or analog media (including TV, movies, and radio).

According to the survey from Pew Research, 36% of adults 18 to 29 in the US say they ‘often get news via social media,’ which is higher than the share saying they ‘often get news via other platforms,’ such as news sites, TV, radio or print newspapers. From the same survey, we also know that 48% of adults 18 to 29 say they go online almost constantly, and 46% say they go online multiple times daily.

The US social media adoption data is here . Regarding Facebook’s global numbers: In 2018, Facebook had 2.26 billion users, and in 2008 it had 100 million; the world population in 2008 was 6.8 billion, and in 2018 it was 7.63 billion (you can check the population data here .)

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social media , a form of mass media communications on the Internet (such as on websites for social networking and microblogging) through which users share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos). Social networking and social media are overlapping concepts, but social networking is usually understood as users building communities among themselves while social media is more about using social networking sites and related platforms to build an audience.

The earliest forms of social media appeared almost as soon as technology could support them. E-mail and chat programs debuted in the early 1970s, but persistent communities did not surface until the creation of the discussion group network USENET in 1979. USENET allowed users to post and receive messages within subject areas called newsgroups. USENET and other discussion forums, such as privately hosted bulletin board systems (BBSs), enabled individuals to interact, but each was essentially a closed system. With the release in 1993 of the Mosaic web browser , those systems were joined with an easy-to-use graphical interface. The architecture of the World Wide Web made it possible to navigate from one site to another with a click, and faster Internet connections allowed for more multimedia content than could be found in the text-heavy newsgroups.

The first companies to create social networks based on web technology were Classmates.com and SixDegrees.com. Classmates.com, founded in 1995, used an aggressive pop-up advertising campaign to draw web surfers to its site. It based its social network on the existing connection between members of high-school and college graduating classes, armed service branches, and workplaces. SixDegrees.com was the first true social networking site. It was launched in 1997 with most of the features that would come to characterize such sites: members could create profiles for themselves, maintain lists of friends, and contact one another through the site’s private messaging system. SixDegrees.com claimed to have attracted more than three million users by 2000, but it failed to translate those numbers into revenue and collapsed with countless other dot-coms when the “ bubble ” burst that year for shares of e-commerce companies.

Nevertheless, social media sites became popular in the early 21st century. Social networks such as Friendster and MySpace emerged that allowed family members, friends, and acquaintances to connect online. Those two sites were eventually supplanted by Facebook , which became one of the world’s most popular social media sites with billions of users worldwide . Other forms of social media emerged for the sharing of specific types of content. For example, YouTube allows users to share videos, and TikTok is specifically designed for the sharing of short videos. LinkedIn emphasizes a user’s professional connections, where users create pages similar in structure to résumés.

Concerns over the possible negative effects of social media are also growing in tandem with the burgeoning technology. For example, some observers suggest that social media sites spur greater schadenfreude —the emotional experience of pleasure in response to another’s misfortune—perhaps as a result of the dehumanization that occurs when interacting through screens on computers and mobile devices . Some studies also suggest a strong tie between heavy social media use and increased depression , anxiety , loneliness , suicidal tendencies, and feelings of inadequacy.

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Twenty-Five Years of Social Media: A Review of Social Media Applications and Definitions from 1994 to 2019

Thomas aichner.

1 Department of Business Administration, John Cabot University, Rome, Italy.

Matthias Grünfelder

2 Johannes Kepler University Linz, Linz, Austria.

Oswin Maurer

3 Faculty of Economics and Management, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bozen-Bolzano, Italy.

Deni Jegeni

In this article, the authors present the results from a structured review of the literature, identifying and analyzing the most quoted and dominant definitions of social media (SM) and alternative terms that were used between 1994 and 2019 to identify their major applications. Similarities and differences in the definitions are highlighted to provide guidelines for researchers and managers who use results from previous research to further study SM or to find practical applications. In other words, when reading an article about SM, it is essential to understand how the researchers defined SM and how results from articles that use different definitions can be compared. This article is intended to act as a guideline for readers of those articles.

Introduction

The term “social media” (SM) was first used in 1994 on a Tokyo online media environment, called Matisse. 1 It was in these early days of the commercial Internet that the first SM platforms were developed and launched. Over time, both the number of SM platforms and the number of active SM users have increased significantly, making it one of the most important applications of the Internet.

With a similarly fast pace, businesses have moved their marketing interests toward SM platforms. The presence of both businesses and users on SM has further led to a shift in how companies interact with their customers, who are additionally no longer limited to a passive role in their relationship with a company. 2 Customers give feedback, ask questions, and expect quick and customized answers to their specific problems. In addition, customers post text, pictures, and videos. Managers came to the understanding that the brand transition to SM ultimately involves a re-casting of the customer relationship, where the customer has become an ally or an enemy, not an audience. 3

In research, SM is generally used as an umbrella term that describes a variety of online platforms, including blogs, business networks, collaborative projects, enterprise social networks (SN), forums, microblogs, photo sharing, products review, social bookmarking, social gaming, SN, video sharing, and virtual worlds. 4 Given this broad spectrum of SM platforms, the applications of SM are quite diverse and not limited to sharing holiday snapshots or advertising and promotion.

As of January 2020, there are more than 110,000 publications that have the term “social media” in their title. Over the past 25 years in which these works were published, countless researchers have formulated quite varying definitions of SM—sometimes using alternative terms. In this period, the perceptions and understanding of what SM is, what it includes, and what it represents have also varied considerably. This can make it difficult for both researchers and companies to interpret and apply research findings; for example , when referring to SM in general, rather than referring to a specific type of SM, such as SN. It can be problematic to quote previous research that was carried out exclusively on one SM platform as being generalizable to SM, or to refer to results from research that defined SM as being more or less inclusive in terms of which platforms qualify as SM and which do not.

Major Applications of SM

This section serves as the background of SM functions, rather than how the definition has changed. It provides a general, although not comprehensive, overview of some of the most important applications of SM over the past two and a half decades. This is important, as it highlights that SM cover a broad variety of scopes with specific functions and applications that can differ greatly between the different types of SM. Consequently, also the purpose and the users' perceived value of using SM varies. From a research perspective, this section serves as a foundation for classifying and discussing the SM definitions that are presented in the following chapters.

Socializing with friends and family

Although not all SM platforms are specifically designed to facilitate socialization between its users, it may be considered one of the most apparent commonalities of all types of SM. 4 Sometimes referred to as online communities, these SM platforms are valuable given that people often do not perceive a difference between virtual friends and real friends, as long as they feel supported and belong to a community of like-minded individuals. 5 The SM helps to strengthen relationships through the sharing of important life events in the form of status updates, photos, etc., reinforcing at the same time their in-person encounters as well. 6

The SM has also become a common tool for communication in families. A study conducted by Sponcil and Gitimu 7 showed that for 91.7 percent of students the main reason for using SM is communicating with family and friends. In addition, 50 percent of the students communicated with their family and friends every day, and another 40 percent at least a few days a week. Williams and Merten 8 suggest that by using SM in everyday life, people strengthen the relationships with family. Especially in relation to globalization and constant migration, it has become a vital tool for maintaining contact within migrant families. The need for transnational communication between family members and the people they left behind is of great importance. 9

Romance and flirting

Several studies suggest that SM significantly influences the romantic aspects of life. Aside from facilitating human interaction, communication technologies are also shaping and defining our relationships. 10 It has been shown that SM is important in the starting phases of a relationship and has a significant influence on the relationship of many couples in the long run. 11 The SM can help when starting a romantic relationship, for example , contacting a crush through SM can have special benefits for introverts, who otherwise would avoid face-to-face contact and would otherwise communicate less. 7 Moreover, in some cases, online dating is preferable to live dating, as it gives the same feeling and allows users to avoid unnecessary discomforts. 11 Finally, rejection on SM is less painful compared with face-to-face rejection. 10 Further, users can contemplate their responses and do not have to worry about their physical appearance while conversing/chatting online, making it a less stressful environment to flirt with people on SM than face-to-face conversations. 12

Interacting with companies and brands

It is estimated that close to 100 percent of larger companies (both B2C and B2B) are using some sort of SM platform to inform their customers, gather information, receive feedback, provide after-sales service or consultancy, and promote their products or services. The key characteristic that makes SM so relevant for companies is the fact that SM allows for two-way communication between the brand and the customer. 13 Sometimes referred to as “social customer relationship management,” 14 SM can be viewed as an effective tool used to get closer to the customer. However, some studies suggest that what customers seek is somewhat different from what companies offer through SM. 14 Customers are mainly interested in communicating easily and quickly with the company. From a business perspective, the company wants to make sure customers receive the right information in a timely manner, linking the customer closer to the brand and, simultaneously, controlling the flow of information. Successful SM managers understand how an SM platform works and is used by its customers, and they then develop corporate communication tools that fit the behavior of their users. Many researchers highlight the need for customer relationship management to adapt to the rise of SM 2 to efficiently manage relationships with modern, connected, and empowered customers.

Job seeking and professional networking

Another application of SM is to connect job seekers with employers. The vast majority of Fortune 500 companies use LinkedIn for talent acquisition. 15 With more than 660 million users in 2020, it is an important tool for companies searching to expand their talent pool. This pool of individuals is extended, as the nature of SM also allows recruiters to identify and target, apart from active users, talented candidates who are passive or semi-passive and lure them to prospective job positions. 16 In fact, through SM platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, recruiters can post job advertisements to lure potential applicants who are not actively looking for a job. 17 Rather than the costly and time-consuming traditional ways of staffing with interviews and tests, hiring through SM offers recruiters the benefit of free access to prospects' profiles and an instant means of communication. For users, LinkedIn profiles allow them to create an idealized portrait by displaying their skills to recruiters and peers. 18 Indeed, LinkedIn asks members to highlight their relevant skills, promoting their abilities and strengths, urging them to complete their profiles through getting recommendations and praise from peers/colleagues and clients for their performance or skills. 19

Doing business

The SM has a considerable impact on how companies approach clients and vice versa. In addition, SM utilizing SM as a means of understanding and informing customers has become imperative for businesses to remain competitive. The SM providers have created possibilities for companies to improve their internal operations and communicate in new ways with customers, other businesses, and suppliers. 20 At the same time, companies can actively engage customers, encouraging them to become advocates of their brands. 2 This is certainly important, as users can create online customer communities, which potentially add value to the brand beyond just increased sales. 20 The engagement of customers can be beneficial, as they will frequently interact with the brand and share positive word-of-mouth since they have become more emotionally attached to the brand. 21 This electronic word-of-mouth created in SM communities helps consumers in their purchasing decisions. 22 This suggestion is important given that customers are actually more interested in other users' recommendations and word-of-mouth rather than the vendor-created product information. 23

Research questions

Reviewing the existent literature about SM applications inevitably leads to the question of whether the researchers had the same definition in mind when talking about SM, SN, online communities, and the like. It is also apparent that the focus of the researcher's interest has changed over time, and that the time when the research was conducted could have an impact on how the findings should be interpreted. Therefore, the remainder of this article aims at answering the following research questions (RQ):

RQ1: How has the definition of social media changed from 1994 to 2019? RQ2: What are the differences and commonalities in social media definitions from 1994 to 2019?

To answer the two RQ, we decided to conduct a systematic literature review (SLR). Using a multi-step SLR approach as recommended by Tranfield et al. 24 ( Fig. 1 ), we structurally examined the literature between 1994 and 2019 to find all relevant SM definitions to identify the major differences and commonalities.

Structure and process of the systematic literature review.

After identifying 88 potential papers, all the articles were read to find original definitions for SM or related terms. In addition, we used backward and forward snowballing, two methods frequently employed in academic research to find additional relevant sources based on the references used in the original publication (backward snowballing) and searched papers that cited the article (forward snowballing), respectively. 25 In combination with the SLR, the backward snowballing led to the identification of a total number of 21 original definitions, including some definitions that were published in books and conference proceedings, which were not included in the SLR.

In this chapter, we present all major definitions of SM (and synonymous terms) that were formulated from 1994 to 2019 ( Table 1 ). Table 1 further includes details about the source and the number of citations according to Google Scholar as of August 2020.

Social Media Definitions with Author Names, Source, and the Number of Citations As of August 2020

Before we assess the meaning and compare the definitions in terms of the two RQ, a few quantitative results are provided. Analyzing the 21 definitions, we found a lexical density (i.e., the percentage of nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs) of 57.5 percent. The most frequently used word with 23 occurrences is “social,” followed by “people” with 12 occurrences, and “virtual,” “content,” “user,” and “network” with 8 occurrences each. In terms of two-word phrases, “social network[s]” (8 occurrences) is followed by “social media” and “social networking” (5 occurrences each), as well as “virtual communities” (VC) (4 occurrences).

Notably, the first formal definition is from 1996 and uses “computer-supported social networks” or “CSSNs,” although the term “SM” was coined about 2 years earlier. Later, researchers used different terms such as “virtual communities,” “social networks,” “social networking services,” “online social network,” “social networking sites,” “social network sites,” and “social media.” Although there are small variations in these terms, they can be classified into three categories: VC, SN, and SM. It is important to mention that all these definitions describe the same concept, but with different terms. Assessing the SM definitions that resulted from the SLR reveals that from 1997 to 2002, VC was the dominant term. In contrast, SN was used over a longer period, but it was dominant from 2005 to 2009. It was only in 2010 that researchers started using predominantly SM. But how did the definitions—independent from their terminology—change?

Throughout the observed period, the role of SM, as an enabler for human interaction as well as an avenue to connect with other users, has been a constant in defining SM. In early definitions, the focus was mainly on people and how people interact, whereas later definitions (after 2010) have largely substituted the term “people” with “user” and placed more focus on generating and sharing content. This changed focus, with regard to both the application of SM and the terminology of people versus user, may also reflect the increasingly important role of anonymity in SM. 47

The role of user-generated content is not reflected in early definitions, whereas it has become a central part of recent definitions. It was Kaplan and Haenlein 38 who first mentioned “creation,” whereas later definitions use terms such as “user-supplied content” and “user-driven platforms” in addition to “user-generated content,” which is the common term used in research and practice today.

Another notable change is that until 2009, several researchers included the common interests that linked people with each other, whereas this link is completely missing in post-2010 definitions. Again, this may be reflected by the fact that in the early days, SM users were mostly close or loosely related friends communicating with each other, whereas in recent years, SM has evolved to a set of media that are also used as a powerful tool by companies, celebrities, and influencers to reach the masses. 48

Finally, although sharing information and content is generally not the central aspect in defining SM, the terminology has changed over time. Until 2010, researchers used “exchange” or “upload,” which were substituted with the term “share” in subsequent years. The underlying meaning, however, remained the same.

Conclusions

About 60,000 articles have cited the SM definitions summarized in this article. Therefore, the value this research provides goes beyond a simple overview of the definitions and major applications of SM in the 25 years, since the term was originally coined. The result is a timeline of SM definitions that helps researchers and practitioners to quickly put the results of previous research in perspective and to avoid time-consuming research of the single definitions in different papers. Why is this necessary? This is because, based on the definition, the results may need to be interpreted in a more or less different way.

One notable result is that, although SM is one of the main research areas in social sciences (and beyond) and its landscape has been changing quickly, only a handful of scholars have made an effort to develop a definition of SM. Although some elements, for example , the fact that SM connects people, are common, the definitions are rather different from each other. The commonalities and differences highlighted in the previous section allow for the division of the definitions into two main streams: those published before 2010 and after 2010. Before 2010, SM was commonly approached as a tool of connectivity for people with common interests. After 2010, the focus changed to creating and sharing user-generated content.

These results are in line with previous research about the evolution of SM literature, which concluded that SM definitions changed over time, namely from platforms for socializing in the past to tools for information aggregation. 45 Similarly, Kapoor et al. 45 found that there was an evolution in SM definitions and a cut in the early 2010. Our research shows that there is no single or commonly accepted definition, but that several definitions have been co-existing and found broad acceptance in literature.

Future SM researchers can use these findings to better compare SM articles and avoid flaws in their theory or methodological design. Especially when comparing the results of empirical studies, it may be critical to consider both when the study was conducted and which SM definition was used as a basis for hypothesis development and data analysis. In addition, this article gives SM researchers the possibility to make an informed choice of which SM definition to use for their studies.

Given the method employed to identify the SM definitions, we are confident that this is the most comprehensive overview that includes all major publications. However, the results may be limited by the original search terms used to identify the papers to be included in the SLR. Although the use of backward snowballing should have helped in minimizing this risk, there may still be some less explicit definitions of SM that were not included in this article. In addition, non-English articles and other gray literature were not considered, which is common criticism in academic research. Future research could also try to identify the differences in how SM is defined by researchers from different scientific backgrounds, for example , marketing versus medicine versus psychology versus anthropology versus engineering versus information technology. It would also be insightful to see whether there are tendencies of certain researchers, for example , from engineering, to base their research on specific definitions rather than on others. For example, if one definition is dominant in engineering but not in medical research, this would imply that interdisciplinary research about SM applications needs to be compared more carefully, as the basic definition differs. Similarly, it would be interesting to link the use of SM definitions to the cultural or national context of where the research was carried out, for example , to identify whether European versus American versus Asian researchers have a generally different understanding of SM and its applications. These possible cultural differences in the definition or selection of an SM definition as a basis for research could be linked to the fact that in different countries and cultural clusters different SM platforms are more or less popular. 49 Overall, our research will help compare findings from SM literature more easily and avoid misinterpretations of past and future research.

Author Disclosure Statement

No competing financial interests exist.

Funding Information

This work was supported by the Open Access Publishing Fund of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano.

Social Media, Definition, and History

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Blog ; Content communities ; Facebook ; Foursquare ; Microblog ; Second life ; Social media ; Twitter ; User-generated content ; Web 2.0 ; Wikipedia ; Word-of-mouth ; YouTube

Awareness created through regular and constant reception and/or exchange of information fragments through social media

Massively multiplayer online role-playing game

Group of mobile marketing applications that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content

User-generated content

Social media are defined as “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content” (Kaplan and Haenlein 2010, p. 61). Indeed, many have mastered the social media landscape successfully, showing the potential of these applications to yield impressive results. In politics, e.g., social media communications were a key element in Barack...

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Are you on social media a lot? When is the last time you checked Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram? Last night? Before breakfast? Five minutes ago?

If so, you are not alone — which is the point, of course. Humans are highly social creatures. Our brains have become wired to process social information, and we usually feel better when we are connected. Social media taps into this tendency.

“Human brains have essentially evolved because of sociality more than any other thing,” says Sinan Aral, an MIT professor and expert in information technology and marketing. “When you develop a population-scale technology that delivers social signals to the tune of trillions per day in real-time, the rise of social media isn’t unexpected. It’s like tossing a lit match into a pool of gasoline.”

The numbers make this clear. In 2005, about 7 percent of American adults used social media. But by 2017, 80 percent of American adults used Facebook alone. About 3.5 billion people on the planet, out of 7.7 billion, are active social media participants. Globally, during a typical day, people post 500 million tweets, share over 10 billion pieces of Facebook content, and watch over a billion hours of YouTube video.

As social media platforms have grown, though, the once-prevalent, gauzy utopian vision of online community has disappeared. Along with the benefits of easy connectivity and increased information, social media has also become a vehicle for disinformation and political attacks from beyond sovereign borders.

“Social media disrupts our elections, our economy, and our health,” says Aral, who is the David Austin Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Now Aral has written a book about it. In “The Hype Machine,” published this month by Currency, a Random House imprint, Aral details why social media platforms have become so successful yet so problematic, and suggests ways to improve them.

As Aral notes, the book covers some of the same territory as “The Social Dilemma,” a documentary that is one of the most popular films on Netflix at the moment. But Aral’s book, as he puts it, "starts where ‘The Social Dilemma’ leaves off and goes one step further to ask: What can we do about it?”

“This machine exists in every facet of our lives,” Aral says. “And the question in the book is, what do we do? How do we achieve the promise of this machine and avoid the peril? We’re at a crossroads. What we do next is essential, so I want to equip people, policymakers, and platforms to help us achieve the good outcomes and avoid the bad outcomes.”

When “engagement” equals anger

“The Hype Machine” draws on Aral’s own research about social networks, as well as other findings, from the cognitive sciences, computer science, business, politics, and more. Researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles, for instance, have found that people obtain bigger hits of dopamine — the chemical in our brains highly bound up with motivation and reward — when their social media posts receive more likes.

At the same time, consider a 2018 MIT study by Soroush Vosoughi, an MIT PhD student and now an assistant professor of computer science at Dartmouth College; Deb Roy, MIT professor of media arts and sciences and executive director of the MIT Media Lab; and Aral, who has been studying social networking for 20 years. The three researchers found that on Twitter, from 2006 to 2017, false news stories were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true ones. Why? Most likely because false news has greater novelty value compared to the truth, and provokes stronger reactions — especially disgust and surprise.

In this light, the essential tension surrounding social media companies is that their platforms gain audiences and revenue when posts provoke strong emotional responses, often based on dubious content.

“This is a well-designed, well-thought-out machine that has objectives it maximizes,” Aral says. “The business models that run the social-media industrial complex have a lot to do with the outcomes we’re seeing — it’s an attention economy, and businesses want you engaged. How do they get engagement? Well, they give you little dopamine hits, and … get you riled up. That’s why I call it the hype machine. We know strong emotions get us engaged, so [that favors] anger and salacious content.”

From Russia to marketing

“The Hype Machine” explores both the political implications and business dimensions of social media in depth. Certainly social media is fertile terrain for misinformation campaigns. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Russia spread  false information to at least 126 million people on Facebook and another 20 million people on Insta­gram (which Facebook owns), and was responsible for 10 million tweets. About 44 percent of adult Americans visited a false news source in the final weeks of the campaign.

“I think we need to be a lot more vigilant than we are,” says Aral.

We do not know if Russia’s efforts altered the outcome of the 2016 election, Aral says, though they may have been fairly effective. Curiously, it is not clear if the same is true of most U.S. corporate engagement efforts.

As Aral examines, digital advertising on most big U.S. online platforms is often wildly ineffective, with academic studies showing that the “lift” generated by ad campaigns — the extent to which they affect consumer action — has been overstated by a factor of hundreds, in some cases. Simply counting clicks on ads is not enough. Instead, online engagement tends to be more effective among new consumers, and when it is targeted well; in that sense, there is a parallel between good marketing and guerilla social media campaigns.

“The two questions I get asked the most these days,” Aral says, “are, one, did Russia succeed in intervening in our democracy? And two, how do I measure the ROI [return on investment] from marketing investments? As I was writing this book, I realized the answer to those two questions is the same.”

Ideas for improvement

“The Hype Machine” has received praise from many commentators. Foster Provost, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, says it is a “masterful integration of science, business, law, and policy.” Duncan Watts, a university professor at the University of Pennsylvania, says the book is “essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how we got here and how we can get somewhere better.”

In that vein, “The Hype Machine” has several detailed suggestions for improving social media. Aral favors automated and user-generated labeling of false news, and limiting revenue-collection that is based on false content. He also calls for firms to help scholars better research the issue of election interference.

Aral believes federal privacy measures could be useful, if we learn from the benefits and missteps of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe and a new California law that lets consumers stop some data-sharing and allows people to find out what information companies have stored about them. He does not endorse breaking up Facebook, and suggests instead that the social media economy needs structural reform. He calls for data portability and interoperability, so “consumers would own their identities and could freely switch from one network to another.” Aral believes that without such fundamental changes, new platforms will simply replace the old ones, propelled by the network effects that drive the social-media economy.

“I do not advocate any one silver bullet,” says Aral, who emphasizes that changes in four areas together — money, code, norms, and laws — can alter the trajectory of the social media industry.

But if things continue without change, Aral adds, Facebook and the other social media giants risk substantial civic backlash and user burnout.

“If you get me angry and riled up, I might click more in the short term, but I might also grow really tired and annoyed by how this is making my life miserable, and I might turn you off entirely,” Aral observes. “I mean, that’s why we have a Delete Facebook movement, that’s why we have a Stop Hate for Profit movement. People are pushing back against the short-term vision, and I think we need to embrace this longer-term vision of a healthier communications ecosystem.”

Changing the social media giants can seem like a tall order. Still, Aral says, these firms are not necessarily destined for domination.

“I don’t think this technology or any other technology has some deterministic endpoint,” Aral says. “I want to bring us back to a more practical reality, which is that technology is what we make it, and we are abdicating our responsibility to steer technology toward good and away from bad. That is the path I try to illuminate in this book.”

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Press mentions.

Prof. Sinan Aral’s new book, “The Hype Machine,” has been selected as one of the best books of the year about AI by Wired . Gilad Edelman notes that Aral’s book is “an engagingly written shortcut to expertise on what the likes of Facebook and Twitter are doing to our brains and our society.”

Prof. Sinan Aral speaks with Danny Crichton of TechCrunch about his new book, “The Hype Machine,” which explores the future of social media. Aral notes that he believes a starting point “for solving the social media crisis is creating competition in the social media economy.” 

New York Times

Prof. Sinan Aral speaks with New York Times editorial board member Greg Bensinger about how social media platforms can reduce the spread of misinformation. “Human-in-the-loop moderation is the right solution,” says Aral. “It’s not a simple silver bullet, but it would give accountability where these companies have in the past blamed software.”

Prof. Sinan Aral speaks with Kara Miller of GBH’s Innovation Hub about his research examining the impact of social media on everything from business re-openings during the Covid-19 pandemic to politics.

Prof. Sinan Aral speaks with NPR’s Michael Martin about his new book, “The Hype Machine,” which explores the benefits and downfalls posed by social media. “I've been researching social media for 20 years. I've seen its evolution and also the techno utopianism and dystopianism,” says Aral. “I thought it was appropriate to have a book that asks, 'what can we do to really fix the social media morass we find ourselves in?'”

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1.3 The Evolution of Media

Learning objectives.

• Identify four roles the media performs in our society.
• Recognize events that affected the adoption of mass media.
• Explain how different technological transitions have shaped media industries.

In 2010, Americans could turn on their television and find 24-hour news channels as well as music videos, nature documentaries, and reality shows about everything from hoarders to fashion models. That’s not to mention movies available on demand from cable providers or television and video available online for streaming or downloading. Half of U.S. households receive a daily newspaper, and the average person holds 1.9 magazine subscriptions (State of the Media, 2004) (Bilton, 2007). A University of California, San Diego study claimed that U.S. households consumed a total of approximately 3.6 zettabytes of information in 2008—the digital equivalent of a 7-foot high stack of books covering the entire United States—a 350 percent increase since 1980 (Ramsey, 2009). Americans are exposed to media in taxicabs and buses, in classrooms and doctors’ offices, on highways, and in airplanes. We can begin to orient ourselves in the information cloud through parsing what roles the media fills in society, examining its history in society, and looking at the way technological innovations have helped bring us to where we are today.

What Does Media Do for Us?

Media fulfills several basic roles in our society. One obvious role is entertainment. Media can act as a springboard for our imaginations, a source of fantasy, and an outlet for escapism. In the 19th century, Victorian readers disillusioned by the grimness of the Industrial Revolution found themselves drawn into fantastic worlds of fairies and other fictitious beings. In the first decade of the 21st century, American television viewers could peek in on a conflicted Texas high school football team in Friday Night Lights ; the violence-plagued drug trade in Baltimore in The Wire ; a 1960s-Manhattan ad agency in Mad Men ; or the last surviving band of humans in a distant, miserable future in Battlestar Galactica . Through bringing us stories of all kinds, media has the power to take us away from ourselves.

Media can also provide information and education. Information can come in many forms, and it may sometimes be difficult to separate from entertainment. Today, newspapers and news-oriented television and radio programs make available stories from across the globe, allowing readers or viewers in London to access voices and videos from Baghdad, Tokyo, or Buenos Aires. Books and magazines provide a more in-depth look at a wide range of subjects. The free online encyclopedia Wikipedia has articles on topics from presidential nicknames to child prodigies to tongue twisters in various languages. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has posted free lecture notes, exams, and audio and video recordings of classes on its OpenCourseWare website, allowing anyone with an Internet connection access to world-class professors.

Another useful aspect of media is its ability to act as a public forum for the discussion of important issues. In newspapers or other periodicals, letters to the editor allow readers to respond to journalists or to voice their opinions on the issues of the day. These letters were an important part of U.S. newspapers even when the nation was a British colony, and they have served as a means of public discourse ever since. The Internet is a fundamentally democratic medium that allows everyone who can get online the ability to express their opinions through, for example, blogging or podcasting—though whether anyone will hear is another question.

Similarly, media can be used to monitor government, business, and other institutions. Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle exposed the miserable conditions in the turn-of-the-century meatpacking industry; and in the early 1970s, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered evidence of the Watergate break-in and subsequent cover-up, which eventually led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. But purveyors of mass media may be beholden to particular agendas because of political slant, advertising funds, or ideological bias, thus constraining their ability to act as a watchdog. The following are some of these agendas:

• Entertaining and providing an outlet for the imagination
• Educating and informing
• Serving as a public forum for the discussion of important issues
• Acting as a watchdog for government, business, and other institutions

It’s important to remember, though, that not all media are created equal. While some forms of mass communication are better suited to entertainment, others make more sense as a venue for spreading information. In terms of print media, books are durable and able to contain lots of information, but are relatively slow and expensive to produce; in contrast, newspapers are comparatively cheaper and quicker to create, making them a better medium for the quick turnover of daily news. Television provides vastly more visual information than radio and is more dynamic than a static printed page; it can also be used to broadcast live events to a nationwide audience, as in the annual State of the Union address given by the U.S. president. However, it is also a one-way medium—that is, it allows for very little direct person-to-person communication. In contrast, the Internet encourages public discussion of issues and allows nearly everyone who wants a voice to have one. However, the Internet is also largely unmoderated. Users may have to wade through thousands of inane comments or misinformed amateur opinions to find quality information.

The 1960s media theorist Marshall McLuhan took these ideas one step further, famously coining the phrase “ the medium is the message (McLuhan, 1964).” By this, McLuhan meant that every medium delivers information in a different way and that content is fundamentally shaped by the medium of transmission. For example, although television news has the advantage of offering video and live coverage, making a story come alive more vividly, it is also a faster-paced medium. That means more stories get covered in less depth. A story told on television will probably be flashier, less in-depth, and with less context than the same story covered in a monthly magazine; therefore, people who get the majority of their news from television may have a particular view of the world shaped not by the content of what they watch but its medium . Or, as computer scientist Alan Kay put it, “Each medium has a special way of representing ideas that emphasize particular ways of thinking and de-emphasize others (Kay, 1994).” Kay was writing in 1994, when the Internet was just transitioning from an academic research network to an open public system. A decade and a half later, with the Internet firmly ensconced in our daily lives, McLuhan’s intellectual descendants are the media analysts who claim that the Internet is making us better at associative thinking, or more democratic, or shallower. But McLuhan’s claims don’t leave much space for individual autonomy or resistance. In an essay about television’s effects on contemporary fiction, writer David Foster Wallace scoffed at the “reactionaries who regard TV as some malignancy visited on an innocent populace, sapping IQs and compromising SAT scores while we all sit there on ever fatter bottoms with little mesmerized spirals revolving in our eyes…. Treating television as evil is just as reductive and silly as treating it like a toaster with pictures (Wallace, 1997).” Nonetheless, media messages and technologies affect us in countless ways, some of which probably won’t be sorted out until long in the future.

A Brief History of Mass Media and Culture

Until Johannes Gutenberg’s 15th-century invention of the movable type printing press, books were painstakingly handwritten and no two copies were exactly the same. The printing press made the mass production of print media possible. Not only was it much cheaper to produce written material, but new transportation technologies also made it easier for texts to reach a wide audience. It’s hard to overstate the importance of Gutenberg’s invention, which helped usher in massive cultural movements like the European Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation. In 1810, another German printer, Friedrich Koenig, pushed media production even further when he essentially hooked the steam engine up to a printing press, enabling the industrialization of printed media. In 1800, a hand-operated printing press could produce about 480 pages per hour; Koenig’s machine more than doubled this rate. (By the 1930s, many printing presses could publish 3,000 pages an hour.)

This increased efficiency went hand in hand with the rise of the daily newspaper. The newspaper was the perfect medium for the increasingly urbanized Americans of the 19th century, who could no longer get their local news merely through gossip and word of mouth. These Americans were living in unfamiliar territory, and newspapers and other media helped them negotiate the rapidly changing world. The Industrial Revolution meant that some people had more leisure time and more money, and media helped them figure out how to spend both. Media theorist Benedict Anderson has argued that newspapers also helped forge a sense of national identity by treating readers across the country as part of one unified community (Anderson, 1991).

In the 1830s, the major daily newspapers faced a new threat from the rise of penny papers, which were low-priced broadsheets that served as a cheaper, more sensational daily news source. They favored news of murder and adventure over the dry political news of the day. While newspapers catered to a wealthier, more educated audience, the penny press attempted to reach a wide swath of readers through cheap prices and entertaining (often scandalous) stories. The penny press can be seen as the forerunner to today’s gossip-hungry tabloids.

The penny press appealed to readers’ desires for lurid tales of murder and scandal.

Wikimedia Commons – public domain.

In the early decades of the 20th century, the first major nonprint form of mass media—radio—exploded in popularity. Radios, which were less expensive than telephones and widely available by the 1920s, had the unprecedented ability of allowing huge numbers of people to listen to the same event at the same time. In 1924, Calvin Coolidge’s preelection speech reached more than 20 million people. Radio was a boon for advertisers, who now had access to a large and captive audience. An early advertising consultant claimed that the early days of radio were “a glorious opportunity for the advertising man to spread his sales propaganda” because of “a countless audience, sympathetic, pleasure seeking, enthusiastic, curious, interested, approachable in the privacy of their homes (Briggs & Burke, 2005).” The reach of radio also meant that the medium was able to downplay regional differences and encourage a unified sense of the American lifestyle—a lifestyle that was increasingly driven and defined by consumer purchases. “Americans in the 1920s were the first to wear ready-made, exact-size clothing…to play electric phonographs, to use electric vacuum cleaners, to listen to commercial radio broadcasts, and to drink fresh orange juice year round (Mintz, 2007).” This boom in consumerism put its stamp on the 1920s and also helped contribute to the Great Depression of the 1930s (Library of Congress). The consumerist impulse drove production to unprecedented levels, but when the Depression began and consumer demand dropped dramatically, the surplus of production helped further deepen the economic crisis, as more goods were being produced than could be sold.

The post–World War II era in the United States was marked by prosperity, and by the introduction of a seductive new form of mass communication: television. In 1946, about 17,000 televisions existed in the United States; within 7 years, two-thirds of American households owned at least one set. As the United States’ gross national product (GNP) doubled in the 1950s, and again in the 1960s, the American home became firmly ensconced as a consumer unit; along with a television, the typical U.S. household owned a car and a house in the suburbs, all of which contributed to the nation’s thriving consumer-based economy (Briggs & Burke, 2005). Broadcast television was the dominant form of mass media, and the three major networks controlled more than 90 percent of the news programs, live events, and sitcoms viewed by Americans. Some social critics argued that television was fostering a homogenous, conformist culture by reinforcing ideas about what “normal” American life looked like. But television also contributed to the counterculture of the 1960s. The Vietnam War was the nation’s first televised military conflict, and nightly images of war footage and war protesters helped intensify the nation’s internal conflicts.

Broadcast technology, including radio and television, had such a hold on the American imagination that newspapers and other print media found themselves having to adapt to the new media landscape. Print media was more durable and easily archived, and it allowed users more flexibility in terms of time—once a person had purchased a magazine, he or she could read it whenever and wherever. Broadcast media, in contrast, usually aired programs on a fixed schedule, which allowed it to both provide a sense of immediacy and fleetingness. Until the advent of digital video recorders in the late 1990s, it was impossible to pause and rewind a live television broadcast.

The media world faced drastic changes once again in the 1980s and 1990s with the spread of cable television. During the early decades of television, viewers had a limited number of channels to choose from—one reason for the charges of homogeneity. In 1975, the three major networks accounted for 93 percent of all television viewing. By 2004, however, this share had dropped to 28.4 percent of total viewing, thanks to the spread of cable television. Cable providers allowed viewers a wide menu of choices, including channels specifically tailored to people who wanted to watch only golf, classic films, sermons, or videos of sharks. Still, until the mid-1990s, television was dominated by the three large networks. The Telecommunications Act of 1996, an attempt to foster competition by deregulating the industry, actually resulted in many mergers and buyouts that left most of the control of the broadcast spectrum in the hands of a few large corporations. In 2003, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) loosened regulation even further, allowing a single company to own 45 percent of a single market (up from 25 percent in 1982).

Technological Transitions Shape Media Industries

New media technologies both spring from and cause social changes. For this reason, it can be difficult to neatly sort the evolution of media into clear causes and effects. Did radio fuel the consumerist boom of the 1920s, or did the radio become wildly popular because it appealed to a society that was already exploring consumerist tendencies? Probably a little bit of both. Technological innovations such as the steam engine, electricity, wireless communication, and the Internet have all had lasting and significant effects on American culture. As media historians Asa Briggs and Peter Burke note, every crucial invention came with “a change in historical perspectives.” Electricity altered the way people thought about time because work and play were no longer dependent on the daily rhythms of sunrise and sunset; wireless communication collapsed distance; the Internet revolutionized the way we store and retrieve information.

The transatlantic telegraph cable made nearly instantaneous communication between the United States and Europe possible for the first time in 1858.

Amber Case – 1858 trans-Atlantic telegraph cable route – CC BY-NC 2.0.

The contemporary media age can trace its origins back to the electrical telegraph, patented in the United States by Samuel Morse in 1837. Thanks to the telegraph, communication was no longer linked to the physical transportation of messages; it didn’t matter whether a message needed to travel 5 or 500 miles. Suddenly, information from distant places was nearly as accessible as local news, as telegraph lines began to stretch across the globe, making their own kind of World Wide Web. In this way, the telegraph acted as the precursor to much of the technology that followed, including the telephone, radio, television, and Internet. When the first transatlantic cable was laid in 1858, allowing nearly instantaneous communication from the United States to Europe, the London Times described it as “the greatest discovery since that of Columbus, a vast enlargement…given to the sphere of human activity.”

Not long afterward, wireless communication (which eventually led to the development of radio, television, and other broadcast media) emerged as an extension of telegraph technology. Although many 19th-century inventors, including Nikola Tesla, were involved in early wireless experiments, it was Italian-born Guglielmo Marconi who is recognized as the developer of the first practical wireless radio system. Many people were fascinated by this new invention. Early radio was used for military communication, but soon the technology entered the home. The burgeoning interest in radio inspired hundreds of applications for broadcasting licenses from newspapers and other news outlets, retail stores, schools, and even cities. In the 1920s, large media networks—including the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS)—were launched, and they soon began to dominate the airwaves. In 1926, they owned 6.4 percent of U.S. broadcasting stations; by 1931, that number had risen to 30 percent.

Gone With the Wind defeated The Wizard of Oz to become the first color film ever to win the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1939.

Wikimedia Commons – public domain; Wikimedia Commons – public domain.

In addition to the breakthroughs in audio broadcasting, inventors in the 1800s made significant advances in visual media. The 19th-century development of photographic technologies would lead to the later innovations of cinema and television. As with wireless technology, several inventors independently created a form of photography at the same time, among them the French inventors Joseph Niépce and Louis Daguerre and the British scientist William Henry Fox Talbot. In the United States, George Eastman developed the Kodak camera in 1888, anticipating that Americans would welcome an inexpensive, easy-to-use camera into their homes as they had with the radio and telephone. Moving pictures were first seen around the turn of the century, with the first U.S. projection-hall opening in Pittsburgh in 1905. By the 1920s, Hollywood had already created its first stars, most notably Charlie Chaplin; by the end of the 1930s, Americans were watching color films with full sound, including Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz .

Television—which consists of an image being converted to electrical impulses, transmitted through wires or radio waves, and then reconverted into images—existed before World War II, but gained mainstream popularity in the 1950s. In 1947, there were 178,000 television sets made in the United States; 5 years later, 15 million were made. Radio, cinema, and live theater declined because the new medium allowed viewers to be entertained with sound and moving pictures in their homes. In the United States, competing commercial stations (including the radio powerhouses of CBS and NBC) meant that commercial-driven programming dominated. In Great Britain, the government managed broadcasting through the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Funding was driven by licensing fees instead of advertisements. In contrast to the U.S. system, the BBC strictly regulated the length and character of commercials that could be aired. However, U.S. television (and its increasingly powerful networks) still dominated. By the beginning of 1955, there were around 36 million television sets in the United States, but only 4.8 million in all of Europe. Important national events, broadcast live for the first time, were an impetus for consumers to buy sets so they could witness the spectacle; both England and Japan saw a boom in sales before important royal weddings in the 1950s.

In the 1960s, the concept of a useful portable computer was still a dream; huge mainframes were required to run a basic operating system.

In 1969, management consultant Peter Drucker predicted that the next major technological innovation would be an electronic appliance that would revolutionize the way people lived just as thoroughly as Thomas Edison’s light bulb had. This appliance would sell for less than a television set and be “capable of being plugged in wherever there is electricity and giving immediate access to all the information needed for school work from first grade through college.” Although Drucker may have underestimated the cost of this hypothetical machine, he was prescient about the effect these machines—personal computers—and the Internet would have on education, social relationships, and the culture at large. The inventions of random access memory (RAM) chips and microprocessors in the 1970s were important steps to the Internet age. As Briggs and Burke note, these advances meant that “hundreds of thousands of components could be carried on a microprocessor.” The reduction of many different kinds of content to digitally stored information meant that “print, film, recording, radio and television and all forms of telecommunications [were] now being thought of increasingly as part of one complex.” This process, also known as convergence, is a force that’s affecting media today.

Key Takeaways

Media fulfills several roles in society, including the following:

• entertaining and providing an outlet for the imagination,
• educating and informing,
• serving as a public forum for the discussion of important issues, and
• acting as a watchdog for government, business, and other institutions.
• Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press enabled the mass production of media, which was then industrialized by Friedrich Koenig in the early 1800s. These innovations led to the daily newspaper, which united the urbanized, industrialized populations of the 19th century.
• In the 20th century, radio allowed advertisers to reach a mass audience and helped spur the consumerism of the 1920s—and the Great Depression of the 1930s. After World War II, television boomed in the United States and abroad, though its concentration in the hands of three major networks led to accusations of homogenization. The spread of cable and subsequent deregulation in the 1980s and 1990s led to more channels, but not necessarily to more diverse ownership.
• Transitions from one technology to another have greatly affected the media industry, although it is difficult to say whether technology caused a cultural shift or resulted from it. The ability to make technology small and affordable enough to fit into the home is an important aspect of the popularization of new technologies.

Choose two different types of mass communication—radio shows, television broadcasts, Internet sites, newspaper advertisements, and so on—from two different kinds of media. Make a list of what role(s) each one fills, keeping in mind that much of what we see, hear, or read in the mass media has more than one aspect. Then, answer the following questions. Each response should be a minimum of one paragraph.

• To which of the four roles media plays in society do your selections correspond? Why did the creators of these particular messages present them in these particular ways and in these particular mediums?
• What events have shaped the adoption of the two kinds of media you selected?
• How have technological transitions shaped the industries involved in the two kinds of media you have selected?

Anderson, Benedict Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism , (London: Verso, 1991).

Bilton, Jim. “The Loyalty Challenge: How Magazine Subscriptions Work,” In Circulation , January/February 2007.

Briggs and Burke, Social History of the Media .

Briggs, Asa and Peter Burke, A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2005).

Kay, Alan. “The Infobahn Is Not the Answer,” Wired , May 1994.

Library of Congress, “Radio: A Consumer Product and a Producer of Consumption,” Coolidge-Consumerism Collection, http://lcweb2.loc.gov:8081/ammem/amrlhtml/inradio.html .

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man , (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).

Mintz, Steven “The Jazz Age: The American 1920s: The Formation of Modern American Mass Culture,” Digital History , 2007, http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cfm?hhid=454 .

Ramsey, Doug. “UC San Diego Experts Calculate How Much Information Americans Consume” UC San Diego News Center, December 9, 2009, http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/general/12-09Information.asp .

State of the Media, project for Excellence in Journalism, The State of the News Media 2004 , http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2004/ .

Wallace, David Foster “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (New York: Little Brown, 1997).

Understanding Media and Culture Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

• History of Social Media

Around 72.5% of Americans in 2024 and 63.82% of people globally in 2023 used social media sites including Facebook , Instagram, Twitter (now X), LinkedIn , and Pinterest. On social media sites, users may develop biographical profiles, communicate with friends and strangers, do research, and share thoughts, photos, music, links, and more. [ 339 ] [ 340 ]

SixDegrees.com & Forward

SixDegrees.com, which existed from 1997-2001, is considered the first social media site because it allowed users to create personal spaces and connect to friends online. Friendster, created in 2002, popularized social media in the United States but was quickly outpaced by other social media such as MySpace (2003), Facebook (2004), Twitter (now X, 2006), Pinterest (2009), and Google+ (2012).

Facebook reached one billion monthly users worldwide on October 4, 2012, making it the most popular social media platform with one in seven people on the planet as members. 71% of online adults in the United States used Facebook, causing the tech company to manage 4.5 billion “Likes,” 4.75 billion content shares, and over 300 million photo uploads. As of Sep. 2014, 51% of US adults used YouTube , 28% used Pinterest, 28% LinkedIn, 26% Instagram, and 23% Twitter. Twitter had 288 million monthly active users and over 500 million tweets are sent daily. Among online adults, use of more than one social media platform increased from 42% in 2013 to 52% in 2014. [ 26 ] [ 142 ] [ 174 ] [ 175 ] [ 176 ] [ 177 ] [ 178 ]

Early User and Advertiser Demographics

As the sites became increasingly popular, the user base expanded from teenagers and young adults to include more people over the age of 50. Although Facebook began in 2004 as a site for college students with log-ins restricted to those with .edu e-mail addresses, in Sep. 2006 it opened registration to everyone and as of Jan. 15, 2014, 23.3% of users were 18-24 years old, 24.4% were 25-34 years old, 31.1% were 35-54, and 15.6% were 55 and older. As of Feb. 2014, nearly two-thirds of social media users accessed sites from their computers once a day and nearly half of smartphone owners visited a social media platform every day. Two in five Americans had used social media at work, while one in five admitted to having logged into social media while in the bathroom. [ 26 ] [ 147 ] [ 179 ] [ 180 ] [ 181 ]

Social media’s largest source of revenue is advertising. Social media ad revenue was expected to reach $8.8 billion in 2012, an increase of 43% from 2011. Gaming also accounted for a large portion of social media revenue, with an expected $6.2 billion in 2012. Predictions place overall social media revenue at about $34 billion by 2016, an increase from $11.8 billion in 2011 and the projected $16.9 billion in 2012. [ 149 ] [ 150 ]

Social Media & Politics

Social media has played a large role in shaping the political landscape. More than a quarter of US voters younger than 30 (including 37% of those 18-24 years old) reported that they obtained information about the 2008 presidential campaign from social media. On Nov. 3, 2008, the day before the US presidential election , Democratic candidate Barack Obama had 2,379,102 Facebook supporters, 38% more than Republican candidate John McCain who had 620,359 supporters. [ 151 ] [ 152 ]

On June 12, 2009, the White House announced, via the White House Blog, that it was joining Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and Flickr in order to “create… unprecedented opportunity to connect you to your government in order to obtain information and services and to participate in policymaking.” [ 153 ]

Joining the social media sites was part of the administration’s efforts to meet President Obama’s call to “reform our government so that it is more efficient, more transparent, and more creative.” On Sep. 16, 2009, The Washington Times broke a story that the White House had begun collecting and storing comments and videos posted on social media, bringing invasion of privacy criticism. Defenders stated that the White House was simply complying with the Presidential Records Act, which requires the preservation of all presidential records. [ 154 ] [ 155 ]

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo dubbed the 2012 election the “Twitter election.” All of the main 2012 presidential candidates had Facebook and Twitter accounts. Barack Obama and Mitt Romney maintained MySpace accounts, and Obama also has a Pinterest account. The 2012 presidential election set the record at the time for most-tweeted event with more than 327,000 tweets per minute being sent when Barack Obama was announced the winner. The image of him and his wife that Obama posted upon his reelection with “Four more years” became the most re-tweeted tweet with over 816,883 re-tweets as of Nov. 19, 2012 (breaking Justin Beiber’s record of over 200,000 re-tweets). [ 156 ] [ 158 ][ 159 ]

The protests in Tunisia, which spawned the Arab Spring , were fueled and organized by social media as were protests in Egypt and Iran. The governments of those countries censored and attempted to shut down the social media sites. In response to the censorship, Hillary Clinton , US Secretary of State, said, “The United States believes passionately and strongly in the basic principle of free expression… And it is the case that one of the means of expression, the use of Twitter is a very important one, not only to the Iranian people but now increasingly to people around the world, and most particularly to young people.” [ 160 ] [ 161 ] [ 162 ]

Social media site growth has sometimes outpaced the development of rules, laws, and etiquette regarding their use. For example, in Feb. 2009 Congressman Peter Hoekstra (R-MI) tweeted his whereabouts as he traversed war zones in Iraq, which gave rise to security concerns about the use of social media to post real-time locations. [ 163 ]

An Aug. 23, 2018, study published in the American Journal of Public Health has found that the same Russian trolls, bots, and content polluters that influenced the 2016 US presidential election used Twitter to stoke both sides of the vaccines debate to promote “political discord” during the election. The study, “Weaponized Health Communication: Twitter Bots and Russian Trolls Amplify the Vaccine Debate,” examined almost 1.8 million tweets about vaccines and found that, while some came from malware or spam accounts, more were sent from identified Russian troll accounts, including many from the Internet Research Agency, a Kremlin-linked propaganda group. [ 289 ]

President Donald Trump , a frequent Twitter user who started his account in Mar. 2009, set a presidential record for most tweets and retweets in a single day with 142 posts on Twitter on Jan. 22, 2020. [ 289 ]

Social media continued to play a role in the 2020 presidential election as a major method of communication for and about the candidates. Donald Trump’s social media interactions dominated his rivals: in Oct. 2019, he had 181 million interactions (defined as likes, comments, and shares), compared to a combined 58 million for all 17 Democrats in the race. [ 292 ]

Social Media & the Law

Illinois passed a law in Aug. 2009 banning registered sex offenders from using social media. However, a Dec. 31, 2008 Internet Safety Technical Task Force report presented to the US State Attorneys General found that adults lying about their ages to initiate relationships with minors are a rare occurrence; 43% of online sexual predators were identified as minors, 30% were adults between the ages of 18 and 21, and 9% were adults over the age of 21. [ 165 ] [ 166 ]

On May 2, 2012, Maryland became the first state to pass a law prohibiting employers from asking current or prospective employees for their user names or passwords for social media. Governor Jerry Brown of California announced via Twitter on Sep. 27, 2012 that he signed two bills into law to prohibit employers and universities from demanding passwords. Other states have followed suit and have passed social media protection laws or have laws pending. [ 167 ] [ 168 ] [ 169 ][ 170 ][ 171 ]

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was called to appear before a panel of Senate committees in Apr. 2018 to address how the social media company mishandled user data, which were used by a consulting firm to create targeted political advertisements during the 2016 presidential election. He stated in prepared testimony, “We were too slow to spot and respond to Russian interference, and we’re working hard to get better… We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake, and I’m sorry.” Lawmakers indicated that they might enact privacy rules and regulations in the wake of the recent scandals. [ 284 ][ 285 ]

On May 26, 2020, Twitter labeled two of President Donald Trump’s tweets with “! Get the facts about mail-in ballots.” In response to the labels, Trump issued an executive order on May 28, 2020 that requires federal agencies to review social media companies’ conduct and potential biases, and bans federal agencies from advertising on platforms with alleged violations. [ 293 ] [ 294 ] [ 295 ] [ 296 ]

Social Media during COVID-19 and Beyond

During the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic in 2020, Americans consumed about 53 minutes of news per day, according Flixed, a site that provides “cord cutting” tools for people looking to ditch their cable boxes. That was an increase of 22 minutes. Facebook was the primary social media platform source for coronavirus news (35.8% of people surveyed), followed by Twitter (17.0%) and YouTube (16.3%). People who turned to Reddit as their primary social media news source about the pandemic were most likely to report a decline in their mental health (57.6%), followed by Twitter (43%), then Facebook (41.6%). [ 291 ]

A May 2021 NBC News poll found 64% of Americans believed social media “does more harm than good,” while 27% believed the platforms united Americans. [ 298 ]

Social media use only continues to increase as more platforms debut. In 2022, a Common Sense Media report found 84% of teens used social media, with only 34% reporting that they enjoy social media “a lot.” Social media use was also increasing among tweens, a group that is ostensibly barred from using the platforms. [ 299 ]

Minimum Age Laws

On Mar. 23, 2023 Utah Governor Spencer Cox signed a bill that will require anyone under 18 to acquire parental consent to join social media platforms in Utah as of Mar. 1, 2024. S.B. 152 Social Media Regulation Amendments will also require social media companies to implement curfews for minors, blocking anyone under 18 from using the platforms between 10:30 p.m. and 6:30 a.m. The law also requires social media platforms to remove all ads from the accounts of minors and allow parents access to the accounts. Utah’s law will serve as something of a guinea pig as social media platforms figure out how to implement the changes and the government figures out how to enforce the law. Similar laws were under consideration in Louisiana, New Jersey, Ohio, and Texas. [ 330 ] [ 331 ]

On Apr. 12, 2023, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee signed the Social Media Safety Act, which will take effect in Sep. 2023. The law requires social media platforms to verify the ages of all new users and have minor users obtain parental consent before creating an account. [ 332 ]

Possible Surgeon General’s Warning Label

In a June 17, 2024,   New York Times   opinion piece, Vivek H. Murthy, the  U.S. Surgeon General , called for a Surgeon General’s warning label on social media. [ 333 ]

Murthy argues, “It is time to require a surgeon general’s warning label on  social media  platforms, stating that social media is associated with significant  mental health  harms for  adolescents . A surgeon general’s warning label, which requires congressional action, would regularly remind parents and adolescents that social media has not been proved safe. Evidence from  tobacco  studies show that warning labels can increase awareness and change behavior.” [ 333 ]

The warning label now standard on  cigarette  packages was introduced in 1965 and heralded a 50-year decrease in smoking among Americans. [ 334 ]

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The History of Social Media

This essay about the origins of social media traces its development from early networked communication systems to the complex platforms we use today. It begins with ARPANET in the late 1960s, a foundational network that laid the groundwork for the internet. The essay identifies “Six Degrees,” launched in 1997, as the first true social media platform, allowing users to create profiles and establish personal connections online. It discusses the evolution through early 2000s platforms like Friendster and MySpace, which expanded the concept by introducing profile customization and multimedia sharing. The narrative culminates with the launch of Facebook in 2004, which revolutionized social media by combining these features into a sophisticated network that became accessible to the general public in 2006. This progression from simple digital communications to today’s social media giants shows how these platforms have grown to influence nearly every aspect of modern life, reflecting and shaping societal norms.

How it works

When we think of social media, images of Instagram selfies or tweets might spring to mind. But the roots of social media stretch far back before the first photo was ever posted on Instagram. To trace the lineage of social media, we need to go back several decades to understand how it evolved from basic networked communications to the complex social platforms we navigate today.

The concept of social media is deeply intertwined with the development of the internet itself. One could argue that the first inklings of social media appeared with early computer networks.

In the late 1960s, a system known as ARPANET, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, allowed multiple computers to communicate on a single network. The technology that enabled ARPANET is the bedrock upon which the entire internet and subsequent social networking platforms were built.

However, the first true forerunner to today’s social media platforms was likely “Six Degrees,” created in 1997 by Andrew Weinreich. Six Degrees was revolutionary in that it allowed users to create profiles and list their friends. Although the platform itself was not sustained for a long time, it introduced the concept of online social networks that could mimic and expand upon our real-world networks of friends and acquaintances.

Building on the ideas established by Six Degrees, the early 2000s saw a boom in social media platforms. Friendster, launched in 2002, tackled the concept of connecting with friends and networks more robustly. It was followed closely by MySpace in 2003, which became the dominant social networking site by allowing users to customize their profiles and share music, thereby attracting a massive user base, especially among younger people.

The landscape of social media changed dramatically in 2004 with the launch of Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg and his college roommates. Initially limited to Harvard students, Facebook soon expanded to other universities, eventually opening up to the general public in 2006. Facebook brought a new level of sophistication to social networking, offering features that encouraged users to share personal updates, photos, and engage with content in varied ways. It was Facebook’s model that solidified the framework for the modern social media platform: a place not just to connect with others, but to curate an online presence and consume a variety of media.

Each of these developments contributed to the social media ecosystem as we know it today. From humble beginnings as basic network communication systems, social media has grown into a complex web of platforms that influence nearly every aspect of modern life. These platforms continue to evolve, driven by technological advancements and shifting user expectations, reflecting and shaping the cultural and social paradigms of our time.

In conclusion, pinpointing the exact moment social media was created depends significantly on how one defines it. If we consider the broader concept of digital social connectivity, then ARPANET’s creation in the 1960s might serve as the starting point. However, if we focus on platforms designed specifically for personal and social communication, Six Degrees in 1997 marks the birth of what we now recognize as social media. This evolution from basic networked systems to the complex, multimedia platforms of today showcases the dynamic nature of digital communication and its profound impact on global society.

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Historical Evolution of Social Media: An Overview

International Conference on Advances in Engineering Science Management & Technology (ICAESMT) - 2019, Uttaranchal University, Dehradun, India

8 Pages Posted: 22 Jul 2019

Manish Dhingra

Rama University

Rakesh K. Mudgal

Teerthanker Mahaveer University

Date Written: March 15, 2019

Social media has become the buzz word of marketing nowadays. Today it is difficult to visualise the effectiveness of promotion mix of any company without social media. Starting from basic means of exchanging information, it grew to development of means of communication whose purpose was manifold. With the advent of social media customers and businesses have become well connected with each other. Business to business, business to customer, and customer to customer communication has been great facilitated by social media. Various types of social media platforms have evolved over a period of time, which have become more sophisticated in terms of technology, more effective in terms of capability to influence the customers and more efficient in terms of reaching the customers in optimum time. All these developments took place over many years and have passed through several stages. The aim of this paper is to capture the historical developments of social media over a period of time.

Keywords: Social Media, Bulletin Board Systems, UseNet

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Manish Dhingra (Contact Author)

Rama university ( email ).

Rama University Kanpur Kanpur, UT Uttar Pradesh 209217 India 7417095234 (Phone)

Teerthanker Mahaveer University ( email )

NH 24 Delhi Road Pakbada Moradabad, Utter Pradesh 244001 India

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Essay on Social Media for School Students and Children

500+ words essay on social media.

Social media is a tool that is becoming quite popular these days because of its user-friendly features. Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and more are giving people a chance to connect with each other across distances. In other words, the whole world is at our fingertips all thanks to social media. The youth is especially one of the most dominant users of social media. All this makes you wonder that something so powerful and with such a massive reach cannot be all good. Like how there are always two sides to a coin, the same goes for social media. Subsequently, different people have different opinions on this debatable topic. So, in this essay on Social Media, we will see the advantages and disadvantages of social media.

Advantages of Social Media

When we look at the positive aspect of social media, we find numerous advantages. The most important being a great device for education . All the information one requires is just a click away. Students can educate themselves on various topics using social media.

Moreover, live lectures are now possible because of social media. You can attend a lecture happening in America while sitting in India.

Furthermore, as more and more people are distancing themselves from newspapers, they are depending on social media for news. You are always updated on the latest happenings of the world through it. A person becomes more socially aware of the issues of the world.

In addition, it strengthens bonds with your loved ones. Distance is not a barrier anymore because of social media. For instance, you can easily communicate with your friends and relatives overseas.

Most importantly, it also provides a great platform for young budding artists to showcase their talent for free. You can get great opportunities for employment through social media too.

Another advantage definitely benefits companies who wish to promote their brands. Social media has become a hub for advertising and offers you great opportunities for connecting with the customer.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Disadvantages of Social Media

Despite having such unique advantages, social media is considered to be one of the most harmful elements of society. If the use of social media is not monitored, it can lead to grave consequences.

Thus, the sharing on social media especially by children must be monitored at all times. Next up is the addition of social media which is quite common amongst the youth.

This addiction hampers with the academic performance of a student as they waste their time on social media instead of studying. Social media also creates communal rifts. Fake news is spread with the use of it, which poisons the mind of peace-loving citizens.

In short, surely social media has both advantages and disadvantages. But, it all depends on the user at the end. The youth must particularly create a balance between their academic performances, physical activities, and social media. Excess use of anything is harmful and the same thing applies to social media. Therefore, we must strive to live a satisfying life with the right balance.

FAQs on Social Media

Q.1 Is social media beneficial? If yes, then how?

A.1 Social media is quite beneficial. Social Media offers information, news, educational material, a platform for talented youth and brands.

Q.2 What is a disadvantage of Social Media?

A.2 Social media invades your privacy. It makes you addicted and causes health problems. It also results in cyberbullying and scams as well as communal hatred.

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Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — Social Media — Social Media Impact On Society

Social Media Impact on Society

• Categories: Social Media

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Words: 614 |

Published: Mar 13, 2024

Words: 614 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

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The Architecture of Storytelling on Social Media

In the digital era, the race to showcase unparalleled works by various creators, including architects, has accelerated on the ever-engaging social platforms integral to the lives of the current generation. Social media provides a global platform where architects can express their designs and communicate with people worldwide. The article sets a critical discourse on the evolution of storytelling in architecture by looking at how it has been shaped and changed in the contemporary platform.

The Evolution of Architectural Storytelling

Historically, architectural storytelling evolved through various phases, utilizing sketches, illustrations, drawings, exhibitions, physical models, face-to-face interactions, and print media. These traditional methods, while effective, were limited in their reach, engaging only a select audience. With the advent of digital narratives, the dissemination of architectural concepts has transcended geographical boundaries, allowing the global community to appreciate diverse techniques and contexts. This digital transformation fosters a more informed and engaged audience, encouraging the development of innovative ideas and perspectives. Consequently, individuals can make more informed architectural decisions that not only meet their needs but also harmonize with the environment.

Crafting Compelling Narratives on Social Media

Making Strong Stories on Social Media This can be done on several platforms, such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Key techniques that make these stories very strong include the following:

Visual Storytelling: The most powerful story in social media is told through compelling images and videos. In essence, this project will help architects explain more than just physical appearance, but the aesthetics, functionality, and context of their project.

B-Roll or Behind-the-Scenes Content: To illustrate the processes or methods adopted to reach a design, behind-the-scenes content can be highly effective. This approach can incorporate bloopers, initial sketches, discarded ideas, thought processes, rejected designs, refined versions, video clips, movie times, books read, and more. Such content humanizes the architectural process, enabling the audience to relate better to the people behind the projects.

Interactive Content: Interactive content, like polls, Q&A, or live videos, invites great participation from your audience. Instagram and Facebook make provisions for real-time interaction between the audience and the storyteller, making the experience not just highly dynamic but also closest to reality.

Story Highlights: Platforms like Instagram offer the possibility of highlighting stories, where architects can curate content into topics and themes. This way, the story will lead to a great understanding while being accessed by the followers at any time.

User-Generated Content : Inviting experiences from clients, collaborators, and even users to submit their photos of the spaces themselves helps greatly enhance the story. Such shared authorship builds an authentic brand story that brings multiple perspectives and testimonials.

Public Engagement and Perception

Social media storytelling tends to capture a vast and diverse audience. Post their work on social media to increase visibility for architectural projects and reach a wider audience, which was somewhat impossible through traditional media. Engage with the audience through comments, likes, and shares, enabling them to feel part and parcel of a community of the brand and, therefore, loyal. This community can be a great source of essential feedback, inspiration, and support.

Shape Public Perception

The way a project is being presented over social media can shape public perception. Positive engagement and perhaps something that goes viral boost the name of architects and firms, whereas criticism could also provide a learning curve for growth.

• Case Studies

Some architects and firms have mastered the art of digital storytelling. Here are some examples:

Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG): BIG’s Instagram page (@bjarkeingels) often shares projects in hyper-visual, aesthetic ways that bring out the beauty of projects through punchline captions, lighting up more intriguing topics around a project. They are masters at communicating through social media and doing so in ways that give a behind-the-scenes look at the company and personal insights coming directly from Bjarke Ingels himself.

Zaha Hadid Architects : Featuring an all-inclusive and hefty following on heavy platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, Zaha Hadid Architects deploy these very avenues to bring out innovative design dissemination and their global presence. The follower will have an idea of the vision in each project through the context and detailed descriptions in their posts.

Studio Gang : Likewise, Jeanne Gang along with her team uses social media to discuss its design process, its efforts for community engagement, and sustainability measures. Their approach toward sharing information with their audience depends on the social and environmental effects of their work.

Symbiotic Relationship of Architecture and Social Media

The relationship of architecture to social media is symbiotic. Where social media is a surface for an architect to be creative and visionary, the very subject matter of architecture—built form—is visually impactful content that sustains on these platforms. That said, together they not only augment digital culture but also add new chapters to the book of collective memory about our built environment.

In conclusion, the architecture of storytelling on social media is a dynamic and evolving practice. In that case, it becomes the power of architects to weave inspiring stories in digital platforms. The architects could weave engaging narratives responsive to the needs of the global audience in digital platforms, improve public engagement, and further shape their work’s perception. Just as social media continues getting better, so too will the ways through which the architects tell their stories—their ingenuity and innovation in seeking to ace in this digital era.

Niya Francis is a recent graduate from the College of Engineering Trivandrum, passionate about designing socially impactful spaces. With a keen interest in research and architectural writing, Niya aims to contribute to the field by exploring innovative design practices and shaping inspiring environments.

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