The (Brief) History of Social Media

January 22, 2013

Origins: Ancient Greece

• Original concepts of social media date back to the famous philosophers of Ancient Greece

• Rhetoric – the art of persuasion (one to many)

• Dialectic – involves arriving at a conclusion via a conversation & exchange of ideas/viewpoints (participation from both sides)

“One to Many” Concept

• Catholic church popularized the “one to many” concept: the word of God must be communicated and interpreted only through the church– Council of Nicaea decided what

books would be included in the Bible and how the Word would be communicated to man

• Education/information reserved for the clergy or the wealthy – the masses were largely uneducated

500 AD – 1900s

• “One to Many” idea carried through for hundreds of years– Came up for debate during English

Reformation, King Henry VIII’s rule• Martin Luther argued that the Bible

could be read and interpreted by man – not just the church

– Rise of Communism, dictatorships, state-controlled media• Information came from one source;

government ruled by one person/group

Technology: The Great Equalizer

• 20th Century: As technology evolved, access to information grew

• Computers and the Internet deconstructed the “one to many” precedent; created the “many to many” paradigm

• Anyone now has access to information that was once reserved for governments, universities, clergy or the wealthy

Key Milestones

• First computer built: 1946• First networked computers:

1968• First home computer sold: 1977• First online chat room: 1980• Birth date of World Wide Web:

August 6, 1991• First Internet Service Provider

(ISP): 1994

History of Social Media: 1989 - 2010

1980s – 1990s

• Compuserve and Prodigy first large scale attempts to bring an interactive, “social” online experience to the masses– High cost ($30/hour!) and low speeds (dial-

up) • Internet Relay Chat (today’s IM) created in

August 1988 – Used during the first Gulf War– AOL launches AIM in 1996

• P2P (peer to peer) sharing launches in 1999 with Napster; marked an radical shift of distribution power from record companies to the consumer

2000s

• Most significant development: broadband speeds rise & cost of computers decreases – By the end of 2000, more than 360

million had access to the Internet (now: more than 2 billion)

• “Dot Com Bust” in 2001 refined Internet business models; created a more realistic view of the Web– We learned what to build and how

to make money (advertising vs. subscriptions)

Web 2.0• The biggest evolution of the Web in the mid-2000s• Web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing,

interoperability, and collaboration on the Internet• Marks the rise of user-generated content and democratization of

information • Power shifting to the people or “the many”

Rise of Social Networks• Using the Internet to make and organize personal &

business connections• The creation of the “social graph” – a person’s sphere

of influence and connections • OpenID – a single sign-on for third-party websites

(Facebook Connect, Twitter OAuth, MySpaceID)

2002 2004 2005 2007

Real-Time & Location-Based• From static pages to real-time streams of updates• Smartphones enable mass adoption of location-

based services (“checking in” @ Starbucks)– More on this in upcoming Privacy lecture

• GrouponNow offers instant deals by location

201120092006

Visual and Aspirational

• Evolution from utility to aesthetic – further up Maslow’s Hierarchy

• Shift from need to want; functional to delightful• Information as pictures; visualization of data

201020082007

The Social Media Revolution