Online chat rooms and message forums were running on a campus network in the 1960s
Long before Facebook, a teaching network called PLATO, launched at the University of Illinois in 1960, offered message forums, instant messaging, a crowdsourced newspaper and Talkomatic, perhaps the first online chat room. It even let owners restrict a file to chosen friends or classmates, an early version of today's privacy settings.
Other pieces arrived over the following decades. ARPANET went live in 1969, and by 1982 an MIT computing handbook was already laying out network etiquette. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis dreamed up Usenet in 1979, and it opened in 1980 as the first open social media application. In Chicago, the Computer Bulletin Board System went online on 16 February 1978, and by the late 1980s and early 1990s North America had tens of thousands of dial-up boards, each built around its message forums.
The web changed the scale. After Tim Berners-Lee combined hypertext with the internet in 1991, forums moved online and blogs multiplied. The mid-1990s brought SixDegrees.com, named after the idea that any two people are linked by six acquaintances. It was the first service built for people to connect under their real names rather than handles, with profiles, friend lists and school ties. BlackPlanet, Friendster and Myspace followed, then Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
What sets these services apart from newspapers and broadcasters is direction. Old media send one message to many receivers; social platforms let many sources reach many receivers. By 2023 some 4.76 billion people, around 59 percent of humanity, used them, and a 2015 study found that 22 percent of time online went to social networks. Content can go viral, spreading from one network to the next within hours, which is why marketers love it, although only a few posts ever take off.
The same dynamics draw criticism. The American Psychological Association notes that engagement-driven algorithms tend to promote material that stirs anger and outrage, and that a small minority of superspreaders produces most online misinformation. Critics also link heavy use by young people to sleep and attention problems.
Source: Social media
