Wikipedia Deep Dive

Social media

6 min read

In 1960, a revolutionary system called PLATO launched at the University of Illinois, offering early forms of social media features—years before anyone used the term "social media" itself. It featured Notes, an electronic message-forum application; TERM-talk, which enabled instant messaging; Talkomatic, perhaps the world's first online chat room; and News Report, a crowdsourced digital newspaper. Users could limit access to their files, creating communities of friends, classmates, or co-workers.

This precursor emerged from ARPANET, which came online in 1969, by the late 1970s enabling exchanges of non-commercial ideas between computer terminals across university labs. A 1982 handbook on computing at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory described network etiquette—or "netiquette"—as norms for online communication evolved. ARPANET eventually evolved into what we now call the Internet.

The story really begins in 1979, when two graduate students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University conceived Usenet, a distributed information system that allowed users to share messages across computer networks. By 1980, Usenet had become the first open social media application—a precursor to the electronic bulletin board systems (BBSs) that would soon proliferate across America.

What Social Media Actually Is

At its core, social media refers to new media technologies that facilitate the creation, sharing, and aggregation of content among virtual communities and networks. These platforms enable users to create and share content and participate in social networking—everything from text posts or comments to digital photos, videos, and data generated through online interactions.

The word "social" in this context is crucial: these platforms enable communal activity, helping people connect and build networks. Users access social media through web-based or mobile applications, which serve as interactive platforms allowing individuals, communities, businesses, and organizations to share, co-create, discuss, participate in, and modify user-generated content.

Social media serves multiple purposes: sharing memories, forming friendships, building communities, learning, promoting people, companies, products, and ideas. They can also be used to consume, publish, or share news—transforming how journalism works.

The Platforms That Changed Everything

The social media landscape took shape in the mid-1990s with platforms like Classmates.com and SixDegrees.com. While instant messaging and chat clients existed at the time, SixDegrees was unique: it was the first online service designed for people to connect using their actual names instead of anonymously. It introduced features like profiles, friends lists, and school affiliations—essentially creating "the very first social networking site." The platform's name was inspired by the "six degrees of separation" concept, suggesting every person on Earth is just six connections away from everyone else.

In the early 2000s, social media platforms gained widespread popularity. BlackPlanet (1999) preceded Friendster and MySpace, followed by Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter—each reshaping how people interact online.

Research from 2015 reported that users spent 22% of their online time on social networks, fueled by smartphone availability. As of 2023, as many as 4.76 billion people used social media—approximately 59% of the global population.

Popular platforms with over 100 million registered users include Twitter, Facebook, WeChat, ShareChat, Instagram, Pinterest, QZone, Weibo, VK, Tumblr, Baidu Tieba, Threads, and LinkedIn. Depending on interpretation, other popular platforms sometimes referred to as social media services include YouTube, Letterboxd, QQ, Quora, Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, LINE, Snapchat, Viber, Reddit, Discord, and TikTok.

A New Model of Communication

Social media outlets differ from old media—newspapers, TV, and radio broadcasting—in many ways, including quality, reach, frequency, usability, relevancy, and permanence. But the most significant difference lies in how information flows.

Traditional media operate under a monologic transmission model: one source transmits to many receivers. A newspaper delivers the same content to millions of subscribers; a radio station broadcasts identical programs to an entire city. Social media, by contrast, operates in a dialogic transmission system—many sources communicate with many receivers simultaneously.

This fundamental shift democratized information creation, but it also introduced new challenges that traditional media did not face.

Shadows in the Feed

Social media has been criticized for a range of negative impacts on children and teenagers, including exposure to inappropriate content, exploitation by adults, sleep problems, attention problems, feelings of exclusion, and various mental health maladies. The algorithms that track user engagement tend to prioritize content that spurs negative emotions like anger and outrage.

Journalist Maria Ressa, who won the Nobel Prize in 2020 for her work documenting authoritarian oppression, described social media as "toxic sludge" for increasing distrust among members of society. Her work highlighted how misinformation spreads through these platforms.

Major news outlets often have strong controls to avoid false claims, but social media's unique qualities bring viral content with little to no oversight. A 2020 study found that most online misinformation originates from a small minority of "superspreaders," but social media amplifies their reach and influence exponentially.

Social media has also received criticism for worsening political polarization and undermining democracy, exacerbated by platform capture by vested interests. The consequences ripple through economies, politics, and culture.

From Bulletin Boards to Global Networks

The evolution of online services progressed from serving as channels for networked communication to becoming interactive platforms for networked social interaction with the advent of Web 2.0—a paradigm shift in how people engage online.

Message forums migrated to the web and evolved into internet forums, supported by cheaper access and the ability to handle far more people simultaneously. These early text-based systems expanded to include images and video in the 21st century, aided by digital cameras and camera phones.

Social media encompasses an expanding suite of services: blogs (like HuffPost or Boing Boing), business networks (LinkedIn, XING), collaborative projects (Mozilla, GitHub), enterprise social networks (Yammer, Slack), forums (Gaia Online, IGN), microblogs (Twitter, Tumblr, Weibo), photo sharing (Pinterest, Flickr), products and services review sites (Amazon, Upwork), and social bookmarking.

In 2019, Merriam-Webster defined social media 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."

The National Institute of Standards and Technology defines it more broadly: "Forms of electronic communications, including websites and applications, that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking."

The Never-Ending Story

From PLATO's pioneering message forums in 1960 to TikTok's viral dances in 2023, social media has transformed how humans connect, communicate, and consume information. It has rewritten the social contract between individuals and communities, between speakers and listeners, between private reflection and public performance.

The platforms we now consider "traditional"—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram—are actually relatively recent innovations built atop decades of experimentation in networked communication. They emerged from bulletin board systems, Usenet groups, early microblogs, and the fundamental insight that human connection matters more than anonymity.