Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok...the list goes on. You have all heard of them, and many of you probably use at least one of them every single day. These apps and websites, which go under the name of social medias, have since their inception gone on to have a massive impact on our societies. In many ways they have thoroughly changed the way we interact with others, and by extension, also how we live our lives. With the first ones being born in the late 1990s, when the internet had just started becoming available to a wider portion of the public, social media now have a more than two-decade-long history, which this article will be devoted to exploring. In what follows, we will start off with an overview of the origins of social media, tracing their development from niche communities for the privileged few to the mass-based platforms of contemporary times. With this in mind, we will then go on to explore what role social media have come to play in the society of today, focusing on their impact in the vast realms of politics and business.
So, how did it all begin? As you might know, the first building blocks towards what we today know as the internet saw the light of day in 1969. This was the year when the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network – more commonly known as the ARPANET – was launched. Developed by the United States Department of Defence, the ARPANET was a digital network connecting computers at four different universities, allowing scientists to share hardware, software, and data with each other in a straightforward way. In the decade that followed, new technologies were developed, opening up the possibility for communication in ways that could not have been imagined before. One of these was CompuServe, which offered the first renditions of computer messaging that became known as e-mails, while also allowing users to access news and events, participate in forum discussions, and share files with each other. In 1980, the system known as Usenet was launched, allowing users to communicate through a virtual newsletter. At around the same time, so called bulletin board systems (BBS) began to appear. These were early online meeting places, which enabled people to communicate through text, posting messages for others to see, as well as downloading files and games to their own computers.
In 1987, the American National Science Foundation launched NSFNET as a successor to the ARPANET. NSFNET was a nationwide digital network, which opened up for a more widespread use of this new technology, at a time when computers were starting to become common phenomena in households across the country. A year later, a service known as America Online (AOL) was launched, boasting millions of users at its height. In many ways, this was a real precursor to the social medias of today, featuring member-created communities where each user could design a profile with information about themselves. The same year, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), a system that opened up the possibility of instant messaging, was launched. In the years that followed, usage of the internet grew steadily, spreading across the world as more and more people gained access to this new, exciting technology. As this brief account of internet history shows, there were plenty of forerunners to the expansive world of social media we know today. Still, we have not yet mentioned the perhaps most crucial point in the development of the internet: The invention of the World Wide Web, launched in 1991 by British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee. As the www at the beginning of URLs in your web browser shows, the World Wide Web has since become the dominant software platform of the world, enabling us to utilise all the features of the internet we are used to today: Blogging, chatting, gaming, job hunting, news reading, shopping, and of course, using social media.
Indeed, before long, the first renditions of what could be described as social media, that is, sites used as a means of sharing content and interacting with others, started to appear. Of the early websites to be considered social media, one of the most commonly known is probably Myspace, which was launched in 2003. However, this was not the first such website. In fact, the first social media website was launched as much as six years earlier, in 1997. Developed by American entrepreneur Andrew Weinreich, the website was named Six Degrees, after the so called six degrees of separation theory, which postulates that all people in the world can be connected to each other through a maximum of six other people. It enabled users to create profiles, organise groups, and connect with others to make friends. While the platform was relatively short-lived, it paved the way for the development of subsequent social media websites, such as Friendster, which was launched in 2001. The website, developed by Canadian engineer and entrepreneur Jonathan Abrams, quickly became immensely popular, gaining three million users within its first year online. The interface boasted many features now associated with online dating sites, which proved to be a success. However, like its predecessor, Friendster would soon see a decline in popularity, having been overtaken by Myspace, which appealed to a younger audience with its hip design and focus on music. As the first social media to reach a global audience, the website, developed by American entrepreneurs Chris DeWolfe, Tom Anderson, and Jon Hart, had a considerable impact on popular culture. A year prior, LinkedIn, the now largest website for career professionals to connect with both each other and potential employers, had been launched by American entrepreneurs Reid Hoffman and Eric Ly, providing a well-needed space for those wanting to use the internet to enhance their careers.
As we now approach the mid-2000s, this was the time when social media really took off. The world's currently largest social media platform, (The) Facebook (yes, the definite article was originally part of its name), was launched in 2004. Developed by American media magnate Mark Zuckerberg and Brazilian entrepreneur Eduardo Saverin, the website quickly gained traction, surpassing Myspace as the most visited social media website in just a few years after its launch to the general public in 2006. Of the websites mentioned so far, Facebook is the only one, together with LinkedIn, to have maintained its popularity in contemporary times. The reason behind Facebook's success has been stated by some to be as simple as the introduction of the now omnipresent like-button, which enables users to quickly show their appreciation of a post. 2006 was truly a golden year for social media, as this was also the year in which Twitter, founded by four American entrepreneurs Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams, made its first appearance. To be sure, the introduction of the microblogging format, through the 140-character limit for posts, known as tweets, would soon prove to be a successful concept. With the introduction of smartphones in the latter half of the 2000s, websites quickly turned into apps. Indeed, Instagram, developed by American programmer Kevin Systrom and entrepreneur Mike Krieger, was one of the first large social medias to be developed directly as an app rather than as a website, appearing in Apple's Appstore in 2010. Its focus on photos with short captions displayed in a feed made it particularly suitable for the mobile format, which has since grown to become the main way of accessing social media today. What should have become noticeable in this brief overview of social media development is the seeming concentration of social media sites and applications to North America. In recent years however, a new social media giant has appeared. Launched by Chinese internet technology company ByteDance in 2016, TikTok has gained increasing success since it became available outside China, where it is known as DouYin. Its focus on short videos accompanied by music has made it especially popular among kids and teenagers, who make up a majority of the app's user base.
The availability of social media from anywhere and at any time through the use of mobile devices is surely a reason behind their tremendous growth in popularity in the past decade. The now ubiquitous nature of these apps have enabled social media to really extend their impact to nearly all aspects of our lives, ranging from keeping in touch with friends and family, searching for jobs, engaging in political discussions, being creative, and discovering new places and people. At their core, social media are tools for communicating and connecting with people. As the previously commonly used term social networking sites suggests, their main purpose is to allow people to maintain existing relationships with others, as well as initiate new ones. Another essential aspect is the focus on user generated content, which is what really sets social media apart from other media. Content, be it text, photos, videos or something else, is the lifeblood of social media, which they cannot survive without. Indeed, this has provided ample opportunity for people to connect with others all across the globe, coming together around a shared interest or a common goal. As such, social media has not only been a space for people to engage in fandoms and share memes, but has also been instrumental in many of the social movements that have sprung up in the past decade. Because of the way they function, they enable people to reach out to other like-minded individuals, sparking events such as the Arab Spring in the early 2010s, where hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to protest their governments across Northern Africa and Western Asia. Social media have proven to be especially conducive to activism and social justice movements, using hashtags such as #metoo and #BlackLivesMatter to spread awareness of and spur action for a wide range of different causes. With the development of social media, it has become much easier to share whatever is on your mind to a large potential audience. This also makes it a favourable option for sharing witness accounts, for example from war-torn areas, where information might otherwise be hard to come by. Of course, their use in this context also make them a breeding ground for the spread of various forms of propaganda, especially by authoritarian regimes, which are acutely aware that controlling information is the key to keeping their power.
In recent years, concerns about so called fake news have arisen, not least in regards to the United States presidential election in 2016, and the subsequent four years of Twitter-presidency, in which Donald Trump frequently shared complete falsehoods through his social media platform of choice. Indeed, discussions about the prominence of fake news and conspiracies in today's social media landscape have raised questions about the responsibilities of large social media companies, which now hold a considerable amount of power, given the immensity of social media influence in today's society. With 3.5 billion people now using social media across the globe, they have become the main source of information-sharing and communication for more than 40% of the world's population. While there are many positive aspects of this, it is important to also keep in mind the negative effects. One of these is political polarisation, which only seems to increase as time goes by. This can partly be attributed to the algorithms that platforms such as Facebook operate with, keeping their users in a so called filter bubble, making sure that people are only exposed to for example news content from sources that they are likely to agree with. Here we should also mention the potential for discrimination and the spread of hate and violence, especially on platforms that have less moderation. The possibility of broadcasting hateful rhetoric to a large mass of people through the use of social media platforms has proven to be potentially deadly, and is therefore something that social media companies need to consider how to tackle.
Another concern is privacy, which is virtually non-existent for anyone who has ever used a social media. The companies behind them harvest data, including various forms of personal information, which can then be used to target ads to specific demographics. This vast amount of data can of course also be used for decidedly more sinister purposes, which we perhaps do not yet know the full magnitude of. As American whistleblower Edward Snowden has shown, mass surveillance is now an ongoing operation, stripping internet users of any form of privacy they might formerly have had. Intensified calls for action to be taken has resulted in increasing regulation on part of politicians, not least through the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) framework developed within the European Union. More recently, Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has threatened to shut down operations in Europe, following a dispute around an agreement prohibiting the transfer of user data from Europe to the United States. At the end of the day, causing these social media to become unavailable on a whole continent would arguably deal Meta the hardest blow, making this threat unlikely to materialise. Another, perhaps less evident, negative consequence of the rise of social media is their use as a marketing tool by companies, who can now advertise their products and services at a fraction of the cost previously required. Using so called influencers, they attempt to grow their brand in a less intrusive way than with traditional ads, hoping to spur people to create and share related content of their own, thus promoting their brands at essentially no cost. In this way, people are essentially performing free labour on behalf of large corporations, which happily repost consumers' content on their own social media pages, improving their image by appearing to engage with their patrons.
After this exploration of our most recent media revolution, it is safe to say that the development of social media from the late 1990s onwards has been an interesting journey. Some social medias have come and gone, while others continue to thrive in an increasingly diverse media landscape, where apps and websites are constantly competing to gain the attention of the ever wider circle of people utilising the internet. To summarise the points made about the impact of social media on society, one main positive aspect stands out: As the great tools for communication they are, social media have the ability to really connect people. Apart from simply connecting people with those they already know, they can help people expand their social circles. Interaction with others who are different from oneself can hopefully also help foster greater tolerance and respect, which is very much needed in today's divisive society. That said, social media also has some distinctly negative features, including the potential for them to be used in a discriminatory manner, as well as a tool for surveillance, and thus, the undermining of privacy. With this in mind, we can only speculate in whether social media as we know them today will be able to keep their appeal, or whether they will give way to something else that we perhaps have not yet imagined. The social media giants of today have been in the game for a considerably long time now, and thus seem unlikely to disappear any time soon. As such, only time will tell what the future holds for the vast and fascinating network of applications and websites known as social media.
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