Final: Social Media Before the Internet

 Have you ever wondered what it must have been like to use social media BEFORE the creation of the internet?

I know, I know, you're probably thinking "what is Jennifer talking about? She is absolutely crazy! The social media can't EXIST without the internet!" Some of you may even be staring at this post like the painting below. Everyone knows social media requires the internet and could never be created without it.

(If this post hasn't made you feel like this yet, good! I am sure the rest of the semester has though).

But what if it was?

I recently started working on our final, but the question of "What is the internet/social media?" really got me thinking. At a simple glance, the question seems easily answerable. After all, we all have probably used some type of social media, whether that was Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube, Pinterest, and the list goes on and on. Social media has intertwined itself with our everyday lives. Although I cannot speak for everyone, I am sure that we have all been impacted by it in someway. I am a huge Snapchat user. Due to my phone plan providing me with limited data and texts, Snapchat had been my way to communicate with my peers for years. In high school, I was required to create a Twitter account so my AP Gov class could tweet to each other about the State of the Union address by Donald Trump. When I entered college, I picked up a Facebook account so I could join club accounts and be informed. Finally, most recently, I got an Instagram account just a few months back. True, I am slow in social media, and I hardly know how to use much of it, but I still have it. I still am using it to connect with old friends, find information, and attempt to be entertained by whatever content I find on these platforms when I am extremely board or procrastinating. 

So what did the original social media look like? With the initial creation of the World Wide Web in 1991, a platform called Six Degrees (logo below) was supposedly the first social media platform created in 1997. Along with Six Degrees, blog platforms were also the social media norm. These platforms did exactly what we do now: share, scroll, like.

Although the above platforms did not function exactly like our modern day ones, the ideas were the same. Encouraging people to share their thoughts, beliefs and ideas was a form of entertainment for people. So was connecting with friends, family, beloved ones from far away. It is this idea that brings me to think social media existed without the use of the internet, which is a really crazy thought!

By the Merriam Webster dictionary, 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).” This definition does call attention to the requirement of "online communication," which sort of breaks the point I am trying to make, but I would like to call attention to the subject matter that this definition encompasses. The subject matter for social media is to create a space for people to communicate their ideas, information, and personal messages to each other. It is this part of the definition that brings me back to my main question: what did social media look like without the internet?

Perhaps by now you are getting bored or you think I am making a moot point, but is technology really the qualification for turning social media into what it is? 

After all, people used to use letters and the printing press as their way to carry information across countries. These personalized articles, papers, and ledgers carried ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and values throughout the world, and that was just with paper! Then, in 1792, the telegraph made an even quicker form of communication by inventing a system that allowed people to communicate WITHOUT paper, and it was relatively quick compared to people running around with papers in their hands. Following the telegraph, the telephone and the radio came to be. Then came the computer and the birth of the internet. 

So how does any of this contribute to the idea of social media existing without the internet? My point is technological advancements have created ways for us to easily communicate and share information throughout the past few centuries. One could argue that technology is the base of the creation of social media rather than the internet, but I think social media can reflect upon all of these technological advancements. Communication was born from all of these technological advancements, and from this communication stemmed communities and a vast reach of societal members meeting other societal members that they may never have been able to contact before. The product of all these technological advancements was the spread of information and the connection of communities...which is exactly what our modern day social media platforms do for us.

Perhaps you feel like the image above because my point came across, or perhaps you feel like so because I entered a very confusing realm of rhetoric that did not get my point across. Either way, I hope you pulled something from this post! Although I can still agree social media is backed heavily by the internet, I would like the debate over social media being a creation before its time to be continued on in some way. 

Here is a source of mine if you would like to look some more: https://smallbiztrends.com/2013/05/the-complete-history-of-social-media-infographic.html