The History of Social Networking and the advent of Social Media

Social networking is only a new thing, right?

This social media thing only started a few years ago and it won’t last, right?

In my article today I wanted to review the history of social networking, define social media and explain why the answer to both of these questions is NO.
Firstly, we need to define what social networks are.

A network can be defined as a grouping or connection of individuals with similar interests and goals to collaborate, share, communicate and co-operate. These groupings are sometimes focused around social interaction. The creation of social networks.

The first social networks were created over 100,000 years ago. Historical evidence suggests that certain elements of social network structures may have been present at an early point in human history. Early humans may have formed ties with both kin and non-kin, based on sharing common interests and their tendency to co-operate to reach a goal. Eg they formed networks to kill mammoths, and I’d bet they had social networks that partied on afterwards.

A social network is a community where the individuals are linked to each other by proximity, socially, by a common interest or goal. Examples of social networks include your family, your work friends and your toastmasters’ club. When these groups connect for the purpose of communication and sharing, they are said to be “social networking” and most of the time this occurs at a face-to-face level. However, more and more “social networking” is occurring on a different level, using technology. But this technology we now know as “social media” is just the platform by which connect and communicate.

Over 100 years ago, ranches in America, out of necessity and creativity, created the first primitive social networking platform through a connection of barbed wire and beer bottles. The network was social as there was no switch or exchange to isolate the signs, it was basically a ‘party’ line, and anyone on the line could hear any other person on the line.

It was the advent of the internet and the mainstreaming of the world wide web in the early 1980s that gave us the ideal technology to facilitate social networking using social media. But it wasn’t until 10 years later that personal computers and access to dial up internet we starting to become mainstream, that online social networking websites were born, making it convenient and fast, depending on your connection, to conduct our “social networking”.

The first of the online social networks was Geocities in 1994, then Theglobe.com and Sixdegrees.com. Then in early 2002 (after we all survived the Y2K meltdown) sites like Friendster, Myspace and LinkedIn were started and growing fast. In 2004, Facebook was launched, originally as a college social site, but soon spread to public use. In 2006 Twitter was launched as a micro blogging platform similar to mobile texting. In 2011 Google created their own social networking site called Google+.

Today there are 1000s of social networking sites being used by 28% of the planet’s population (in Australia it is 50% of the population). The top 5 social networking sites are Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Google+ which claim the market share.

It is new for us to have a technology where we can connect and share instantly. And it is going to take us as a generation some time to learn how to use these new tools and technology, how to deal with it.

We aren’t slowing down.
We have moved through the stone age, the industrial age, the digital age, the information age, we are now in the social age, where our lives and businesses are being shared and communicated via social media and social networks.

We are living through an evolution as technology improves and we learn to embrace this new way to interact with our networks.

Since that beginning with the “Mammoths Social Network” back in the caveman days, social networking has evolved throughout the ages to the use of electronic platforms we have today.

We are social creatures and we continue to network socially, it’s just the platform we are using to facilitate this networking that has changed.

Social networking has been around since the dawn of time and we will continue to embrace social media as it evolves. I am really excited to be alike right know to witness this new evolution.