Synonyms

Blog; Content communities; Facebook; Foursquare; Microblog; Second life; Social media; Twitter; User-generated content; Web 2.0; Wikipedia; Word-of-mouth; YouTube

Glossary

Ambient awareness:

Awareness created through regular and constant reception and/or exchange of information fragments through social media

MMORPG:

Massively multiplayer online role-playing game

Mobile social media:

Group of mobile marketing applications that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content

UCG:

User-generated content

Definition

Social media are defined as “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content” (Kaplan and Haenlein 2010, p. 61). Indeed, many have mastered the social media landscape successfully, showing the potential of these applications to yield impressive results. In politics, e.g., social media communications were a key element in Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, which led to his first election in 2008. Many states and public administrations make use of Facebook, Twitter, and similar platforms, including the European Union, which aims to create a feeling of European identity among its citizens through social media (Kaplan 2014). Within the entertainment industry, stars such as Britney Spears have built their communication strategies completely around social media (Kaplan and Haenlein 2012b). Even the higher education sector might be close to disruption due to the arrival of digital elements (Kaplan and Haenlein 2016; Pucciarelli and Kaplan 2016), such as massive open online courses (MOOCs) and small private online courses (SPOCs). Social media applications (cf. Fig. 1) – including collaborative projects, microblogs/blogs, content communities, social networking sites, and virtual worlds – have become part of the standard communication repertoire for most corporations and organizations.

Social Media, Definition, and History, Fig. 1
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Classification of social media (for more details, see Kaplan and Haenlein (2010), p. 62)

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Many would probably identify the advent of Facebook, Twitter (Kaplan and Haenlein 2011), and YouTube as the beginning of social media. But, contrary to this belief, the creation and exchange of user-generated content existed long before. The aim of this short essay is to provide a brief sketch of the key developments in social media history, its roots, and its future evolutions.

First Era, 1980s: Arrival of Social Media

The arrival of social media applications coincides with the Internet’s first use by private individuals. In fact, a big part of the Internet started as nothing more than so-called newsgroups where individuals could view, discuss, and post bulletin boardlike messages to numerous categories. Often these newsgroups were focused on technical issues but they also covered cultural topics such as science fiction or similar. Usenet, established in 1980 by Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis from Duke University, was the most popular discussion system at that time and can be seen as the direct forerunner of the category “Internet forum” which is similar to collaborative projects. These bulletin board systems quickly developed into real discussion groups by allowing individuals to create and exchange user-generated content with each other. Also the first virtual game worlds came up during this era of social media: in 1980, Multi-User Dungeon, the first so-called massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) and precursor of virtual game worlds (Kaplan and Haenlein 2009) such as the World of Warcraft, was introduced by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle from Essex University.

Second Era, 1990s: Fading of Social Media

During the second era of social media, user-generated content heavily lost in importance due to the fact that more and more companies started to make use of the Internet for their purposes. With industry giants such as Amazon or eBay arriving in 1995 and conquering the web with their corporate websites, the social media applications from the first era seemingly faded away. Despite the fact that social media went by unnoticed by the general public, more and more people started to have their own blogs during the second era and used them to publicly account of their personal lives. While the term “weblog” was introduced by Jorn Barger not before the end of 1997, blogs existed already in the beginning of the 1990s. Its short form “blog,” by the way, was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog on his own blog in 1999.

Third Era, 2000s: Rising of Social Media

With the dot-com bubble bursting in 2001, social media came back into the game and started to recapture the virtual sphere. Wikipedia (Kaplan and Haenlein 2014) started on January 15, 2001, with the simple sentence: “Hello world. Humor me. Go there and add a little article. It will take all of five or 10 minutes.” On February 4, 2004, Marc Zuckerberg launched Facebook, originally located at thefacebook.com, changing it to the current web address not before 2005. Founded on February 14, 2005, YouTube’s first video entitled “Me at the zoo” showed cofounder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo and was uploaded on April 23 of the same year. And Twitter, launched on July 15, 2006, started out with its first tweet 4 months earlier on March 21 sent by cofounder Jack Dorsey typing “Just setting up my Twtr.” All of these four social media applications lived an enormous success story and today belong to the top ten websites worldwide.

Fourth Era, 2010s: Mobilizing of Social Media

The fourth era of social media is characterized by the arrival of so-called mobile social media (Kaplan 2012) such as Foursquare, i.e., social media accessed via a mobile device. These new mobile forms have turned computer-based social media, despite their young age, already into traditional social media. Geolocalization and increased time sensitivity are two of the features offered by mobile devices. Both provide mobile social media applications with increased opportunities compared to computer-based ones. For example, with mobile social media, one is aware not only of one’s friends’ plans but also of their current location and might just go and see them. Ambient awareness, defined as “awareness created through regular and constant reception, and/or exchange of information fragments through social media” (Kaplan 2012, p. 132), is an equally important concept within the area of mobile social media. Since this era just started, it is difficult to say more about its potential evolution for the moment. However, some futuristic, but not impossible, scenarios already arise on the horizon, e.g., facial recognition could make it feasible to take somebody’s picture with a cell phone and compare it to social networking sites. A match could give the name and other details about this individual.

This brief sketch of the key developments in social media history showed that these applications started earlier than one would have thought, i.e., in the 1980s. Applications such as Facebook or YouTube can actually be seen as the Internet going “back to the roots” when the power was with the individual users instead of with big companies (Kaplan and Haenlein 2012a). Social media retransformed the Internet to what it was initially intended for – a platform to create and exchange user-generated content.

Future Directions

A potential topic of the future might involve the so-called blockchain technology. What started as a mathematical idea to generate electronic cash without the need for formal institutions (like central banks) and which resulted in the creation of Bitcoin (Nakamoto 2008) can today easily be extended to other forms of information that need to be stored in a secure manner. Such information includes land ownership certificates (especially in countries where no central repository of such information exists), but also possession of precious metals or academic diplomas. The specific way in which blockchains are maintained and modified ensures that information stored in them is essentially free of being manipulated in a fraudulent way. In combination with (mobile) social media, blockchains will allow for new inventions in the digital sphere which we probably cannot even imagine yet.

Cross-References