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Understanding of Social Media - History &
Importance
Ajay Zharotia
WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA?
Human communication and interactions have gone to just another level, where simple means of communication has lost its vitality. With the advent of the Internet, human interactions have become groomed, and it has surprisingly worked as a medium to provide information, news, entertainment and interactive means to its users. Social media is basically; the outcome of easy accessibility of the internet that has provided the liberty to the people to express their thoughts, ideas, and views freely among their networks, groups, and communities.
As per Wikipedia, Social Media is a medium for social interactions with the help of scalable and accessible communication methods. It's a mix of web-based and mobile technologies which can turn the whole communication into an interactive dialogue.
Social media is a popular term these days and quite in trend. In the recent years, it has become an innate part of our daily routines, and we all are using it for vivid purposes.
As per Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, social media is a type of electronic communication through which users can create various online communities wherein they can share ideas, information, personal messages and other contents easily. Social media platforms consist of multiple means like social network sites, wikis, blogs, video-sharing sites, micro-blogs, podcasts, widgets, instant messaging, virtual worlds and so on.
Some of the quite known and popular social media sites include Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, Tinder, Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube and the list goes on.
Social media is gaining its importance in everyone's life, whether it's personal or professional or even related to a business. These days, it has become the most prominent way to connect and to share your opinions as well as ideas with others and to get updates, news, etc. regarding all the things around the world.
Sarah Hofstetter once said about social media, that it reflects the communication happening on a daily basis, at any place. It just enhances the conversation and allows it to reach a greater audience.
As compared to the mass media, social media has gained immense popularity and have reached a mass audience more convincingly. People can say that social media is addictive because it has to offer us what the real world lacks. It provides us direction, immediacy and value as an individual.
Let's see the various perspective of scholars and thinkers on Social Media.
As per Boyd (2014), Social media means the services or the sites which came into existence during the early 2000s. It includes video sharing sites, social networking sites, microblogging and bloggingplatforms and several other associated tools which help in creating as well as sharing our own content. It also let people interact with each other via online communities.
As per Sam Decker-Mass Relevance, social media refers to the digital content and interaction created by the people to use by them. Matt Goulart said that social media is all about people, it's not about your business. You need to provide value to your users, and in return, you will get value for your work.
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between a various group of people online. It is a platform or tool which allows the people to interact with each other more efficiently. In the same way, social networking is the act of connecting on social media platforms. Social media marketing can be explained as the way by which the businesses join the conversation authentically and with more transparency to build strong relationships.
Howard Greenstein stated that social media is basically the online practices and technologies used by the users to share their content, insights, perspectives, experiences, opinions, and media amongst themselves. It's a medium for social interaction and a fun way to connect with your friends as well.
David Alston defined social media as not just a media, but a key to engage, listen and build strong relationships. Erik Qualman says that social media has made the whole web about Me, Me and Me. That means the users have the power to influence others. Whatever they do or post online, somewhere affects the reader. So, the question is not to avoid using social media but learn to use it efficiently. He further said that social media has the power to bring the social change in the society. It has the power which can force the change necessary for our community.
Dave Willis suggested that one should not use social media to impress others, but one should use it to create some impact. Deborah Weinstein considers social media as the new wild. The wildest thing for the marketers. Every organization is trying to enhance its social presence, create a better brand identify, attract more people, build communities in the virtual space. One gets to use a lot of opportunities in the form of various social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Using these, one can also showcase their newest technology, invention or the type of services he/she is offering. Social media gives you a way to influence people by having a person-to-person communication. It is quite useful in spreading awareness, changing behavior and acceptance. With the help of proper and powerful tactics of communication, one can use social networks for brand-building, protection strategy as well as for providing better maintenance.
HISTORY OF SOCIAL MEDIA
Social Media has three pillars: Evolution, Revolution, and Contribution.
It is undoubtedly an evolution in the field of communication, which has even replaced the older way of communication, i.e., emails in a lot of cases.
No doubt its revolution, because for the very first time, all of us has access to free global, instantaneous communication. We can get to know about anything from anywhere in this world.
Social media has provided a way, or you can say have given the ability to all the users to share and contribute as a publisher.
Now let's segregate the history of social media into three broad categories: 1. Social Media Before the Internet
2. The Rise of Internet and Evolution of Social Media 3. Revolution of Social Media
Social Media Before the Internet
Telegraph, Telephone, Radio (1800’s -- early 90’s)
Much before the rise of the Internet, some of the mass media played a significant role in the execution of social interactions. However, these mediums carried forward the one-on-one communication and were radically conventional means, but they were the best possible routes for creating a passage of communication. In the year 1792, the telegraph was invented, and this turned out to be a remarkable way to convey the information or messages. With this invention, people could send their message to relatives, friends, and close ones. People felt connected in a better way. Above all, the usage of telegraph helped immensely in establishing world harmony by reducing national-rivalries.
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Telephone made a doorway into the lives of the people as an all-purpose tool of communication. Daljinder Kang said that telephone had increased the range of people for conversation. With it, contacting a long distance person is even possible. It helps in keeping the loved ones close and relationships alive.
Soon the technology evolved from telegraphy to voice transmission and channels started using it for broadcasting entertainment as well as news related content. Hence, the radio came into existence. Just like newspapers, radio was another medium for transmitting, wherein one can share content to a mass audience. Soon the radio stations realized that people want two-way communication, so they came up with airwaves in the early rock n roll era. At that time, around 40 stations served as the first social networks.
Radio paved the way for social consciousness among the individuals of the different societies and countries. People knew that if not in person they were connected to each other through radio. Radio up surged as a medium of entertainment, information, and integrity among the people.
The Phreaking Phase (1950’s – early 90’s)
A group of hackers during the late 1960s and early 1970s, known as "phone phreaks" were more interested in exploring the global telephone network. Most of their work revolved around making long distance calls free, but they also find out various ways of creating a conference call, wherein multiple people can talk simultaneously. It was just like the chat rooms but on the telephone line. Those people were not frauds, but technophiles who were trapped in a telecom monopoly, way before Skype or any other thing was invented.
THE RISE OF INTERNET AND EVOLUTION OF SOCIAL MEDIA
CompuServe (1969)
CompuServe was founded in the year 1969 as a computer time-sharing service in Columbus, Ohio, United States. This may be considered as the origin point of social media which has given a great experience to the people by providing instantaneous communication. It was the first online service to serve Internet connectivity.
Albeit the technology and connectivity in the early phase werelimited, still it offered the possibility of true interactions among the people. It allowed its member to share files and access information as well as news. Individuals could send and receive text messages, in the form of emails.
CompuServe provided the discussion forums with a broad spectrum of interests such as show business, current events, entertainment, sports, aviation, politics, etc., where individuals could babble with thousands of other members of the forum on any relevant and important topic of the day. These forums received overwhelming responses from the people worldwide, which made them very popular eventually.
Email (1971)
Email or Electronic mail, is a way of exchanging digital messages between people with the help of digital devices like mobile phones or laptops, desktops, etc. People started using email in the late 1960s, and by the mid-1970s it had taken them with a storm. In some of the early email systems, it was mandatory for the author and the recipient to be online at the same time, just like in instant messaging but it's not required anymore.
Email took us to the Internet from ARPANET. This was approachable for the ordinary people all over the world. It proved to be quite useful at those places where the cost of telephone calls are highly expensive. Till then email was the most widely used application. By 1974, there were hundreds of users of email just because ARPANET encouraged its usage. Email became the savior of ARPANET and also cause a radical shift in its purpose.
a. BBS’s & AOL: Bulletin Board System and America Online (1978)
Bulletin Board System, in short BBC, is mainly a computer system running the software and allowing the users to connect and login to the system using a terminal program. After login, the user can perform various functions like downloading, uploading data or softwares, read the news or even exchange messages with each other. It can be done via email or public message boards.
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the most well-known brand on the internet in the US. AOL developed as a provider of the web portal, dial-up service, instant messaging and email to millions of Americans.
b. Usenet (1979)
The idea of Usenet was contrived by two graduate students from a Duke University, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, namely, in the year 1979. It was created from the UUCP, general-purpose, dial-up network architecture. This system mirrored a BBS in vivid ways but one considerable dissimilarity existed in it which is the absence of a central server and committed administrator. Now, Usenet is a worldwide-distributed discussion system.
c. Listservs (1984)
LISTSERV happens to be the first electronic mailing list software application that allowed the sender to send one email to a group of people. L-Soft International, Inc. is the registered trademark used by LISTSERV which is used to refer to the electronic mailing list software applications in general and to refer to such software, which allows a sender to send one email to the list, and then clearly sends it to the addresses of the subscribers on the list. Fundamentally, Ira Fuchs, Daniel Oberst, and Ricky Hernadez developed the original Listserv software in 1984 known as the Bitnic Listserv (1984-1986).
d. IRC: Internet Relay Chat (1988)
Internet Relay Chat is a form of chatting, mainly constructed for group chats in discussion forums. IRC allowed one-to-one communication via private messages simultaneously with data transfers including the file sharing. Formally, IRC is an application layer protocol that assists communication in the form of text. The course of chat is based on a client/server network module, and the servers are the computer programs, which the users can install on their system. As per the records until the May 2009, the top 100 IRC systems recorded to have served more than half a million users with having hundreds of thousands of channels.
a. www: World Wide Web (1991)
In a layman‟s words, World Wide Web is a subdivision of the Internet; the network of the networks is the Internet where all the information is located. WWW and the Internet are not synonyms, but each of them has their own functions. WWW is an information space where their unique URLs recognize web resources and other documents, intertwined by hypertext links and accessible through the Internet.
b. Personal Websites, Chat, Discussion Groups (1993)
The advent of Internet and WWW embarked the revolution of social media. The early Internet service providers catered free small personal, user-created, and owned WebPages along with free Usenet News services. Many other web-hosting services like GeoCities yielded free web space for using as individual web pages. The main aim of these free web-hosting services is to carry out the web-based site management scripts along with few precise pre-configured scripts so that it can incorporate an input or guestbook script into the user‟s webpage.
Later the progress of Internet Relay Chat many personal websites, chat groups and discussion groups were flowered. This provided a whole lot of independence to the Internet users they were elated and literally opinionated. By the late 90‟s people began to prefer Internet forums as the leading platform for contemporary discussions. Personal websites or personal web pages are fundamentally the WWW pages generated by an individual to embody the contents of a personal nature.
REVOLUTION OF SOCIAL MEDIA
By the mid of 80‟s to 90‟s Internet almost became a necessity for the people and why not, after all, it had made social communication a multifaceted phenomenon. It provided the leisure to the people of connecting with others‟ in a much better way. Society was becoming more active and involved than before. With new advancements in the tools of social communication, connections among people were improving, and the social profiles of the individuals were enhancing.
20 a. IRC & ICQ & Instant Messenger (1988 -1996)
Internet Relay Chat is supposed to be the origin of Instant Messaging with the introduction of IRC people were enticed to participate in chats, discussions, and online grapevine. That naturally gave the impetus to create easier, interesting, immediate, and more captivating measures of social communication. Instant Messaging or in short IM, is a real-time communication service between desktop computers.
The Instant Messaging System is also known as ICQ that was formulated by the four Israeli technologists for the desktop computers in the year 1996. Very soon after its creation, AOL bought it out, and IM technology came out with a new feature of Emote-Icons which were representative images/small icons used to represent one‟s emotions and ideas in computer chatting. These emote-icons very soon became a popular computer dialect that many people used liberally.
b. Blogs (1994-1999)
In 1994 Justin Hall-- a student of Swarthmore College, created the first blog known as Links.net. The term „blog‟ was not a familiar one at that time thus Justin referred to it as his personal homepage. In 1997, Jorn Barger conceived the term „weblog‟ as he inclined to reflect the process of logging the web. Programmer Peter Merholz curtailed the term „weblog‟ to „blog‟ in 1999.
At the start, blogs were static websites, but over the years, these websites evolved with many new features to make them more of requiting and friendly. Nonetheless, to make the blog system easily accessible for the non-technical people also was a fundamental challenge. Today blogs have become a robust social media. An enormous number of people have availed the blogging web services to voice their thoughts and views in front of others.
c. Social Bookmarking (1996-2003)
Wikipedia defines social bookmarking as a method for all the internet users through which they can manage, store, organize and search for bookmarks for various resources online. Its different from sharing, in this, the users don't share the resource, but bookmark it for future reference.
Social bookmarking initiated with a site called itList in April 1996. In the preceding three years, many other online bookmarking web services reached out in a competition such as Backflip, Clip2, HotLinks, Blink, ClickMarks, and others. Delicious who explored the concept of „tagging‟ and then contrived the term „social bookmarking‟ founded social bookmarking in 2003. Social bookmarking is quite imperative for those folks who want to access a set of bookmarks from different computers, to organize a huge number of bookmarks and even to share the bookmarks with contacts.
d. Social Network Sites (1997-2008)
Social network sites or SNSs‟ have flourished as the most influential mediums of social media, which have genuinely assisted in bringing the people close to each other. Social network sites are the online platform where people join to build up their social networks or social alliances with other people who share homogenous interests, career aspirations, personal kinships, activities, and similar environment or real-life ties. SNS such as Classmates.com was created with the idea of a creating virtual reunion among the old school friends.
Then in 1997, another site SixDegrees.com came into existence. Now, this site came up with the proficiency of allowing the users to create their profiles, organize groups, and above all invite friends and to browse other users‟ profiles.
The starting of all social network sites are not like that. For instance, QQ was earlier used as a Chinese instant messaging service, Skyrock as a French Blogging service, LunarStormstarted as a community site, and Cyworldwas a renowned Korean discussion forum tool, before they added the SNS features. At that time, MiGente, AsianAvenue, and BlackPlanet were the most popular ethnic community sites but with limited functionality and friends before they re-launch it in 2005-2006 after adding the SNS structure and features.
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That same year MySpace was launched which introduced the people to the fun side of social media. It allured the young generation with music videos, music, and other entertaining stuff.
Later in 2004, Facebook was launched, which was just meant for the Harvard campus for around 2 years. But in 2006, it was made accessible for all of us. One can easily create his/her profile and invite as well send direct messages to other users using Facebook. Users can also join various communities and promote their ideas, interest, etc., using it.
In the current scenario, Facebook is one of the leading social media sites with more than 1.3 billion active users. It has influenced a lot of people in various ways. During all these things, Orkut was another social media site which gained its popularity and reached up to 100 million users; it was highly prevalent in India and Brazil.
With the rise of Twitter and Facebook, Orkut vanished in the thin air, and now no user has signed it since 2014.
e. Peer-to-Peer file sharing: P2P, Bit Torrent – Social Media Sharing (1999)
With the help of email services, chat and discussion forums internet users also began to share links, files; photographs, etc. People could easily upload or download files to and from the internet sites. Eventually, a file sharing (popularly known as P2P or Peer-to-Peer file sharing) application was formulated by Napster that had gone live in June 1999. The only limitation was that only music files could be shared through P2P. With the emergence of this P2P application users could download music files in an MP3 format easily and quickly that; could immediately be burnt onto a CD.
After Napster discontinued, many other competitive P2P services had breezed in such as Limewire, Gnutella, and Kazaa until Bit Torrent technology, (a P2P file sharing protocol) emerged. This application provided a legal and centralized medium to share files and that too without being interrupted. Today Bit Torrent is the most discernible software for downloading any data from the internet.
f. Real Time and Location-based Social Networking (2008 onwards)
Jack Dorsey created Twitter a micro-blogging site in March 2006 with the proposal to provide a web space where they can send and read text-based posts. These posts consist of 140 characters called 'tweets' in real-time, which earned a worldwide following with over 300 million users as of 2011. It was interpreted as the 'SMS' of the Internet. The new smartphones technology allowed their users to log in to popular social network sites like Twitter, Facebook and location-based site BrightKite where they could update their status in real-time from anywhere (location). This was in a way a kind of 'check-in' provision provided to the users. However, BriteKite is no longer in function. Foursquare and Gowalla are other sites which provide location-based networking to the users.
WHY DO WE NEED SOCIAL MEDIA?
Technology advancements have bestowed an almost 24/7 degree of access to people to get information about anything. Social media has a significant role to play in this acquisition of knowledge, as it has become a massive enhancer of information and awareness. We may know social media as large libraries available on the web every time.
Undoubtedly it has grabbed hold of everything related to our lives, behavior, interests, connections, moreover the interactions. It has even influenced the way we think and act, besides, it has drastically changed and impacted the methods of business communication and the strategies of companies. Smartphones technology has a lot to do with this, in fact, the impact of social media interlaced with smartphones technology has made a deep impression. Mark Zuckerberg, Founder of Facebook once said that in terms of engagement they could see that mobile users are more active on a daily basis as compared to desktop users. They are using Facebook for 6 or 7 days a week.
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shown on the TV was deemed approved and trustworthy content because the government regulated television and broadcasting services.
Consumers‟ expectation has grown manifolds. Today consumers are seeking more or products in terms of continuous service & support, innovation and product development. They are a lot more aware of their choices and seek complete information about the product they want to purchase. So, it is not about attaining the attention of the customer but to engage him with the brand to create a complete, satisfying consumer experience. Today, it is not about just selling the product anymore but also about after sale customer engagement.
Scott Cook, Co-Founder of Intuit said that a brand is not what we tell the consumer, but it is what the consumer tell each other.
Today social media is one of the most influential tools of brand marketing profoundly used to build up a brand. With rapid technology-advancement social media has gained a whole lot of significance that eventually has impacted brand marketing, communication, consumers‟ behavior and brand expectations. Majority of the businesses today, make use of social media to leverage and enhance their relationships with their consumers moreover, realizing the utility of social media to actuate innovation in their brands, products, and services. We are living into the age where consumers have become the active participants in the brand marketing process with every Like, tweet, comment or opinion on social media platforms; consumers happen to engage more and more into the products and services.
CONCLUSION
Ever since social media has emerged many thinkers, scholars and famous personalities have believed that social media is all about the people and social connectivity. More than the reflection of technology development, it reflects the social and emotional enhancement of people. It is believed that because of the interactive nature of social media people tend to get attracted to it.
One more, fundamental reason to assure the longevity of social media is, to have convenient access to technology. Smartphones, tablets, computers, mobile devices have made the access to social media so much easier and instantaneous, it‟s like, and the people are just a click or touch away. This is not a casual circumstance instead it has given a big boost to interpersonal communication on an all-inclusive level. Geographic boundaries are no more a hurdle because of social media virtually everyone is connected in real time.
Specifically, in the Indian context, social media has a vast scope of survival and growth. Here social has already become extremely popular and familiar; people are making its use in the field of marketing, branding, social interactions, research, campaigning, awareness, and even for political purposes too. It has enabled the commercial world to reach across the globe, and no business can afford to ignore it. Even at the social level, people are reaching out and apparently; they would not want to go back to the world of hindered connections. What is required is to utilize the credibility of social media wisely.
Social media too has undergone many changes its reach and relevance all have changed now it is not just limited to the social aspect but, also impacting the economic, political and psychological aspects of our lives. Earlier communication shaped social media—now social media is developing our connections.
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