Interactions of Social Media and the Effects on Society.

Interactions of social media and the effects on society.

When people talk about social media, the first thing they think about is Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. When in actuality social media actually started in the 70’s and it was “called the BBS, or the “bulletin board system”. (Where they started) The problem with them was that not a lot of people were able to use them due the expensive nature of having them and the sheer size of them.

Next was the 80’s. During this time frame “social media was very much an underground phenomenon. There were some legitimate BBSes, but the large majority of them were somehow connected to adult content, pirate software, hacking theories, anarchist movements and virus codes. Because of the nature of much of the online interaction, real names and identities were strictly guarded and the web was not a place for personal information sharing.” (Where they started) In the 90’s the social media actually became more appealing to the public. This is where there was the integration of Napstar, and AOL which helped the public get a feel for the world wide web and became more user friendly. This led to the next stage of social media platforms such as Friendster, Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.

Mark Zuckerberg is accredited with starting Facebook. In 2004, while at Harvard University he created “thefacebook.com.” (Where Did Facebook) In the movie, “The Social Network”, it shows how Mark Zuckerberg created the social networking site that would become known as Facebook. During the movie it shows how the two brothers who went to school and worked on Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg, later sued him where they claimed he “stole their idea, and the cofounder who was later squeezed out of the business.” (Social Network) What started out as a simple Harvard onsite website to meet people, expanded and grew in popularity and expanded to other schools along the east coast. Through lengthy litigations that never truly amounted to anything, Mark Zuckerberg simply renamed it Facebook and thus the beginning of Facebook, the biggest social media outlet that reaches all ages at “1 Billion users in a months’ time frame”. (What’s the average)

Twitter is a complicated story in itself. There are actually two different versions of how it got started. Actually “the official version leaves out the role of a major co-founder. Some early Twitter investors also wonder if it also leaves out a scandal.” (The real history of twitter) Twitter was actually called “Odeo” in the beginning and was created by Noah Williams in 2004. A group of four, Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and Jack Dorsey originally created it from their apartment. “One day in February 2006, Glass, Dorsey, and a German contract developer Florian Weber, presented Jack's idea to the rest of the company.  It was a system where you could send a text to one number and it would be broadcasted out to all of your friends: Twttr.” (The real history of twitter) Eventually Noah Glass came up with Twitter. Five years after it’s beginning the company was Evan Williams bought the company. “Assets of the company the original Odeo investors sold for approximately $5 million are now worth at least 1,000 percent more: $5 billion.” (The real history of twitter) “Twitter reaches nearly 230 million users in a quarter.” (Blodget) While some think that Evan’s gesture was gracious given the fact that some feel that the company may have went belly-up, others believe that Evans knew how much the company would be worth and was trying to get ahead of the curve.