It’s so easy to forget now but there was a time, a very short while ago, when social media didn’t exist. I know, I know. For our younger readers, that might sound too crazy to be true. But it is. Those of us who are a little older remember a time before we had phones in our pockets and we could check to see what everyone else was doing. It wasn’t that long ago, either. The utility of social media has changed our lives in every conceivable way and it’s not hard to see why everyone loves the convenience. It’s easier than ever to stay in touch with everyone around you, to see how they’re feeling and what they’re doing, to really become friends with people that you never would have before. To see people that you would have never seen and to be exposed to all new things that we would never have been exposed to before. These things are well and good but there was a time before all of this connection, when meeting people was a lot harder and when the systems that now connect us were a lot cruder. If we look at what social media is now, we can get a sense for what the original designers intended as sort of echo of their past blueprint. For example, there is a huge emphasis on open and free sharing of information nowadays, a concept that was very core to the original early adopters of social media. Most social media nowadays is based around a few key concepts, all of which are pretty and fairly visible if you look. There’s openness, for one, a vast and undifferentiated openness that permeates everything. This feeling of openness is put there by the social media management agency, whichever one runs whichever platform, as a means of gathering more followers and making the experience as pleasant as possible. If you look at the website design or the general web design of these sites, you can see the careful thought and consideration that went into them. The social media management agency that runs the site wanted the people to feel as welcome as possible when people visit and they will go to great lengths to design the site around that idea. That openness is not only a good humanitarian thing to add but also helps support their brand and marketing as well. But where did this idea of openness and connectivity come from? Who thought of it and where did it start?
Where It All Started
At the beginning of the social internet, there wasn’t a social media management agency to be seen. There weren’t any institutions of the sort because the internet used to be quite a wild place back in the day, mostly a decentralized network of computers and sites all catering to very specific niche audiences. It was a harder place to reach back in the day, with dial up being your only option, really. The modern world has already lost the concept of actually going on the internet as we’re all always on the internet now. In a lot of ways. But back then it wasn’t nearly so easy. For example, there were many early websites that catered to fans of specific shows and movies. Of course, there are movie and fan sites today but, back then, they weren’t nearly as easy to find. It was easier if you knew someone or had access to a directory of sites that you knew you wanted to go to. The web was a much harder place to navigate back then, with many sites being super obscure or just downright impossible to find. This sounds complicated but remember there were no search engines back in the early and mid nineties. They just didn’t exist. Whatever you wanted to find, you had to look for it manually, no social media management agency or big company to help you out. This went double for people who were looking to start their own sites and wanted to get promoted. Eventually these connectivity sites reached a place where they could begin to advertise to the population but it took a long time for the internet to evolve.
