You never heard too much about social networking in the 80s because it had not truly hit the mainstream, this is of course talking about the people who had access to the internet. It was a very underground thing at the time where only a few legitimate BBSs existed, but most of them had private software rooms in the back for hackers to get a hold of. “Many were strictly underground – dedicated exclusively to niches like warez (pirated software), H/P (explicit hacking and phreaking information discussion), Anarchy (articles on fraud, bomb making, drug chemistry), and Virus code for download” (Borders). Now though these things seemed quite illegal at the time and somewhat evil to only broadcast such things across the web it did have its ups by providing more frameworks for what was to come later on in the history of web design. Since these were people very fluent in “computer talk”, they were able to accomplish a great number of new software applications to better help their goals.
The 90s
Though the internet had existed since the late 1960s, it only had done so as a network, but the World Wide Web available to the public on August 6th, 1991. At the start of 1990s, internet was only available to main computer users at the time such as the military and schools that had connections with the government. But in 1994 and 1995, businesses started popping up called ISPs or Internet Service Providers. This gave millions of home users the chance to enjoy unfiltered, unlimited online experiences. “Usenet was the first center for most of the high-end discussion – but early internet users were extremely outspoken and opinionated by today’s standards. The first online social media etiquette standards were proposed, and called netiquette, as a reactionary to stop the rampant flaming and keep things somewhat civilized” (Borders).
Media Sharing
Media sharing started to hit the mainstream like everything else at the time had begun doing. In June of 1999, a program called Napster had gone live. This program allowed internet users to fileshare all of their information across the internet.
This process marked the beginning of all the music downloading that we see today. This trend raged on through 1999 and 2000 where music was freely flowing all over the internet until it was declared “illegal” and Napster was forced to eliminate all copyrighted content from their application (Borders). Though Napster was ripped away from most of its data, competing applications, such as LimeWire, filled that spot in no time. Yet something else took over, not another program, but a new sense of technology that allows users to share information without being blocked called BitTorrent technology. Since then, a Swedish website called The Pirate Bay arrived and became the main “social” media distribution.
During this time frame, we can see that a lot of information became known to the public and everyone began having computers used a hell of a lot more frequently. The Social Networking aspect did not start becoming hugely popular until around 1997 where a website called SixDegrees allowed people to make profiles, connect with others, and use the same bulletin system as before but now all together. This gained huge amounts of momentum when the same application concept came out on different websites; Friendster in 2002, Myspace in 2004, and now Facebook in 2007.
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