My Brief History of Social Media

Remember Web 2.0?

In 1991, when Tim Berners-Lee intertwined the concept of hypertext with the vast realm of the Internet, the World Wide Web was born, thereby igniting a revolution in networked communication.

I was an early beneficiary of this Web 1.0. I took full advantage of the budding Internet to learn from others, discovering people who had similar interests through things like web rings. Search was limited and lousy, so we the people used to simply link to other pages we found interesting or useful. That’s how a lot of discovery happened in early Web 1.0.

E-commerce was new, but as platforms like eBay and PayPal began processing payments and handling transactions, consumer trust started to grow. This allowed me to begin selling items online. I learned HTML code, the lingua franca of the early Internet, and built my own websites. I started blogging and writing regularly.

Gradually, as the tides of technology surged forward, the channels for networked communication transformed int…