In a previous post I tried to debunk the term ’social media’. I’ve claimed -in contrast to the Wikipedia-definition- social media has got nothing to do with technology or the internet.

As Dorien asked for more clarification I will focus on the telegraph as an example of social media.

The Hurrays (& Boo’s) each medium faces

“we are one!” said the nations, and hand met hand, in a thrill electric from land to land. (The Victory, 1872)

The Atlantic Telegraph – that instantaneous highway of thought between the Old and New worlds.  (Scientific American, 1858)

These quotes remind me of the quotes you heard at the beginning of the popularization of the internet or when after an O’Reilly-conference the term web2.0 was coined. Typical terms for that time were “information superhighway” (see above, that instantaneous highway of thought) or the co

ncept of “global village” connecting distant places beyond the borders of space and time.

The ‘code language’

We all know chat language or SMS langauge. It is an abbreviated form of the English

language to speed up the process of communication.

Most known examples are probably LOL for ‘laughing out loud’ or thx for ‘thanks’.

With the telegraph they also used these code language for fast and easy social contact:

I I stands for ‘I am ready’. An operator would use SFD (’Stop For Dinner’) when he would take a break for dinner and one would use GM to wish the fellow-operators a Good Morning.

Human relationships

When the internet started to become mainstream we saw stories poppin up in popular press about

people meeting and eventually getting married via the internet. It was perceived as a miraculuous never-seen-before event that love emerged via your 56k-modem.

In his work “The Victorian Internet” Tom Standage refers to numerous stories of love over the wires. Most of them comes down to operators who in the after-hours started chatting (or playing board games like checkers) via the telegraph and eventually fell in love.
So, the only thing I wanted to tell in this and the previous post is that it’s not the internet or any other medium which is making us social, but it is the people using it (to have fast and easy communication, to find friendshiop and maybe even find love). All the buzz surrounding so-called web social media is not new and has been here before…

Source: The Victorian Internet