Ot's like the opening of the canal system —
a wonderful method of transport,
you can get stuff made in Birmingha
and get it to the sea. Then, before you know it,
it's full of rusting Tesco trolleys and turds.
—Stephen Fry in The New Yorker 24xi25
Social media Wikipedia
Social media and the internet APA
History of Social Media Lyndon Seitz at broadbandsearch.nt
The Evolution of Social Media: How Did It Begin, and Where Could It Go Next? Maryville University (2020)
Twenty-Five Years of Social Media: A Review of Social Media Applications and Definitions from 1994 to 2019 Thomas Aichner et al. Cyberpsychol Behav Soc Netw. (2021)
Britannica:
...The earliest forms of social media appeared almost as soon as technology could support them. E-mail and chat programs debuted in the early 1970s, but persistent communities did not surface until the creation of the discussion group network USENET in 1979. USENET allowed users to post and receive messages within subject areas called newsgroups. USENET and other discussion forums, such as privately hosted bulletin board systems (BBSs), enabled individuals to interact, but each was essentially a closed system. With the release in 1993 of the Mosaic web browser, those systems were joined with an easy-to-use graphical interface. The architecture of the World Wide Web made it possible to navigate from one site to another with a click, and faster Internet connections allowed for more multimedia content than could be found in the text-heavy newsgroups.