There’s been a lot of discussion about federal Labor’s plan to ban social media networks for people under the age of 16 years. This is actually been boiling for a little while now, but is getting full media attention now that the US election has finished.
It got me thinking though, what is a social media network? A website? A mobile phone application? Depending on your definition, you might be shocked to learn that the concept of a social media network has existed long before the existence of both these things.
Tom Standage published a book back in 1998 (yes, last century), “The Victorian Internet“, which discussed the development of telecommunications, from the early days of visual semaphores and banging pots and pans… through to the wired telegraph, and the parallels with the Internet we have today.
Of course this book being the late 90s, a time when the state-of-the-art feature was a mobile phone that had user-programmable ringtones and maybe could play Snake, the idea of this global network being accessible from a pocketable device seemed far fetched. This was just a year before the technology dead end called WAP.
If you consider a social network as being a place where people can exchange messages and ideas… then one might consider the “personal columns” of the local newspaper to be a very early form of social media network. It was a place where members of the public could write in, and have published (at the editors’ discretion) their letter for the readership to see. Sometimes the letters were public in nature, sometimes they were coded: providing a puzzle to challenge armchair cryptographers.
When telegraph networks started springing up, the need for telegraph operators grew, especially as these networks transitioned from being military networks to being a short message service for the general public. The operators themselves would go on to develop their own culture, parts of which survive today in the amateur radio world.
The invention of the telephone did eventually force the closure of the telegraph network, but it too, in its own way hailed the development of a social media network that over the course of the 20th century, would become a taken-for-granted fixture in most urban homes.
Many amateur radio enthusiasts are curious about electronics in general, and thus a good number of them became interested in the developing world that was the home computer. As the cost of components came down and parts became more integrated, both radio amateurs, and non-radio electronics enthusiasts alike would experiment with home computers.
Some amateur operators in the late 80s took old dial-up modems and modified them to connect to their radios, developing a protocol and standard we call “packet radio”. Others, would leave the modems as they were, write a program to answer the telephone and create a basic message board: the bulletin board system. People who were versed with both got the idea to make BBSes that faced both ways (packet radio and dial-up).
Some had access into an early cold-war era computer network system called ARPAnet (we now call this the Internet), and it too, had social network services of its own (e.g. Usenet), they would develop gateways that allowed their BBS users to interact on Usenet newsgroups. BBS software suites would also eventually develop peer-to-peer federation protocols like FIDOnet, enabling users of one BBS system to exchange messages with users of other BBSes.
The “normal” folk of the day often looked on such developments with disdain. Deriding the users as just boring “nerds”, the pioneers of this online social networking scene were often ostracised. These were people that often were socially awkward in real life. Today we might use the term “neurodivergent” to describe some of them. This online network provided an alternate reality, where your place in the world was judged on merit, what you knew … rather than physical attributes. A place where people could be themselves, and not get bullied about it.
The people that developed these systems though, would later go on to develop online communities for themselves on what was then a relatively new Internet-based service, the world wide web. MySpace, LiveJournal, Facebook, Twitter, the ActivityPub platforms (including Mastodon) and BlueSky… are all just further developments of the same ideas. Social networks thus, have a very long history.
Thus I come back to, what is a social network? Many of the things you can do on a site like Facebook or Twitter, can similarly be done lots of other ways, equally as effectively. MMS might be one of the last vestiges of the old WAP protocol, but it still lives on in modern mobile phones, and can send both text, pictures and video just as easily as posting to a web-based social media system like Facebook. In short, it is a social media network.
If the federal government wants to ban under 16s from using “social media”, they might as well create a time machine and zap our teens back to the 1700s, as it appears the only communication technology they’ll be able to legally use will all be inventions that were commonplace in that era.
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