Is Social Media Just History Repeating Itself?

Some people believe that social media is killing personal relationships, corrupting society, and eliminating privacy. Many wish that we could go back to the good old days when life was simpler and slower.

So let’s roll the clock back to the good old days and take a look at the uncanny similarities between the telephone and social media.

85 years ago, adults were asking, “Does the telephone make men more active or more lazy?” and “Does the telephone break up home life and the old practice of visiting friends?”

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? History has a tendency of repeating itself.

The telephone was described as a fad and time waster.  So goes social media. There was fear that the telephone would erode privacy, fuel the rumor mills, distract employees and family from daily chores, and result in idle chit-chat.  So goes social media. Business people complained that the telephone would allow false rumors to travel faster and result in disruptive, bothersome requests.  So goes social media.

Before the telephone was invented people communicated in many ways, according to Paul Humphrey, author of What Was it Like Before the Telephone. “They sent letters. … It took forever to deliver one letter. Some used drums to beat out a message. Some used fire to communicate – they sent smoke signals. … They sent messages from one hilltop to another by raising or lowering a semaphore tower’s arms. If it was foggy, no one could see the message. People would put a message into a little container on a carrier pigeon’s leg. The bird would fly to the person receiving the message. People would write messages will quill pens and send them by a postal system. Some went by stagecoach. Pony Express riders galloped thousands of miles from one side of the United States to the other (to deliver mail). Lanterns were used to flash out a message in a code called Morse code. Morse code was also sent by wires through the telegraph. You had to be able to read the code to use it.”

When the telephone first began to be deployed (1890’s through the turn of the century), telephone companies faced a tough sell. They first had to explain to Americans what need the telephone might fulfill. They had to find uses for it. Today many people wonder what’s up with Twitter. But the media, government agencies, police and fire despartments, non-profits, and business are finding new applications.

The Nielsen Company recently described the Internet as a new type of phone system. Like folks on the old phone party line phone networks, social media users risk their privacy by willingly sharing a channel and personal information with other people. While the telephone party lines were usually shared by four or eight people, social media may be shared by hundreds or thousands. But party line users were never sure who, or if anyone, was sharing the phone, social media participants can choose the people with whom they share information. The phone party lines proved decades ago that people were willing to risk considerable privacy to use a new communications tool.

The triviality of tweets and Facebook is possibly the biggest objection I hear about the value of social media.  Our ancestors complained, “thanks to the telephone . . . and such-like inventions, our neighbors have it in their power to turn our leisure into a series of interruptions, and the more leisure they have the more active do they become in destroying ours.”

Disruptive innovation is nothing new. Every generation experiences a change that is resisted by the generation or two that preceded it. As easily as our great-great grandparents spoke about the ill effects of the telephone, their descendants are decrying the disruption and distractions caused by social media.

Some view the change as progress. Others consider it the destruction of tradition. But history will repeat itself. Before long we won’t be talking about “what to do with” social media, but like the telephone, email, and even electricity, we will very shortly just use it without thinking about it.

Comments

[Payroll Software]

Good comparison of social media and the telephone. Like you said all innovations will be resisted by preceding generations. However we cannot do anything about it. We will have to use it anyway.

[Phone System]

Nice. I like the idea of the internet as a new type of phone system.