Social Media A brief history


While the formative years of the internet describe a network ostensibly established to serve strictly utilitarian needs, primarily the sharing of research data among a handful of US universities, a parallel function developed alongside this, almost by accident, empowering researchers to socialize with one another on primitive bulletin board systems. This form of digital socialization became the root of what was later to develop into a fully blown sub- culture of boards, forums, imageboards and so on.


As the infrastructure of the internet became capable of dealing with more intensive forms of server-side processes, and consumer desktops on the client-side became more powerful throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, a concept called “web 2.0” emerged – a more dynamic web empowered by new technologies and client hardware which gave end users the ability for users to engage with things like high resolution imagery, video streaming and more.1


This was an internet that increasingly became defined by consumers and users who wanted more elaborate forms of digital socialization. Facebook replaced Myspace as the dominant social media site, which was followed by the emergence of shortform social media platforms like Twitter.


This growth has been stimulated tremendously by the concurrent paradigm shiſt in consumer hardware from desktop to mobile devices such as


smartphones and tablets.


The result of this intensive development of social media platforms has been to create a situation where the traditional channels of communication (for example: press wires) are increasingly made redundant by the sheer speed of a world in which virtually everyone has a camera equipped smartphone and internet access.


So what impact does this all have on crisis communications? As one very obvious result, virtually any semi-official organization (say, a government department) or business with a public facing brand, even in the SME-space, now has its own “social media manager” (or even “social media team”) who ostensible role is to manage the company’s brand in an online environment, reacting to customer criticism, concerns and queries as well as broadcasting marketing initiatives and general news about things like product line-ups. Similarly for the public sector, press officers and social media managers now play key role in shaping the brand.


As we shall see however, organizations benefit best from a “joined up approach” where in-organization platforms are used efficiently alongside public facing social-media. The former helps to maintain a coherent narrative within an organization while the latter ensures this consistent message reaches the general public quickly.


ARPANET, the precursor to the internet, was linked to over 20 US universities by the late 1970s


1 How the Internet Changed History, Carol Hand, 2015.


Page 3 | Emergency Communication Systems in the Mobile Age


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