The wave of social media

Social media has conquered a disturbingly large chunk of our lives in a remarkably short time. And one of the chief accomplices in this little coup has been the smartphone. That shiny rectangle we now carry everywhere, stare at constantly and occasionally use to make telephone calls.

Only four years ago, in January 2007, Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone in one of the most successful product reveals of all time. Among its many tricks was something that seems almost quaint today: a genuinely useful web browser on a phone.

Back then, much of the Internet was still divided into isolated, proprietary communities. These little digital kingdoms were desperately trying to satisfy our apparently bottomless need to communicate with other human beings, preferably without actually meeting them. Meanwhile, the vaguely defined revolution known as Web 2.0 was gathering momentum, bringing blogs, comments, sharing and other social features that suggested the Internet might become something more interesting than grey corporate homepages and silly cat GIFs.

Facebook had already begun spreading internationally by the time the iPhone arrived. It was proprietary too, of course, but considerably more seductive. It gave us a timeline, photographs, status updates and an efficient new way to discover that people we hadn’t spoken to since school were having coffee.

Twitter appeared in 2006, beginning humbly enough as a sketch in Jack Dorsey’s notebook. Within a year it was handling more than 11 000 requests per second. Apparently humanity had been waiting centuries for the opportunity to tell complete strangers what we were having for lunch.

Then smartphones and social media found each other. That was when things became serious. Suddenly the Internet wasn’t something you visited when you sat down at a computer. It followed you into restaurants, bars, trains, airports and eventually the bathroom. Every mildly interesting meal, sunset and drunken observation could now be photographed, documented and broadcast before anyone had the opportunity to reconsider whether the world actually needed to see it.

In February this year, Facebook became the largest online photo host, while newcomers such as Instagram are busily turning ordinary breakfasts into photographic events. Google has now entered the party with Google+, attempting to combine social networking with its enormous influence over search. Twitter has redesigned itself, borrowing a few ideas from Facebook, and is reportedly processing around 300 million tweets every day. Civilization survived thousands of years without knowing what everyone was thinking at every waking moment. We seem determined to correct that oversight.

So what happens next? Nobody really knows, of course. Social networks will come and go. Some will become enormous, others will disappear into the same digital graveyard as GeoCities and countless forgotten forums. The devices will become smaller, faster and harder to put down.

But one thing seems fairly certain. The social-media journey has only just begun. God help us.