The Connectivity Age

With the Technology Age boom, a new age arrived; the Connectivity Age. Within this new age, our society revolves around social media and has for the past forty years, and it started with phones.

In the Beginning…

The release of the pager in 1950 allowed people to receive brief messages and some sent messages back. As phones got larger and more advanced, sending texts were easier, making the pager used less by the public, yet still used by hospitals, public safety, and retail.

For years, phones were the basic form of communication. Almost every home had phones and almost every corner had phone booths and some in businesses. In 1980, home computers became common, and thus e-mailing started a new way of casual communication which was common during the 1990’s with Hotmail as one of the general e-mail services. A lot has changed since the sending of the first e-mail in 1971.

In 1991, American Online or AOL made it’s way into the world, and in 1997 AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) revolutionized the Connectivity Age as a chat program, allowing people to talk back-and-forth as though they were in the same room. No more waiting for e-mails to send and come back. As AOL was thriving, a new idea was in the wind; Blogging.

In 1999, the first recognized online social network was created in Great Britain; Friends Reunited, designed to reunite old school friends. When AOL reached 34 million members in 2002, a social networking website opened in the U.S., Friendster, and hit three million users in only three months. Around this time, smart phones came out, allowing people to do more than just call. They could now text easier and use day planners.

Friendster started a social media wave. First, Myspace made it’s debut and, after agreeing to remain a free service, gained huge popularity from teens and young adults. In 2004, some Harvard College students created a social networking website for Harvard students, called Facebook, however later opened to other colleges. Today, Facebook is public for all over thirteen to use. With the arrival of Twitter in 2006 and Google+ in 2011, the battle of the great social media giants began.

Nowadays

With these new social media outlets, other sites slowly emerged over time and older ones were gaining popularity. Most of them were specific to interest like Digg (‘04) to share stories, Pinterest for photo-sharing, Flickr (‘04) for hosting images, Youtube (‘05) for hosting videos, Blogger (‘03), LiveJournal (‘11), and Tumblr (‘07) for blogging, devinantArt for sharing personal pictures and artwork(‘00), and sites like Second Life where users create avatars to socialize online.

With AIM’s influence, many sites were creating their own chats, while others created messaging services sent messages quick like chats. Along with the growing interest in Social Media Networks, another type of chat was created; video chat. In 2003, Skype made it possible to video chat socially and provided a simple way to talk face-to-face. In 2012, Apple created another video chat, Facetime. With Skype and Facetime turned into apps, phones can now call, text, e-mail, go online, message through social media, chat, or video chat.

Through Social Networking, connecting with someone either on the other side of the street or on the other side of the world is easy. We can now keep in contact with people we see everyday or reunite with those we haven’t seen in years. Nowadays, we have the world wired. We have this connectivity from our computers, tablets, and even our T.V.s and phones. With the Connectivity Age, we live in an age of ease and accessibility, to do anything from anywhere and at any time.