Social Media before the Web

I recently came across an interesting article, Social Media Before the Internet: Tales of Victorians, Comic Book Fans, Phone Phreaks and CBers. It notes that “long before the rise of Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, people found innovative ways to use technology to interact.” One example was of a marriage ceremony conducted over the telegraph. The bride was in Boston and the groom was in New York. Telegraph operators transmitted the couple's vows and the words of the magistrate performing the ceremony over the wires. This may have been the first electronic marriage. There are many more interesting ones in the article.

Here is another example, in the late 1890s my great aunt liked to listen to music but the only place that you could hear music was the saloon in her newly-organized town in the Oklahoma Territory. In her day, this place was not appropriate for young single women. Fortunately, she was the first telephone operator in the town. So she called the saloon and left the line open, getting “piped in” background music, while she worked, whenever the band played.

Her finance worked at the bank. My great aunt would call him and leave the line open so they could talk between their work tasks. Thus their courtship, like the couple above had an electronic assistance.

There was an added benefit to this technology. She was able to also hear whenever a fight broke out in the saloon, a frequent activity, and notify the local police. These features, piped-in music and location monitoring, have taken on new forms and become disaggregated from her primitive phone lines. But now the smart phone is bring these capabilities and much more back to the phone.

 

Comments

[Darryl Tay]

A marriage through telegraph? That sure is one unique ceremony! And yes, it is fun to look back on how things were before all these advancements. Revisiting the past can give us an idea, not only on the way of life back then, but also on how we can improve things in the present and in the future. All those innovations, like the emergence of social media, came up because of the past inventions, and I think we have to give our old folks some credit for that.