2 thoughts on “It’s a dialogue”

  1. Social media isn’t much like a telephone, either. It has a little bit in common with party-line telephones, but I wonder whether Ms. Martin has even heard of those.

    • Doubtful.
      Obvioysly never heard of a BBS, either.

      Today’s Social media are all descendants of the old fashioned community bulletin boards and the electronic bulleting boards of the 70’s. Not TV. Not phones. The former is one-way communucation, the latter two-way, person to person. Bulleting boards were;are two-way, many to many.

      The first proto-BBS on record was Lee Felsenstein and co’s, COMMUNITY MEMORY project from 1973. It worked off a timeshare system and it was literally a neighborhood resource since it only had one access point to start with.

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Memory

      By 1978, two years into the CP/M era, microcomputers brought out the first true electronic BBS, CBBS in Chicago. At first the system only supported one conection at a time but pretty quickly multi-line BBSes developed, followed by commercial systems like COMPUSERVE, PRODIGY, AMERICA ONLINE. In France the telecom adapted the tech into the advanced, for the times, Minitel. All featured most of the traits of social media: discussion boards, real time cgat, threaded discussions, file sharing, etc.

      By the mid 90’s the Internet was opened to the masses and the web took over.
      All services since have been variations on the theme of the community bulletin board. Except the “community” is now global.

Comments are closed.