Social Media (Civ6)/Civilopedia

ICYMI, social media contains all one needs to know about human civilization … or at least those bits of it that the connected people know. Except perhaps whether social media is the boon or the curse of the 21st Century. BTAIM, they’re not even sure exactly how it got started. LMAO.
B4 there was Six Degrees, weblogs or My Space, it started with the first dial-up BBS launched by Ward Christensen and Randy Suess in Chicago in February 1978 AD. These primitive online meeting places were independently-produced hunks of code that allowed users to communicate through a central server where they could download files and post public messages. These text-only services quickly became popular with BFFs through WOM, and through the 1980s and early 1990s various services – such as FidoNet – arose to link these BBSs together into worldwide messaging boards. Meanwhile, commercial services such as CompuServe expanded into the public domain, offering discussion forums on all manner of subjects … and a newfangled service termed “email.” FOMO brought thousands of Gen-Xers into the fold.
In 1997 the first site that everyone can agree was a SMP was launched: SixDegrees.com. Lasting only until 2001 due to a proliferation of SPAM, it allowed subscribers to create an updateable profile of themselves, and then “friend” other users. FYI, by 2000 around 100 million people had access to the Internet; all manner of users were utilizing chat rooms for discussion, dating and sharing. The first social media surge followed shortly after with the launch of LinkedIn (2002) and MySpace (2003). But IMHO it was 2004 and the launch of Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg and 2006 and the launch of Twitter by Jack Dorsey that established the “connected” world of social media. Today, on these and dozens of other services (Flickr, Tumblr, Habbo, Sina Weibo, etc.) virtually any text, video, audio or image file can be shared on all sorts of devices, even mobile ones … although TBH, it is becoming ever harder to separate the wheat from the chaff.
DFTBA … IRL.