Social media is older than the Civil War. Despite the widespread content sharing that has become a defining characteristic of the modern age and “advancement,” the whole concept has roots that go centuries into the past.

The first instance of this sharing of media was in 1844, with the first telegraph message via Morse code; “What hath God wrought?” Indeed, this uncertainty and fear foretold the development of social media over the next one hundred and eighty years.

The technology of international media sharing continued to improve, all the way until the U.S. Department of Defense developed the first rendition of the internet in 1969. From there, advancements in technology grew exponentially as the market expanded and new players such as CompuServe and America Online joined the fray. As the turn of the century passed, social media began to take on the form we know today. LinkedIn was created in 2002 as a networking site for professionals, and was closely followed by Facebook in 2004. These sites, among many others, provided a space for individuals to share information on such a public and widespread scale unseen before in human history. Given the immense reach of these social media sites to the public, they were established as a tremendously profitable business due to advertising revenue. With this new sphere of economic potential unlocked, the social media race was on.

The following two decades were littered with new social media companies that rose in popularity, including YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitch, Discord, and TikTok. These programs quickly reached hundreds of millions and even billions of users. By the end of 2024, there were over five billion social media users, with the number growing by the day. The variety of content and media sharing ability has become a defining part of daily life for people across the globe, most notably among the younger generations. Within the U.S., up to 40% of kids from ages 8-12 use social media, with that number skyrocketing to 95% from ages 13-17. However, social media is prevalent in almost every generation at this point, and the question of social media remains; “What hath God wrought?”