Social media is vastly overrated as a "recent invention," imo. Facebook is basically a copy of MySpace and livejournal which are copies of AOL (instant messaging, profiles, and all). Blogs and microblogs (e.g. twitter) are a nice addition that appeared in the early 2000s, but even they're just a slight reformatting of BBS and forums. Most of this predates the WWW, in some format or another.
Things have definitely evolved a lot, but as far as "social media" (reminds me how much I hated that term when they first started using it, when the basic profile + messaging concept had been around over a decade) goes, it's more like comparing a Tesla to a Model T, rather than a whole new type of technology.
Things have definitely evolved a lot, but as far as "social media" (reminds me how much I hated that term when they first started using it, when the basic profile + messaging concept had been around over a decade) goes, it's more like comparing a Tesla to a Model T, rather than a whole new type of technology.