I too grew up during the dawn of the Internet and "information age" in general. It was a wonderful time to be living, and an even better time to be a teenager -- we had such a leg up on the previous generation because we KNEW the 'net was going to be huge, and most of them thought of it as just another passing fad. I have fond memories of even pre-Internet, dialing into local BBS' on 28.8 baud modems -- which of course led to discovering "phreaking" to get free long-distance calls to dial into the non-local BBS' (hey, I was a teenager remember). Such great memories.
IRC was, and still is, incredible. But I can't bring myself to lump the current day 'social media' (ie; Twitter, Facebook, etc.) into the same category as IRC. Yes technically I guess it's in the same vein, but there are no "likes"/hearts/thumbs-up-or-down on IRC -- it's just a vast open public forum for almost instantaneous text-based chat, for better or worse (better, IMO). That whole likes vs. dislikes thing which is far too central and too much of a core part of current social media platforms. It's way, way, way too easy to use as a tool for manipulation -- and if anyone thinks they are NOT doing this, they are sorely mistaken.
There's a case to be made that advertising is really the central issue with Twitter/FB/etc. They have to keep people's eyes glued to the platform in order to show them more ads in order to make more money. That business model isn't going to end well for anyone except the advertisers.
But I can't bring myself to lump the current day 'social media' (ie; Twitter, Facebook, etc.) into the same category as IRC.
There was no magician behind the curtain of IRC statistically evaluating every line of text before deciding whether or not showing it to you would or would not make you spend more time on IRC, and interjecting an ad every few lines. And you saw it in order too, there was no monkeying with that...
