Today in the Histories of Social Media

Technology doesn’t create social media phenomena as much as change and amplify it. Technology can’t invent new human traits, or rewrite how we’re wired. Today, we live at the cusp of a future that looks a lot like the futures our predecessors faced on this same day last year, a decade ago, or even a thousand years in the past. Each today essay documents a social phenomenon that is as real now as it was then. The short, two or three-paragraph entries reveal varied examples of crowdsourcing, viral, innovation, storytelling and every presumably new quality enabled by current technology. They were experienced when content was usually live, if it hadn’t been captured with quill pens scratched on parchment. They were shared when ideas and trends moved at the speed of horse-drawn carriages, or on trains drawn by steam engines, and remembered when facts were vetted by human minds, and truths stored in our hearts, just like today. Reading an essay each day will get you thinking about social media in novel, challenging, and counter-intuitive ways. You’ll be surprised by interesting, funny, and sometimes gut-wrenching facts about social experience that aren’t well known or often discussed.