Social Media: A Brief Historical Timeline

9^th century B.C.: The poem now known as the Iliad is shared orally for the first time in ancient Greece. Social media is born.

1895: Nikolai Tesla invents the radio. Big media is born. A century of darkness and plague descends over the planet.

1960: The all-talk radio station format is invented, galvanizing cranky senior citizens everywhere. Sales of checkerboards plummet.

2003: Two American college freshmen want to more widely distribute drunken photos of their friends with obscenities written on their foreheads in Sharpie. Facebook is invented.

2004: With the human imagination finally liberated from the shackles of corporate broadcast media, it takes a mere seven milliseconds for a phony celebrity death rumor to sweep from coast to coast.

2007: Deborah Cullings of Omaha, Nebraska, becomes the first 30-year-old to join Facebook, posting three pictures of her pet labradoodle, Muffin.

2007, exactly 10 minues later: Every Facebook user under 19 closes his or her account.

2008: Remember Second Life? Me neither.

2009: Darryl Vandenberg, a Dallas middle manager, walks into a corporate conference room and utters the sentence, “Sorry I’m late to the meeting, team, but I was on the Twitter and really had to tweet,” and no one laughs. Social media is now an officially accepted form of corporate communication.