How The Hippies Invented Social Media
Yes, social media came from Silicon Valley, just not the way you might think. Here's how it all started.
For most of the world, social media is a phenomenon that came out of Silicon Valley. Sort of. But not in the way you might think and it was about half a century ago, not just twenty years. And it came from the minds of the subculture, or counterculture group, we call hippies. And it started with a print magazine.
To uncover the origins of social media, we’ve got to wind back to the days of free love, LSD, stinky cannabis, long hair, folk music and funky fashion choices. Whether it was mind-altering substances that played a role we will never know. But I somehow doubt it.
Where it all started was with a magazine called the Whole Earth Catalog which was published between 1968 and 1972 around the Bay Area of California, which included the nascent Silicon Valley area before hoodies became a thing.
The publisher was the renowned thinker, Stewart Brand and his wife at the time. He is a Stanford educated biologist who spent some time in the US Army as a parachutist. To this day he remains very active in technology spheres and is co-founder of the esteemed Long Now Foundation.
Let’s get back to the hippies.
Stewart and his wife created a magazine called the Whole Earth Catalog, which was aimed at the growing DIY movement and hippy communes around the Bay Area and later available beyond through direct mail. Key to the idea was that people could submit their own ads and content that covered topics focused on the earth and living harmoniously with it.
It became a lot of work. Driving around in his pick up truck, collecting content, getting it all printed and then distributing it via mail and with his truck. Eventually, he wound it down, finding it too complicated to keep up. A digital version popped up in 1985 called the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (Well), which survives today and remains popular. And quite a positive space.
So how do the hippies factor into creating social media? Eventually, the idea of communes all around the Bay area of San Fransisco started to become less than ideal and slowly the people involved in them filtered back into the suburbs. That’s when they discovered computers.
They were far from the sleek designs of today. Some of these hippies like Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Hewlett and Packard would go on to form huge corporations. A subculture emerged quite quickly as people started playing with this new technology.
Some of these visionaries went to university, but even then, computer science was in it’s early years. Computers were just beginning to enter the business world and were mostly used by larger corporations that could afford them. There was even a fair bit of tension between the coders and senior management.
The sort of free thinking, counterculture ideals of the hippy movement had filtered into the zeitgeist of the coder world. A generational gap and in some cases, the usual resistance to new technologies that threatened jobs and incomes.
One thing these new coder-hippies-nerds wanted was to be able to connect computers with each other. And they did. They created in the late 1970’s, the Bulletin Board System (BBS), which you might say, was the first iteration of what we know as Reddit today.
Although at that time, you could only run one program at a time on your computer. No multitasking like today. A fast connection then was around 14K download, not Gigabytes. It was text only, some had sort of images, but they were quite crude. Yet they were beloved and very popular, carrying on well into the 90’s. Some are still operating, but very differently.
The era of the BBS was one of immense curiosity and a culture of sharing knowledge. The utopian ideals of the hippies of the 60’s and 780’s had seeped into this new culture that saw the immense opportunity for a connected humanity. All of this underpinned what would become the social media tools we have today.
While sometimes it can seem like that time of innocence has been lost and we feel somewhat jaded by much of social media today, understandably so, not all is lost. Culture today is changing social media once again. Forums are still around, Reddit being the most popular and people are still sharing and learning. Human curiosity is insatiable.
So you can thank the hippies for inventing social media over 50 years ago.