10 years or more than that ago, people are communicating each other with telephone, writing letters, and other traditional way which is difficulty to keep contact with those who have problem on distance.
Even when email start getting more popular, distance of human are getting more closer and closer but it still not with instant respond and still have inconvenient on communication.
Until around these 10 years, friendster and facebook appearing on the internet, as the common social media which is affected the online society in these years, communication between each other are almost become 0 distance of each other by sharing photo, multimedia content with each other, knowing new friends, and we have skype, msn, yahoo messanger, ICQ and other instant messanger to communicate with each other without distance problem as long the user own a gadget which can use the application.
In the beginning, they only can communicate on desktop and pc, but nowadays smartphone are getting more popular, user can access to their social media platform and sharing any information in anytime, anywhere with internet connection.
Like twitter, instagram, it become a more convenient and simple sharing platform which can easy access by using smartphone like facebook and other social media, therefore, the social media are getting more matured with user can form their own virtual group online, such as facebook group, and pages to get more information on the topic or interest they like, or even brand and business.
In this way, social media also getting important on expanding personal or business reputation, some big company even have position specially for social media development.
Through this, we can see history of social media and how it grows, and until today it how serious affected our life.
Ref Link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media
