Strictly speaking, social media isn’t an invention of our time.
True, something did change when online platforms emerged in the 1990s, and what they changed was something fundamental.
The phenomenon of social media has always been social – because it involves people. What’s changed is the media, that is to say, the way it functions.
The source for the word media is the Latin word for middle, medium, which is media in the plural. Medium made its way into English in the 1580s.
By around 1600, it had acquired a secondary sense – it could now signify a channel of communication. Building on that, media in the 1920s referred to the newspaper, TV and radio. It’s how we still use the term.
Social media today functions by way of platforms such as Facebook, X or Truth Social, which offer a virtual space for people to connect and communicate.
Before people had virtual spaces in which to connect, how did they communicate? What was their media, what were their channels? Well, first of all, and most importantly, they connected and communicated in real, not virtual, spaces.
The opportunities for being together, for sharing a space, were countless.
The ancient Romans, for example, built communal toilets in their cities.
The ones that had existed in the Largo Argentina in Rome could seat dozens of people, one next to the other, on long stone benches with no partitions.
Sitting there for a few minutes, people will inevitably have talked – about the weather, about politics, about the price of artichokes and olives.
They’ll have shared the latest scandal, gossip about common friends, rumours from foreign lands – the kind of content that, mutatis mutandis, you might read on your screen today.
Socializing also went on in the baths that the ancients constructed. Bathing was a very popular activity and it was carried out not in private but in public baths – thermae in Latin.
The largest public bath in ancient Rome was the Baths of Diocletian, which could accommodate about 3,000 people.
In the fourth century, there were reportedly over 950 baths of various sizes in Rome.
The public bath was a place – let’s call it a space – where people would relax and communicate.
Markets were other spaces where people came together and talked, where news could circulate rapidly, not only among the customers but also between vendor and customer.
Not to be overlooked as social media spaces are wash-houses, public facilities for washing clothes, which were frequented above all by women.
Bent over basins of cold water, scrubbing and rinsing loads of laundry, the women must have welcomed conversation, especially gossip, to distract them from their aching backs, arms and hands.
Once washing machines were invented, women were spared the aching limbs, but they had to endure the tedium of interacting with a machine rather than a real person – unless, of course, they went to a laundromat and enjoyed the company and chatter of other customers.
A more elevated kind of social media, or social interaction, was made possible by coffeehouses. Among the earliest were those established in the 16th century in the Middle East.
By the next century, there were coffeehouses in Italy, Austria (especially Vienna) and England, which counted a few thousand by the later 17th century.
People patronized coffeehouses not only for drinking coffee but also for conversing, for communicating, for – excuse the anachronism – networking.
Loneliness and isolation were inconceivable when people had only real spaces – whether they were communal toilets or coffeehouses – in which to carry out their activities, in which to communicate.
Maybe we’re still too human to be able to deal with the virtual and artificial “realities” that modern technologies keep devising. Maybe we’ll have to become less human before we’re able to cope. Or we can fight back. We can shift down and seek the real, human spaces.
Sabine Eiche is a local writer and art historian with a PhD from Princeton University. Her passions are writing for children and protecting nature. Her columns deal with a broad range of topics and often include etymology in order to shed extra light on the subject.
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