9781422273906

released the first bulletin board system (BBS), which was named CBBS. The original BBSs were a bit like the site Reddit today, in that they were centered around threaded discussions; unlike Reddit, they had no graphics. The same year, graduate students in North Carolina created USENET, an online bulletin board system, while computer scientists in the United Kingdom built the first online role-playing game, a Dungeons & Dragons –inspired, text-only game called MUD (Multi-User Dungeon). As time passed, Internet speeds got faster, and sites became more complex. Today we can send sound files, pictures, and videos at rates that were unthinkable back in the PLATO Notes days. Still, the basic activities of social media—making your own posts, reading others’ posts, making comments, and responding to comments—have not fundamentally changed since the 1970s. Some Key Social Media Platforms Facebook. As noted above, Facebook improved on the basic concepts developed by earlier social media platforms. Since its release in 2005, users have been creating personal “home pages” and then “friending” others to connect. About three quarters of Facebook users check the site at least once a day, and many users check it more than once. Since 2016, American users have been drifting away from the site for a variety of reasons, most notably due to concerns about privacy and how Facebook monetizes the information shared on the site. Facebook has also suffered from a perceived lack of hipness; many teens think of Facebook as “your mom’s social media.” Nonetheless, Facebook had well over two billion users in 2019—nearly a

Teen Guides to Health & Wellness: Social Media and the Internet

12

Made with FlippingBook PDF to HTML5