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Intelligence
What Comes Around, Goes Around: Social Media in the (Gasp!) 1990s

Intelligence

What Comes Around, Goes Around: Social Media in the (Gasp!) 1990s

Apr 15, 2009By Michael Stoner

I spoke to two undergraduate marketing classes at Bethel University this week. I was on campus with my colleagues Patrick DiMichele and Doug Gapinski starting up a project to redevelop Bethel’s website. MaryAnn Harris, a marketing professor, invited me to talk her classes. And as a result, two groups of Bethel students patiently listened as I rambled on about my career, mStoner’s history, and talked about how we approach redeveloping a website like Bethel’s.

When I reminded the students in the class that I’ve been doing this work essentially since the beginning of the web, I had to smile to myself. It wasn’t that long ago, but those students don’t remember a world without the Internet or the web. They did their college search on the web because, well, why wouldn’t they?

I know this, of course, and I speak about it often. But it’s helpful being so vividly reminded of that fact: I appreciated the look of stupefaction on the faces of a couple of students when I mentioned writing my master’s thesis on a manual typewriter [I could imagine them thinking: what’s a typewriter?].

And it reminds me to share some thoughts with some of my (younger) colleagues, whom I see on Twitter and elsewhere.

You may find it hard to believe, but we had social media way back in the 1990s.

It’s a shocking fact.

One really important tool back then was email. I remember the days when people were just starting to use email in droves and I could finally assume that many of my colleagues could send and receive email. [One reason we named mStoner mStoner was because “mstoner” has been part of my online identity since 1990. ]

We also formed communities using one-to-many communications. Our tool was called a “listserv.” Imagine: people would send out a message and get responses in return. A query about grammar or editing on CUE‑L could result in a hundred emails in very short order.

I spoke at a CASE Assembly to vice presidents and senior development officers about electronic communications. When I queried my colleagues on several listservs about what they wanted their bosses to know, I got about a hundred responses. Many of them boiled down to: “Learn to type. Read, write, and send email.” In essence: “Participate.”

Funny how I end up saying much the same things about today’s social media.

And, you know what, way back then in the Internet’s dark ages, people used this technology to bond with each other. Amazing, isn’t it? Email seems so banal in the age of YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Yet in its early days, it was incredibly powerful. How quickly we adapted it to stitch together communities of practice around mutual interests and, very quickly, shared connections.

Then again, as Clay Shirky notes, technologies only become really powerful when they are universal, and therefore boring. Who knows what lies in store for us when Facebook is as common and boring as email is now?


  • Michael Stoner Co-Founder and Co-Owner Was I born a skeptic or did I become one as I watched the hypestorm gather during the dotcom years, recede, and congeal once more as we come to terms with our online, social, mobile world? Whatever. I'm not much interested in cutting edge but what actually works for real people in the real world. Does that make me a bad person?