As I've learned so often there really is nothing new under the sun. While the the mechanics of delivering social media has changed over the last century the message remains the same..."Here I am, look at me, I made this, I did that, join me in my happy, sad, or meaningful endeavors, I am!"
The other evening I did a search for articles containing the name of my Great grandmother Olive Robinson and discovered that she and her family were frequently mentioned in stories from the Monticello Herald. In those days the Monticello paper was a weekly and every week they included "reports" from all the little communities around the county. Almost always the reports were of mundane, everyday events. Who went to visit who, who had guests from out of town, who visited someone out of town, who got engaged or got married, funerals attended.....in short they were almost always just reports of neighborhood social events. As I was reading the items it occurred to me "Oh my God.....these sound just like what I read at Facebook" It became quite clear to me...our ancestors were every bit as hooked on social media as some of us are today. The only difference I could see was that they didn't have the option of including a photo of the group gathered for the dinner party they were reporting about, or a picture of their new car. Three randomly selected articles are shown below as the sort of Social Media our ancestors enjoyed.
I am confident that had "Facebook" existed in 1915 my great grandmother would have been a power user of the app.
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