Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2025 November 22
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November 22
[edit]Social media term coined
[edit]What year was social media as a term coined in and what is their earliest usage? ~2025-35678-79 (talk) 23:46, 22 November 2025 (UTC)
- Merriam-Webster says "The first known use of social media was in 1994," but doesn't quote that use. Deor (talk) 00:23, 23 November 2025 (UTC)
- OED's first usage is from the January 1994 number of Online magazine: "What attracted librarians to the Internet? For some cybernauts, USENET, IRC, and the other social media of the net are the hooks." Of course, that just means that's the first usage they're aware of. --Antiquary (talk) 09:40, 23 November 2025 (UTC)
- I have found Habermas and the Dialectic of Reason by David Ingram in 1985. The relevant quote (referring, of course, to Jürgen Habermas) is:
The analytical differentiation and quasi-transcendental grounding of cognitive interests, disciplines, spheres of action, and social media propounded in his Frankfurt inaugural address of 1965 thus marked a significant departure from the hermeneutically conceived unity of theory and practice evident in his earlier work.
- So it goes back to 1985, or if you can find the lecture, to 1965. Given that I have no idea what any of that sentence means, I cannot begin to guess what he might have meant by "social media" either in 1965 or 1985. -- Verbarson talkedits 17:15, 23 November 2025 (UTC)
- See Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas's 1968 book developing on his 1965 inaugural address. The book does not appear to include the phrase "social media". DuncanHill (talk) 17:25, 23 November 2025 (UTC)
- The 1929 book Personality and the social group contains a use of "social media". I don't think these early uses have the same basic meaning. Specifically, I think we see the plural of "social medium", in which "medium" means a context or means in which or by which processes take place, so together this would mean some social context. On the next page we find a use of singular "social medium". Habermas writes, for example, about "the medium of social labor and class struggle". ‑‑Lambiam 20:25, 23 November 2025 (UTC)
- A search through Google groups brings this from 1991 although apparently here 'social media' includes things like clubs that need not to be on the internet, hence the usage of "electronic social media". ~2025-36454-43 (talk) 21:52, 25 November 2025 (UTC)