social media , communications on the 

Internet (such as

on websites for social networking and microblogging) through which users share information,

ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos). Social networking and social
media are overlapping concepts, but social networking is usually understood as users
building communities among themselves while social media is more about using social
networking sites and related platforms to build an audience.

The earliest forms of social media appeared almost as soon as technology could support
them. E-mail and chat programs debuted in the early 1970s, but persistent communities did
not surface until the creation of the discussion group network USENET in 1979. USENET
allowed users to post and receive messages within subject areas called newsgroups. USENET
and other discussion forums, such as privately hosted bulletin board systems (BBSs), enabled
individuals to interact, but each was essentially a closed system. With the release in 1993 of
the Mosaic web browser, those systems were joined with an easy-to-use graphical interface.
The architecture of the World Wide Web made it possible to navigate from one site to another
with a click, and faster Internet connections allowed for more multimedia content than could
be found in the text-heavy newsgroups.