Thank The Hippies for Today’s Social Media

Seriously. How? Let’s go back to the 1970′s and a maveric by the name of Stewart Brand in San Francisco. He was a counter-culture type, disillusioned like many other hippies with the “establishment” and the growth of broadcast television. He also understood the principles of “cybernetics” or what came to be known as “network theory” developed by American Norbert Weiner in WWII who was looking for a solution for better anti-aircraft defence systems. Stewart started “The Whole Earth Catalog“, which featured items that hippies (for example) could use in their communes. A key feature of this catalog was the creation of a feedback loop (feedback loops are a critical element to today’s Social Media) in which readers could send in anything they wanted to be printed and he included these items in the “catalog”.

It was so successful that Brand eventually shut it down for the most part. It had become too “mainstream” by 1972. fast forward to the early 80′s and the hippies had abandoned their “communes” concept and pretty much all moved back to San Francisco. This is when they started to get into computers. Hippies like Stewart Brand saw computers very differently from the likes of IBM, who saw them purely for business purposes. Hippies saw them as a way to connect people in a feedback loop to go around the broadcast mediums of the establishment. This lead Brand with others to create the WELL, or the the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link - arguably the first citizen driven social technology that lead to forums (and survives today.) Modern Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan also saw the intrinsic value to these technologies; for him, as a devout Catholic, he saw this technology as a way to gain a new level of “enlightenment.” The medium after all, is the message. As McLuhan meant by this, the impact a medium would have on shaping the views and actions of those who consumed it. It wasn’t the message he was concerned with, but the “container” the message was delivered in.

From the WELL, sprang ever increasing “networks” of computers tied together. As the Internet gained popularity and computing became easier for people, so did the advancement of Weiners original cybernetics capabilities. Today, social media technologies like Twitter, Facebook and blogs, all pull their technical underpinnings from Weiners original concepts from the 1940′s.

It was the Hippie movement and their belief in enabling people to connect and communicate outside the media channels controlled by industrial media that drove them to evolve these technologies. Today that seems a bit odd, since big media portrays hippies as highly-socialist drug smoking free-love types, not as technologically thinking folk who would be so eager to drive new technologies. But it’s how they saw the technology being used that is key.

After all, a key philosophy of Social Media is “sharing” as in “share the link love” and being open about what we see. As one thinks about that, perhaps the hippies really were onto something. Even Steve Jobs, Apple‘s founder, gave credit to the Whole Earth Catalog as a precursor to today’s World Wide Web.

Interesting isn’t it?

Peace out.

(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Director)