This post is inspired by a discussion on new media at Reno Baby. Relative newcomers facing exposure to online media appear to have adopted assumptions about the uniqueness of these technologies. With that in mind, here are five points to be considered — basically, that media as we know it today has roots back to hunter-gatherer rock art.

1. Social media is new. If new media is defined as being online, then yes, the technology is relatively new. Online technologies with increased user-to-user participation originated in 1979 and became more popular around 1990 with the increased use of the Internet, which was quickly followed by the World Wide Web. Today’s conception of “new media” is really about 20 years old. The bandwidth expansion and innovative level of sharing information — and level of connectivity and participation — is what has changed.

2. Social media has increased the democratization of information. Social media as it’s understood today is an evolved form of what was already a social form of media — it’s just taken level of participation up a notch. Prior, non-online media, beginning with the printed word, tended to be more asymmetrical in nature — it was printed, etched, carved or painted, then transmitted and received. Feedback would have occurred thereby satisfying the “social” nature of such media.

More recently, the power of the press was well into the hands of lay people as early as the founding of our country, with an increased emergence in the 1950s and ’60s. The ’60s in particular had incredibly vibrant independent media that continues through today, even though most of us tend to adopt new terms for it because the technologies have changed. The 1990s saw an advanced emergence in independent media because of the advent of and associated popularity of desktop publishing. Known as the “‘zine revolution,” individually created publications were — and continue to be — shared among readers, friends and so on. This so-called revolution likely peaked with a feature in TIME Magazine in 1994.

3. Social media is raising new questions about the democratization of information. These questions were being asked in the ’80s, early ’90s and likely before then as independent media gained popularity through time. The slick magazine Mondo 2000 poignantly discussed these very questions in depth during the short history of the publication. Wired magazine was also founded around this time and continues to be on the front lines of these questions. A doctoral dissertation from Kent State University from 2001 examined in length the shift from print to electronic self-publishing (unbeknown to me, I am sourced in the study from an apparent email exchange in 1995).

4. Historic media was not “social.” The very nature of media is social. To create and transmit and then receive means a social transaction has taken place. Online technologies have increased the mass level of participation. User-to-user communication has increased sociability. Again, this really began to emerge on a mass scale in the late 1980s and early ’90s.

5. Social media puts the power of media into the hands of the people. The power of the media has always been in the hands of the people, just less so. Independent presses were/are less common than computers and mobiles, but their prevalence, particularly in the 60s, and then later with Xerox technology (mimeographs prior to that), has been longstanding.