The Age of Social Media

In less than three decades, social media transformed from a novelty into the central nervous system of modern civilization. It toppled governments, launched movements, created billionaires, and rewired human psychology. This timeline traces the arc from the first social network in 1997 through Facebook's dorm-room origins, the rise of visual and video culture, the weaponization of data, and the algorithm-driven attention economy that now shapes how billions of people see the world.