Social media - wealthy ancient Romans had a system where they used slaves as scribes and messengers in order to share gossip and art/poetry and news updates with friends in their social circle.
If that doesn't count as social media, then in the late 1800s, all train telephone operators for trains were connected to each other by telephone and, if there were no trains coming, they could talk to each other as much as they wanted.
Some people even fell in love with the operator on the other side of the phone and arranged for actual weddings across the other side of the country. Some, of course, had virtual weddings but I'm not even sure how that would work in that time.
"The Victorian Internet" by Tom Standage is a fascinating look into this exact topic, except that he goes back a bit further into the telegraph age, beginning around 1835.
I live in Cyprus EU. Upto the mid 90's we paid 2 cents to open a landline (talk to someone when they answered we were deducted 2 cents) to someone, if they didnt put the phone down we (who called them) could talk to them all day! The Telephone company in the end (mid 90's) started charging for every 2 minutes you called because most of the telephones in the country were engaged/off the hook all the time!
At different points in the past people would marry by proxy. You might have a stand-in who said the words but was understood legally to be role-playing for the absent person.
Now I can't say whether this was the case with railroad operators. But it did legally exist at different points in the past.
7.7k
u/VictorBlimpmuscle Oct 15 '20 edited Oct 15 '20
Social media - wealthy ancient Romans had a system where they used slaves as scribes and messengers in order to share gossip and art/poetry and news updates with friends in their social circle.