A History of Social Media This recent infographic from copyblogger takes a dive into the history of social media, and it may be a longer history than you expect. History includes: 1971 – First Email – Researchers at ARPA send the worlds first email 1980 – USENET_ – users were able to read and post messages to distributed online bulletin boards 1991 – World Wide Web – Tim Berners-Lee proposes a new protocol for information distribution Are Your Employees Engaged