"Social media" as a term was not well-established at the time, but the notion of online user-generated and social content predates even the Web: Usenet and mailing lists date to the 1970s.
By 2001, there were these, blogs, and aggregators such as Slashdot, as well as many online news and magazine sites, especially in the infotech space. So an active community. The post-9/11 era extended well through the aughts.
GeoCities was one of the Internet's earliest social networking websites, appearing in November 1994, followed by Classmates in December 1995, Six Degrees in May 1997, Open Diary in October 1998, LiveJournal in April 1999, Ryze in October 2001, Friendster in March 2002, LinkedIn in May 2003, hi5 in June 2003, MySpace in August 2003, Orkut in January 2004, Facebook in February 2004, Yahoo! 360° in March 2005, Bebo in July 2005, Twitter in July 2006, Tumblr in February 2007, and Google+ in July 2011.
By 2001, there were these, blogs, and aggregators such as Slashdot, as well as many online news and magazine sites, especially in the infotech space. So an active community. The post-9/11 era extended well through the aughts.
GeoCities was one of the Internet's earliest social networking websites, appearing in November 1994, followed by Classmates in December 1995, Six Degrees in May 1997, Open Diary in October 1998, LiveJournal in April 1999, Ryze in October 2001, Friendster in March 2002, LinkedIn in May 2003, hi5 in June 2003, MySpace in August 2003, Orkut in January 2004, Facebook in February 2004, Yahoo! 360° in March 2005, Bebo in July 2005, Twitter in July 2006, Tumblr in February 2007, and Google+ in July 2011.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=social+media&y...