America's Funniest Home Videos was the real beginning of social networking. Before Facebook, before Twitter, before MySpace, there was America's Funniest Home Videos. The evolution from home movies on VHS, to interactive sharing over the internet was inevitable, because as we all know, people love sharing.
People love to share. Share their knowledge. Share their wisdom. Share their insights. Share their experiences. Share their opinions. This is inherent to human nature. Looking back into the days of cave people, tribes learned that it was advantageous for "Ugg the caveman" to share his knowledge of how to kill saber tooth tigers and hide from dinosaurs, with the rest of the tribe. In turn, the tribe appreciated "Ugg" and respected his knowledge, which kept the tribe alive. The exchange of ideas and insights, from one person or group to another, started as a means of survival which evolved over time into a means of unspoken mutual respect, as well as a reason to communicate with others. In today's modern social atmosphere, wrought with technological communication options (emailing, texting, chatting, Tweeting, Facebooking, to name a few) the core idea of sharing thoughts and ideas, what could be termed "Social Sharing", still motivates us as a society.
When we look back into the late 80's, there was no real public internet. There were no cell phones for everyday people. No texting, No chatting. The closest thing to Facebook may have been the high school or college bulletin board.
Sure, we had telephones, and we had cameras. With the telephone, one could schedule a phone call to a friend or relative, and hope that they were home to answer it. If they weren't home, you were out of luck. But a limit of the telephone was that you could typically only speak with one person at a time. You could conference call, only as long as all the other people were at their phones at the same time. The landline phone was, in a sense, the early version of "networking" in the concept of social networking - connecting people over physical distances. Though it was personal (one person to another), how would it become social?
So we also had the camera; that wild little box that every family carried with them to take snapshots of life. We could save images for memories, and for limited sharing. We could communicate and translate what we experienced in life with other people. The photograph would be the technology "lever" that could connect the words "social" and "networking" into the groundbreaking phenomenon it is today. Photos were a social tool, but unless you invited people over to look at your photo albums, or worse yet brought your albums over to other people's homes, it was tough to easily share pictures, as well as deliver the story that went with each photo. Social, but not easily share-able.
The camcorder and video were next in the Social Sharing evolutionary timeline. It was the natural combination of voice and images. The ability to record, save, and share a moving picture was the answer to how people could feel like they were actively watching and observing something in real time. Video would take a still photo, make it move, and add sound and voices to the movement. Once mainstream America got a hold of the technology, it went from just "video" to become "home video". Home video was the personalization of camcorder technology. By personalizing images with movement and sound, we could convey thoughts and ideas in a way that still photos could not. Video made photos social.
When America's Funniest Home Videos came along, it took the country by storm. Not only could you record and share moments with family and friends, but now you could share with literally millions of people. This ability to share with so many people meant that each Sunday night, people were not only turning on the TV and tuning in, but in effect we were logging onto the television as an electronic media device, to see what other people were sharing with us. AFV was the early incarnation of Social Sharing, and became the root of Social Networking.
So the television became the "network" part of social networking, while home video defined the "social" part.
So when we look at today's social networks, it's easy to see why they are so popular. Human beings love to share with and connect to other human beings. Sharing is what makes life social. It was the reason why Ugg was such a popular caveman, and why America's Funniest Home Videos was such a huge hit on television.
Because, amongst all of today's technology - people love to share.