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This chapter lays the groundwork for a detailed discussion on how social media are transforming human communication and businesses in the coming chapters. It first defines two key terms: social media and technology. Both terms will be thoroughly examined later in the context of analyzing the sociality features of social media. For a better understanding of the social media impact on people and their societies, this chapter proposes the four eras of human civilization and investigates the broad social use of new technologies in each of the eras:

1 Agricultural civilization – farming, printing, geographic discoveries

2 Industrial civilization – steam machines, electricity, mobile transportation

3 Information civilization – PC, mobile communication, network technology

4 Internet civilization – ICT, social media, Wi-Fi, mobile technology

This chapter suggests that a profound knowledge of the social media mechanism is critical to one’s life, career, and social activities in the era of Internet Civilization. Like it or not, social media are starting to exert a growing impact on human society, something that no one can ignore. The chapter also reminds us of the trap of technological determinism. In this chapter, technological determinism is discussed as a useful theoretical framework for studying the technological perspectives in social media activities.