The Paradigm Shifts of the Internet for 30 Years: From Portal Sites, Search Engines to Social Networks, and What’s the Next?

What’s the power to drive the paradigm shifts of the Internet in the past 3 decades? And what paradigm will be in the coming new age?

Tenz Shih in English
The Startup
Published in
9 min readNov 2, 2019

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I was often asked questions like below when I gave speeches on social marketing conferences:

  • Why social networks become so important for online marketing?
  • Why social marketing is one of the most important marketing ways today?

Such questions are so interesting that I could not just answer in simple ways. At last, I realized that I have to dig into the history of the Internet, trying to find some key points in the whole process.

Paradigm and Paradigm Shift

The idea of “paradigm shift”, developed by Prof. Thomas Kuhn in his famous and impactful book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, provides me the convenient and best key to understand the underlying driven force that changes the history of the Internet in the past 3 decades.

What is the Paradigm? According to Wikipedia, the paradigm is:

a distinct set of concepts…

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Tenz Shih in English
The Startup

Senior editor, translator, transcreator, community manager, public speaker, and a free blogger. Another medium blog in Chinese: https://medium.com/@tenz.