Abstract—This article reviews and analyses factors impacting the evolution of the internet, the web, and social media channels, charting historic trends and highlight recent technological developments. The review comprised a deep search using electronic journal databases. Articles were chosen according to specific criteria with a group of 34 papers and books selected for complete reading and deep analysis. The 34 elements were analysed and processed using NVIVO 12 Pro, enabling the creation of dimensions and categories, codes and nodes, identifying the most frequent words, cluster analysis of the terms, and creating a word cloud based on each word's frequency. The review presents updated information about technological trends, marketing, and chronological elements regarding the evolution of the internet and social media.

Index Terms—Internet, social media, web, technology, globalisation.

Charles Alves de Castro is with Technological University Dublin, Blanchardstown Campus, School of Business & Humanities; Research Centre for Psychology, Education and Emotional Intelligence – PEEI, TU Dublin Blanchardstown Rd N, Blanchardstown, Dublin, D15 YV78, Ireland (email: B00139249@mytudublin.ie).
Isobel O’Reilly is with Technological University Dublin, Blanchardstown Campus, School of Business & Humanities; Research Centre for Psychology, Education and Emotional Intelligence – PEEI.
Aiden Carthy is with Research Centre for Psychology, Education and Emotional Intelligence – PEEI, Technological University Dublin, Blanchardstown Campus.

Cite: Charles Alves de Castro, Isobel O’Reilly, Aiden Carthy, "The Evolution of the Internet and Social Media: A Literature Review," International Journal of e-Education, e-Business, e-Management and e-Learning vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 30-41, 2022.

Copyright © 2022 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).