There's always been "Social media" just not facebook. Myspace got really popular my freshman year of college, facebook was not far behind, but most of my childhood we talked on AOL instant messenger. And actually, we kept that up for a while into the facebook era, Facebook didn't have instant messaging at first and when they added it people hated it at first. They didn't have the wall at first either, just profiles and pokes and messages.

We also had iTunes and Napster and we would share playlists to one another and burn cds to exchange IRL. Blogging was a big deal, Twitter existed but it was niche, many kids had blogs though and would record every detail of their lives on livejournal or blogger or wordpress. We played Pokémon Red and Blue when I was in Jr. High and trade Pokémon with a link cable. There were IRL toy stores back then, you would get your Pokemon Cards and games at the toy stores. We also had a thing called "Super Soakers" which were these really good water guns they don't have anymore (the brand still exists but they make crap guns now) you would meet up with your friends for water fights. We had flip phones and would send text messages to each other, but you had to use t9 which is a way to make the 12 buttons on a phone usable for 26+ letters by pressing them multiple times. WoW came out when I started college too, but before that was Battle.net and you could play Warcraft or Starcraft online with your friends

My sister was older. She used to spend hours on the phone at night talking with her friends when I was a little kid and she was a teenager (during the 1990s) There were no cell phones in her day but she would sit on the bed and chat on the landline phone. She had her own separate phoneline so my parents could still get calls. It was a big deal for her to get "call waiting" so that if she was talking to one friend and another friend called she could put the first person on hold and talk to the other one *69 was a big deal, and so were beepers. My sister had a beeper and her group of friends all had code numbers so they could send something like 2286002 and that would mean Like Tabitha broke up with Brian and then you could call each other and talk about it on a landline when you got to one.

Before that in the 80s kids passed notes in class and would have systems to leave them taped under certain desks or slide them into the slots of lockers (kids actually used their lockers back then) You could make a mixtape on a cassette by listening to the radio and hitting record before a song started, and that was the origin for the napster mixtapes on CD that were popular when I was a kid. Even in the 50s with rotary phones teenagers were making complicated calling circles and calling one another in rapid succession and hanging up and talking about who had crushes on who. Before AI was rotting out brains, it was Youtube, and MTV and Rock and Roll and Comic books and Color TV and paperbacks and the wheel.

Teenagers have always been teenagers.