Writing on the Wall

October 7, 2013
The Economist's digital editor Standage (A History of the World in Six Glasses) draws comparisons between modern social media and the forms of communication and information dissemination used over 2,000 years to show how, in fact, "History retweets itself." Examples include ancient Roman graffiti that bears a strong resemblance to a Facebook status update: "On April 19, I made bread" and Martin Luther's 95 theses, perhaps the first document to go viral, selling two thousand copies from 1520-1526. The same era saw propaganda woodcuts featuring "bold graphics with a smattering of text," similar to modern day memes. In the court of Elizabeth I, people like Sir John Harington, inventor of the flushing toilet, were prized for their "witty epigrams" that read like tweets. Standage traces the origins of the American press as a source of shared rebellion leading up to the Revolutionary War and radio broadcasting as a source of culture in Britain and propaganda in Nazi Germany. Finally, Standage discusses the influence of the internet from its conception in a UCLA computer lab to its involvement in 2011's Arab Spring. Standage captures quite beautifully the essence of the human need to connect and interact, both its banality and world-altering power.

July 15, 2013
The technologies are different, but the habit of sharing information horizontally and in two directions is a lot older than the Internet, argues the Economist's digital editor. Indeed, writes Standage (An Edible History of Humanity, 2009, etc.), it's the mass media of the 19th and 20th centuries that are the anomalies. Humans are innately social animals, "built to form networks with others and to exchange information with them." Once writing was invented and literacy became relatively widespread in ancient Rome, news could be shared outside a small, physically proximate group, and "the stage was set for the emergence of the first social-media ecosystem." Educated Romans spread news (and gossip) by letters, which they expected to be copied and passed on, similar to the way emails are forwarded and tweets are retweeted today. Standage draws similar parallels between the Internet and the printed pamphlets that spread the Protestant revolution in the 16th century and the American and French ones in the 18th. Among the many other, sometimes-specious historical precedents he cites are the coffee houses in which 17th-century Europeans gathered to exchange news and poetry circulated in manuscript among members of the Elizabethan elite. The author's main point is well-taken: In the mid 19th century, steam printing presses made it possible to print newspapers much faster and sell them much more cheaply; they also made it much more expensive to set up and maintain a newspaper, which now involved a staff of paid professional journalists. Radio and TV expanded this trend of disseminating information from the top down, with particularly sinister results in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. The creation of the World Wide Web allowed people to reclaim their traditional role in both spreading news and commenting on it. Many of these points were made with greater intellectual rigor in William Bernstein's Masters of the Word (2013), and Standage's habit of seeing a proto-Internet in every historical use of media eventually prompts fatigue and disbelief.

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December 1, 2014

Standage (digital editor, Economist; The Victorian Internet) explores how the last 150 years of centralized print and broadcast media were an anomaly in a long history of communication that relied on distributed social networks. Following a discussion of the neurobiological and anthropological prerequisites for social communication, the author describes the interpersonal networks that historically have facilitated the exchange of gossip, political news, commercial transactions, and new philosophical and scientific ideas. As channels outside of governmental control, these were often instrumental in helping revolutionaries coalesce their positions, build broad public support, and organize effectively as demonstrated in the pamphlets of the Protestant Reformation and American Revolution as well as the tweets, videos, and Facebook messages of the Arab Spring. Throughout the work explicit connections are made between modern technologies and their predecessors. The final chapter and epilog consider modern social media not only as the current form of this historical phenomenon but also as a way for average citizens to resume the roles of authors and publishers, roles that had been corporatized in the broadcast era of the past century. VERDICT Sociologists as well as technologists can enjoy this historical background to modern social media.--Wade M. Lee, Univ. of Toledo Lib.

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