Writing on the Wall: Social Media - The First 2,000 Years
Ratings3
Average rating3.3
15
Ratings3
Average rating3.3
From the bestselling author of A History of the World in 6 Glasses, the story of social media from ancient Rome to the Arab Spring and beyond. Social media is anything but a new phenomenon. From the papyrus letters that Cicero and other Roman statesmen used to exchange news, to the hand-printed tracts of the Reformation and the pamphlets that spread propaganda during the American and French revolutions, the ways people shared information with their peers in the past are echoed in the present. Standage reminds us how historical social networks have much in common with modern social media. The Catholic Church's dilemmas in responding to Martin Luther's attacks are similar to those of today's large institutions in responding to criticism on the Internet, for example, and seventeenth-century complaints about the distractions of coffeehouses mirror modern concerns about social media. Invoking figures from Thomas Paine to Vinton Cerf, co-inventor of the Internet, Standage explores themes that have long been debated, from the tension between freedom of expression and censorship to social media's role in spurring innovation and fomenting revolution. Writing on the Wall draws on history to cast provocative new light on today's social media and encourages debate and discussion about how we'll communicate in the future.
Reviews with the most likes.
This is a great book. I learned so much about the different ways people have historically acquired and shared information since the days of the Roman Empire. We like to think that we're pioneers in inventing and using social media, but Standage shows us that people have been doing much the same thing (even fomenting revolution) with whatever technology they had to hand for a very long time. An example that I thought was especially striking is the story Standage tells about telegraph operators forming a kind of online community among themselves. Operators who never met each other, who were stationed thousands of miles away from each other, would chat or play chess over the telegraph wires when there weren't any messages to transmit. Some people who were stationed in remote areas even came to prefer interacting with their online community of telegraph operators than with the people in their own physical locale.
The book has an extensive bibliography and is engagingly written.
