Writing on the Wall: Social Media - The First 2,000 Years

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.