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

SOCIAL MEDIA - THE FIRST 2,000 YEARS: what a great subtitle! Especially if the title is WRITING ON THE WALL (October 2013) and if the author is much published, insightful Tom Standage, digital editor of the ECONOMIST of London. *** For subjective me, this may be the best non-fiction book of the past ten years. It does two or three important things very well: frames within two thousand years of history today's fast evolving world of texting, FACEBOOK, SKYPE, TWITTER and other social networking media; argues suasively that the roughly 150 years (c. 1830 - c. 1980) of centralized one-way "broadcast" media dominance -- by newspapers, magazines, radio and television -- is an aberration. Writing for people you know who can return your message and pass it along to others who can pass it further along -- i.e., SOCIAL MEDIA -- is the normal, human way to communicate in writing. ***Sweeping through history, Tom Standage speculates about the origin of human language. He then reviews development of writing from Babylonian cuneiform through Egyptian hieroglyphics and into Semitic, Greek and Roman alphabets. Plato denounces writing as inferior to face to face dialog. Writing weakens your memory. Spoken dialog is the natural way to learn. *** One of Standage's finest chapters is on Rome. We see Caesar and Cicero exchanging letters. We find the letter-writing Roman aristocracy's ownership of cheap, learned Greek slaves as a plausible reason why Rome did not invent the printing press and moveable type despite all the elements being at hand. Slaves were just so doggone inexpensive! ***After Guttenberg and his Bibles, we are next shown Martin Luther and the rapid spread of his ideas in Germany once he stopped writing in learned Latin and switched to pithy German pamphlets. His first 60 Catholic opponents replied in academic Latin and Luther was outread by Germans at least ten to one. Those short printed pamphlets passed from hand to hand. They provoked discussion and revision. *** Tudor and Stuart England's experiments with government control of books, pamphlets and printers -- often by chopping off hands or execution -- was essentially dead by 1690. John Milton's 1644 AREOPAGITICA was an eloquent plea for freedom of the press. In the North American British colonies, both while still loyal and later in rebellion, England's efforts at press control failed. Thomas Paine's COMMON SENSE made him the best selling author in the world. Thomas Jefferson said that if he had to choose, he would opt for a free press over a free government! *** And so century by century WRITING ON THE WALL reviews Western Civilization's efforts to communicate in writing with friends without government interference or control -- via Social Networking, Social Media. Early American wired telegraphers formed the world's first simultaneous virtual communities and they used time between business messages to communicate with fellow telegraphers. Marconi made his wireless span the globe. Wireless chaos during and after sinking of the TITANIC ended the free-wheeling, unregulated days of wireless radio. *** Broadcast media became monopolies or oligopolies of governments or for profit capitalist owners and major advertisers. Letters to the editor were not their stock in trade. One-way broadcast messages were the norm for 150 years. Then came ARPANET, the internet, the world wide web, weblogging = BLOGGING, Twitter, Facebook and much much more: biographies, walls, texting, intstant interchanges with "friends." Conventions such as posting messages in reverse chronological order, etc. Today's social media are leveling. Anti-aristocratic. Democratic. But I think aristocrat-lite Cicero would have grasped how charmingly human today's social media are -- at least, at their best. -OOO-