Social Media: A Historical Perspective | Tom Standage | Talks Google

Summary

In this insightful talk, Tom Standage explores the historical roots of social media, arguing that it's not a modern phenomenon but has existed for centuries. He discusses how the Romans used social networks for communication, Martin Luther leveraged the printing press for religious reformation, and 17th-century coffeehouses served as hubs for information exchange. Standage suggests that the current social media landscape mirrors these ancient practices, indicating a return to a pre-mass media model of information sharing.

Takeaways

• 📚 The speaker, Tom Standage, argues that social media is not a new phenomenon but has historical precedents dating back to ancient Rome, challenging the notion that it's a historically unprecedented innovation.
• 🔄 He defines social media as a horizontal, two-way transmission of information through social networks, creating distributed communities or discussions, contrasting it with vertical, one-way transmission like traditional broadcasting.
• 🏛 Standage suggests that the Roman Republic represents an early form of social media environment due to widespread literacy, low costs of copying and delivering information, and the use of slaves as a form of 'Roman broadband'.
• 📜 The script describes how Romans, particularly the elite, used social media-like practices for political and social news dissemination, using messengers and scribes to copy and distribute letters, similar to modern retweeting.
• 📰 The 'Acta Diurna,' a daily summary of political and social events in Rome, is highlighted as an early form of news media that was socially distributed, with people sending relevant parts to friends in other regions.
• 💼 The Apostle Paul's use of social media to distribute epistles and bind early Christian communities is mentioned, showing how social media can shape religious and social movements.
• ✉️ The script discusses the role of the printing press in the rapid spread of Martin Luther's 95 Theses, which led to the Reformation, illustrating how advancements in technology can amplify the impact of social media.
• ☕ The 17th-century coffeehouses of England are presented as social media platforms where people from different social classes could discuss and share information, fostering innovation and the exchange of ideas.
• 📔 Commonplace books are likened to modern social media platforms like Tumblr and Pinterest, where users curate and share content created by others, highlighting the historical continuity of content sharing.
• 📉 Standage reflects on the shift from social media to mass media in the 19th century with the advent of technologies like the steam press, leading to centralized information dissemination and a temporary departure from social distribution systems.
• 🌐 The script concludes by emphasizing the resurgence of social media's role in information sharing, suggesting that the internet has enabled a return to a more distributed model of media consumption, challenging the broadcast model of old media.

Q & A

What is the main argument presented by Tom Standage in the transcript?

Tom Standage argues that social media is not a new phenomenon but rather has historical precedents dating back centuries. He suggests that social media can be traced back to the Roman Republic and has evolved through various forms such as coffeehouses and pamphlets, each serving as a platform for social interaction and information dissemination.

What does Standage mean by 'horizontal two-way transmission' in the context of social media?

By 'horizontal two-way transmission,' Standage refers to the exchange of information or media that travels along social networks, allowing for a distributed community or discussion. This is in contrast to 'vertical one-way transmission,' which implies a top-down flow of information from a single source to a passive audience.

According to the transcript, what role did literacy play in the development of early social media environments?

Literacy was a crucial factor in the development of early social media environments, as it allowed individuals to read and write messages being passed around. This was essential for the creation of a distributed community that could engage in discussions and share information through written media.

How does Standage describe the Roman Republic as an early example of a social media environment?

Standage describes the Roman Republic as an early social media environment due to the low cost of copying and delivering information, which he likens to modern broadband. Slavery in Rome facilitated the cheap replication and distribution of messages, and literacy was widespread among the middle class, enabling the use of written media for social interaction.

What is the significance of the Roman 'Acta Diurna' in the context of Standage's argument?

The 'Acta Diurna' is significant as it represents an early form of official news media in the Roman Republic. It was a daily summary of political and social events that was made publicly available, and its distribution through social networks and personal correspondence is an example of how news traveled in early social media systems.

How did the Apostle Paul utilize the Roman social media system according to the transcript?

The Apostle Paul used the Roman social media system to distribute his epistles across churches in Asia Minor and Greece. By encouraging the reading and copying of his letters in local churches, he was able to bind together a distributed community of believers, thus using social media to form and strengthen the early Christian church.

What role did the printing press play in the spread of Martin Luther's 95 Theses, as discussed in the transcript?

The printing press played a crucial role in the rapid dissemination of Martin Luther's 95 Theses. Once printers got hold of the theses, they were able to produce thousands of copies, which were then distributed to other towns and translated into local languages, greatly increasing the reach and impact of Luther's critique of the Catholic Church.

How did coffeehouses function as media sharing platforms in the 17th century, as described in the transcript?

Coffeehouses functioned as media sharing platforms by providing a space where people could read and discuss a variety of printed materials, such as pamphlets, newsletters, and newspapers. They fostered an environment of free conversation and the exchange of ideas, which contributed to the spread of information and the development of new ventures and innovations.

What is the 'commonplace book' mentioned in the transcript, and how does it relate to modern social media practices?

A 'commonplace book' was a notebook used to record interesting quotes, poems, or ideas that an individual encountered. It was a form of personal curation and reflection. Standage draws a parallel between commonplace books and modern social media platforms like Tumblr and Pinterest, where much of the content shared consists of reblogs or repins of other people's content, representing a form of self-expression through the curation of others' work.

How does Standage suggest that the history of media should be reevaluated in light of the internet and social media?

Standage suggests that the history of media should be reevaluated by recognizing that the period of mass media, characterized by centralized one-way broadcast, is the historical anomaly. He proposes that the internet and social media have brought us back to a state where social distribution systems can compete with mass media, and that this shift is more of a return to the long-standing tradition of social media rather than a new phenomenon.

What are some of the lessons that Standage believes can be drawn from historical social media systems for today's users?

Standage believes that historical social media systems can offer insights into the potential of social media for innovation, the role of social media in synchronizing public opinion and potentially acting as an accelerant for revolutions, and the enduring nature of social media as a format for information exchange and community building.

Outlines

00:00

📚 Social Media's Historical Roots and Horizontal Transmission

Tom Standage discusses the misconception that social media is a new phenomenon, arguing that it has existed for centuries in various forms. He emphasizes the importance of literacy and the cost of copying and delivering messages as key factors in the existence of social media environments. Using the Roman Republic as an example, Standage illustrates how slavery served as a means of information dissemination, akin to modern broadband. He also highlights the role of social networks in distributing media and creating communities, drawing parallels between ancient practices and contemporary digital networks.

05:01

🏛️ Roman Social Media and the Role of Slavery in Information Dissemination

This paragraph delves into the specifics of how the Roman elite utilized social media through the use of slaves as messengers and scribes, effectively creating private postal services. The letters of Cicero serve as a case study, demonstrating how messages were copied and circulated among the elite, reflecting the intertwining of social and political news. The paragraph also touches on the significance of marriage and divorce within the political landscape and how the Roman social media system facilitated the spread of news and the formation of alliances or conflicts.

10:03

📰 The Acta Diurna: Ancient Rome's Official Gazette and News Propagation

The discussion shifts to the 'Acta Diurna,' a daily summary of political and social events in Rome, founded by Julius Caesar. Standage describes the unique method of distribution, which involved a single copy being displayed in the Forum for public reading. He also highlights the use of scribes by the wealthy to copy relevant news, and the subsequent sharing of this information through letters. This system is compared to modern social media, emphasizing the social distribution of news and the desire for commentary and analysis alongside the raw content.

15:03

✝️ Apostle Paul's Use of Roman Social Media to Spread Christianity

Standage explores the apostle Paul's innovative use of the Roman social media system to disseminate his epistles and unify early Christian communities. By encouraging the reading and copying of his letters across churches, Paul was able to bind these communities together, despite geographical separation. This method of social distribution played a crucial role in the formation and spread of Christianity, with the epistles serving as a medium for doctrine, prayer, and community support.

20:05

📖 Martin Luther and the Power of the Printed Word in Social Media

The narrative moves to the 16th century and Martin Luther's use of the printing press to amplify his social media campaign against the Catholic Church's practices, particularly indulgences. Luther's initial intent was to spark debate, but the widespread circulation of his theses, facilitated by printers, led to a rapid and unexpected spread of his ideas. This section underscores the transformative impact of the printing press on social media, enabling Luther to reach a broader audience and incite significant religious and social change.

25:05

☕️ The Coffee House as a 17th Century Social Media Hub

Standage introduces the coffee house as a significant platform for media sharing and social interaction in 17th century England. These venues provided a space for the public to engage with a variety of printed materials, from pamphlets to newsletters, fostering an environment of free conversation and idea exchange. The paragraph highlights the coffee house's role in facilitating the blending of social classes and the emergence of innovative ideas, such as the formation of Lloyd's of London and the London Stock Exchange.

30:06

📘 Commonplace Books and the Evolution of Content Sharing

The discussion turns to commonplace books, which served as personal notebooks for recording interesting content, such as quotes or poems. Standage draws a parallel between these books and modern-day social media platforms like Tumblr and Pinterest, where users curate and share content. The paragraph examines the historical practice of exchanging and annotating these books within social circles, highlighting the continuous thread of social media's influence on content sharing and self-expression.

35:07

🗞️ The Shift from Social to Mass Media and Its Impact on Information Dissemination

Standage reflects on the 19th-century shift from social to mass media, marked by the invention of technologies like the steam press, which allowed for efficient distribution of information to large audiences. This shift led to the centralization of media production and a decrease in social participation. The paragraph contrasts the local, socially driven newspapers of the early 19th century with the mass-produced newspapers of the late 19th century, noting the concentration of media control in the hands of a few.

40:08

🌐 The Internet's Role in Reviving Social Media and Its Historical Significance

In the final paragraph, Standage discusses the internet's role in reviving social media by reducing the cost of information dissemination. He argues that the current shift towards social platforms for news consumption is a return to a historical norm, rather than a new phenomenon. The paragraph concludes by emphasizing the importance of understanding social media's historical context, suggesting that the broadcast era was the anomaly, and that the resurgence of social media is a reversion to older, more democratic forms of information sharing.

Keywords

💡Social Media

Social media refers to platforms that enable the creation and sharing of content, as well as the interaction among users. In the video, it is discussed as not just a modern phenomenon but one with historical roots, dating back to the Roman era. The script uses the Roman Republic as an early example of a social media environment, where the exchange of written messages was facilitated by the availability of literacy and low costs of copying and delivering information.

💡Horizontal Transmission

Horizontal transmission in the context of the video refers to the peer-to-peer exchange of information, as opposed to vertical transmission which is top-down. The script explains that social media is characterized by this horizontal flow, where media is shared among people in a network, leading to the formation of distributed communities or discussions.

💡Literacy

Literacy is the ability to read and write, and it is highlighted in the script as a prerequisite for the existence of a social media environment. In ancient Rome, widespread literacy among the middle class allowed for the circulation of written messages, which is likened to modern social media interactions.

💡Cicero

Cicero was a Roman statesman and orator whose letters provide a detailed look into the Roman social media system. The script uses Cicero's correspondence as an example of how letters were copied and circulated among friends and acquaintances, serving as a form of social media in the Roman era.

💡Retweet

The term 'retweet' is used metaphorically in the script to describe the Roman practice of copying and forwarding letters. Cicero's actions of sending copies of letters he received to his friend Atticus is likened to the modern act of retweeting on Twitter, illustrating the parallel between past and present social media behaviors.

💡Epistles

Epistles, or letters, are a form of written communication that were widely used in the Roman Empire and later during the time of Martin Luther. The script discusses how the Apostle Paul used epistles to communicate with and unite early Christian churches, which is an early example of social media's role in community building.

💡Printing Press

The printing press is identified in the script as a key technological advancement that facilitated the spread of ideas and information, similar to the role of the internet today. It allowed for the mass production of pamphlets containing Martin Luther's 95 Theses, accelerating the Protestant Reformation and demonstrating the power of social media to influence societal change.

💡Coffee Houses

Coffee houses are described in the script as 17th-century media sharing platforms where people gathered to discuss and exchange information. They served as hubs for the free flow of ideas and news, much like how social media platforms operate today, and were instrumental in fostering innovation and community engagement.

💡Commonplace Books

Commonplace books were personal notebooks used to record interesting quotes, poems, or ideas. The script likens them to modern-day social media platforms like Tumblr and Pinterest, where users curate and share content created by others, emphasizing the historical continuity of content sharing in social media.

💡Pamphlets

Pamphlets are small printed works often circulated for informational or persuasive purposes. In the script, they are discussed as a medium for distributing ideas and news in the past, similar to how content is shared on social media today. The English Civil War and the American Revolution are cited as periods where pamphlets played a significant role in spreading political messages.

💡Mass Media

Mass media refers to communication outlets that reach a large audience, such as newspapers, radio, and television. The script contrasts mass media with social media, arguing that the former was an historical anomaly due to the high cost of information dissemination technologies, whereas social media represents a return to the more ancient and widespread practice of decentralized information sharing.

Highlights

Social media is not a new phenomenon but has historical precedents dating back to ancient Rome.

The essence of social media lies in its horizontal, two-way transmission and the creation of distributed communities or discussions.

Literacy and low costs of copying and delivering messages are key components for a social media environment.

The late Roman Republic saw the first social media environment facilitated by the widespread use of slaves for message delivery.

Cicero's letters provide insights into the functioning of the Roman social media system, including the practice of copying and sharing letters.

Social and political news were intertwined in the Roman Empire, with families using private postal services for communication.

The Roman 'Acta Diurna' was an early form of daily newspaper, circulated through social networks and read on wax tablets similar to modern devices.

Apostle Paul utilized the Roman social media system to distribute his epistles and unify early Christian churches.

Martin Luther's 95 Theses were disseminated through social media-like mechanisms, including manuscript circulation and the printing press.

The printing press revolutionized the spread of ideas, enabling Luther's pamphlets to reach a wider audience and contribute to the Protestant Reformation.

Coffee houses in 17th-century England served as media sharing platforms, fostering the exchange of ideas and the birth of new ventures.

The concept of 'really old media' predates mass media, characterized by social distribution systems like the Roman Empire's communication practices.

The 19th-century shift to mass media centralized information distribution, but the internet has restored social media's role in information sharing.

Social media has been historically criticized for being a distraction and wasting time, similar to modern concerns about its impact on productivity.

Coffee houses were initially seen as detrimental to diligence and industry but later recognized as catalysts for innovation and the scientific revolution.

Social media's role in revolutions is not to start them but to synchronize opinion and accelerate their spread, as seen with Martin Luther and the Arab Spring.

The concept of social media is not a fad but has deep historical roots, suggesting its continued relevance and importance in society.

The history of media shows a shift from social distribution to mass media and back to social platforms, indicating a cyclical nature in how information is shared.

Transcripts

TOM STANDAGE: That is just such a good line.

I'm totally stealing that.

Now that the internet is just way to make you go faster

That's brilliant.

Thank you.

You'll be hearing that on NPR.

So thanks very much for having me here.

Thank you, Stephan, for making it all happen.

Yes, I've written this book about social media and the idea

that it's a very old thing and not

as we are encouraged to think of it--

new and shiny and completely historically unprecedented.

I don't think it is.

I think, actually, it has been around for a long time.

And that means it could be-- we can look at history

and we can learn about it.

We can learn some unexpected lessons from it.

So in order to make this claim, I

need to really define what I mean by social media.

So what do I mean by social media?

I think this is the sort of crucial aspect of social media

is horizontal two way transmission rather

than vertical one way transmission.

I can say that to an audience like this,

but this is what I normally have to say.

It's crucially media we get from other people.

And it travels along social networks,

and it results in the creation of a distributed

community or discussion.

So you can feel part of a group with other people who are not

physically present by exchanging media with them.

So that means I'm not including word of mouth.

I'm including anything that involves writing or copying

of media.

So clearly this is something we could do on the internet.

And we know what the network topology of that looks like.

But it turns out that this is something

that you don't need a digital network to do.

And I would contend that social media environment have in fact

existed for centuries.

So what do you need to have a social media environment?

I think you need to have, obviously, literacy.

Because in order to read and write the messages

you're passing around, you need to be literate.

But you also need the cost of copying them and delivering

them to be sufficiently low.

And I think this situation where that combination first arose

was in the late Roman Republic.

Copying and delivering information was cheap then.

It's cheap for us now because of broadband.

It was cheap then because of slavery.

And so slavery was the Roman broadband.

And this is a Roman couple from-- actually,

the first century AD, but around that time--

this is a mural from Pompeii.

And that chap on the right is a guy called Terentius Neo.

And he was a baker in Pompeii.

And that's his wife there.

And this is a mural from their house.

And he is holding a scroll and this

is the label on the scroll, this bit here.

So when you had lots of scrolls on a shelf,

it was like the spine of a book.

It was how you could identify them.

And she is holding what looks like a Samsung Galaxy Note 3,

but is in fact a Roman wax tablet sort of note pad thing.

And what seems to be the case is that he is the baker,

and she actually runs the books and runs the business.

So they are saying in this mural, look at us,

we are literate.

They're proud of their literacy.

And they are members of the Roman middle class,

and not members of the elite.

But this shows you that literacy was quite widespread

among both men and women.

But it's among the Roman elite that we really

see the social media system working.

Because they've got-- a rich noble

would have actually several slaves on his staff

who were just messengers.

And their job was to just run around delivering

and collecting messages on his behalf.

And so really big families have their own essentially private

postal services.

And they could have messages taken wherever they want.

And they would also have scribes so they

can have documents copied very quickly.

And if we look at the letters of Cicero,

which is the best preserved set of correspondence

from this period.

And interestingly, we have his inbox and his out box.

We can see how the Roman social media system works.

And so this is an example from a letter of Cicero's-- "I sent

you on March 24th a copy of Balbus' letter to me

and of Caesar's letter to him."

And this is a letter that Cicero is writing--

I think-- to his friend Atticus.

So if you think about what's happening here,

Balbus has written to Cicero, and Cicero's copying

that letter to Atticus.

But Caesar has also written to Balbus,

and Balbus has copied that letter to Cicero,

and Cicero is now copying that to Atticus.

So this is a third level retweet basically.

And this is what people did.

This is what they did with their letters.

And the reason they did was that the Roman elite

was a bunch of intermarried families.

And the political news and the social news

were very tangled up because if two families fell out,

that could actually mean civil war.

And if two families formed an alliance,

that would change the political landscape.

And that might be cemented with a marriage.

But then if there was a divorce, that would mean that,

potentially, there was obstruction

and there was going to be political fallout.

So what we see is all of these member

of the Roman elite writing to each other.

And we see some quite forming letters

that Cicero writes to other people

to remind them of that he's their friend when

he's in trouble.

And then other people writing to him when he's on top.

And there, they're worried about their position.

And so the social and the political

are very closely mixed together.

Here's another example.

On this occasion, Cicero has written a letter

criticizing Caesar, and he's put it into general circulation.

So he's sent copies of it to many of his friends,

and they've copied to and passed it on.

And he's also kept-- because he kept copies of everything he

sent-- he would have kept the rough copies,

and his scribe would then make the neat copies to send out.

He says that he's actually allowed people who've said,

I've heard you've written a really scorching letter

about Caesar.

Can I have a copy of it?

So this is what he's allow to happen here.

And the same would happen with speeches.

So if you were a Roman and you gave a speech

and you're particularly proud of it, you would put copies of it

in circulation.

So that even people who haven't been

able to hear you make the speech could read it.

And in fact, more people might then read the speech

than had actually seen you deliver the speech.

And Roman books were also propagated in this way.

A book would be a set of rolls in a box.

And if you were a Roman author, you

would choose the wealthiest, most influential patron

that you could.

Actually, you would choose the patron

who had the most foot traffic going through his library.

And you would then have the book put

in his library or your dedicated to him.

And you would hope that the people passing

through the library would read it and be so impressed

that they would ask for a copy of it.

And at that point, he would get his scribes to make a copy.

And this is why the slaves and the scribes are like broadband.

The marginal cost per page is zero at this point.

Because he's paid for the slave, and he's

paying for the upkeep of the slave in the same way

that you pay you're broadband bill every month.

And so you can have as many pages copied out as you like,

you just have to wait for them to download.

So this is why it's like broadband.

So the books would then spread from one library to another.

And if you were really successful,

you could tell you'd make it as a Roman author

if you went to the book seller's street in Rome

and you saw a copy of your book on sale.

That would mean enough people were going to the book sellers

and saying, have you got the new Thomas Standage's?

And eventually they would find someone who had it

and make some copies so that they could sell them.

So they would only do that if there was sufficient demand

so books were propagating socially.

But my favorite example is the way

the news circulated in the sort of official gazette.

And it's called the "Acta Diurna."

It was founded by Julius Caesar in 59 BC.

And as someone who works in news media,

that means he sort of founded our industry, which

is quite funny.

And this was a summary of the debates that's

happened in the Senate and in the People's Assembly each day.

And it was also a roundup of births, deaths, marriages,

and divorces, because those were politically very important.

And announcement of public holidays, the gladiator

results, that kind of stuff.

And this newspaper was produced each day.

But it was bizarrely-- by a sort of traditions of the newspaper

industry-- the circulation was apparently rather low.

Only one copy of it was made.

And it was put up in the Forum.

And if you want to read it, you have to go to the Forum

and read it yourself.

Or, if you were a wealthy noble and you had a scribe,

you could send a scribe down to copy down

the bits that are most relevant to you.

And then you could read it over breakfast.

And you would do that using a device that looked like this.

And this is a Roman iPad.

And this is exactly the size and the shape

and the aspect ratio of the modern iPad.

And you'll notice, Google folks, that it's not 16:9.

So the Romans decided that the big bevel, which

Apples apparently about to get rid of,

and 4:3 was the way to go.

Anyway, they also have the smaller ones

we saw early on which is this sort of thing.

These were things you could note stuff down on.

I'll go back to the Roman iPad there.

So you could then read the news on this,

and then you would send the news that you thought

would interest your friends to them in a letter.

And we see this-- we see it in the letters of Pliny and Pliny

the Elder and also in letters of Cicero and Tacitus

talked about this as well-- that when a Roman was outside Rome,

they would expect their friends to keep them

abreast of the news by sending them

the most relevant parts of the "Acta."

And in some cases, in fact, entire copies

of the "Acta Diurna" transcribed.

And that way they could keep up with what was happening.

But they didn't just what the raw content of the "Acta,"

they wanted the discussion of it the commentary

and the analysis that their friends would provide around it

as well.

So the Romans were using their friends to sift the news

and to deliver the news.

It was a social distribution system for all of this stuff

because, of course, there was no broadcast.

There was no printing press.

It was the only way you could actually do it.

And this seems to work very well.

We can tell that news from Rome would

get to Britain in the West and Syria

in the east in about five or six weeks.

And that's really not bad.

So news would propagate in from the Provinces to Rome,

and then would be also distributed

from the center outwards.

And there were boats going to and fro.

Seneca is very amusing.

He writes about how some people were so obsessed with getting

their mail that they-- when they saw the ships coming

from Egypt with the mail-- they would rush down to the harbor.

And he would sit down and sort of laugh at them

in the same way that people who are addicted

to their BlackBerrys are mocked-- or used

to be when anyone had BlackBerrys.

And this is a sort of being hooked

on the dopamine rush to getting your mail is something

that even the Romans were mocking.

Probably the most effective user for the Roman social media

system was the apostle Paul.

And he used it to distribute the epistles.

If you think about it, epistles are letters.

This is a classic example of how Roman letters were

passed around.

And so, this is what Paul says in his letter

to the Colossians.

So he's got this network of churches

across Asia Minor and Greece.

And he's writing to them all.

And he's encouraging them to read out the letters in church,

and then to copy them to local churches.

And also to get copies of the letter

that he's written to those churches.

And what happens is all the chapters

end up with a set of all the letters that he's written.

And they end up being made into part of the New Testament.

And by doing this, what he's doing

is binding together this community of churches.

He's making them feel like a distributed group that

are connected to each other.

And they hear about one of the Church's being persecuted,

and they're invited to pray for the members of that church.

And he resolves matters of doctrine and answers questions.

And that's something that they're all interested in

and they all want to hear about.

So he helps to form the Christian church

in the first century AD using social media.

And the social distribution of the epistle

are still going on today.

In churches on Sundays when epistle is read out,

that is the same social distribution

system still in action.

Which is something that's been going on for a very long time.

And in fact, what Paul's doing is he's arguing at this stage

with other members of the early church who

think that Christianity should be just the Jews.

And he's arguing that, no, it should be open to everyone.

And because he essentially runs the more effective social media

campaign, he prevails.

Which is why Christianity ends up

being an open religion in the way that it did.

So this is, as far as I could see,

the first example of a social media system.

You've got enough literacy, you've

got enough-- it's cheap enough to copy and deliver

information.

And so you get social media first in the Roman world.

And what I do in the book is I look

at many other examples of this.

So I'll touch on a couple of others.

So here's the second one.

This is 1,500 years later.

Again it involves the Christian church.

But instead of using social media to reinforce the church,

this is Martin Luther using it to actually split the church.

That wasn't his initial intention.

Initially, he just wanted to have

a debate about the doctrine of indulgences.

And these are sort of tickets that the Catholic church would

sell you to get out of purgatory after you died.

And the idea was that if you gave them some money

to help them build-- in this case, Saint Peter's Rome,

that giant cathedral-- they would then give you

a ticket that would mean when you died,

you wouldn't have to spend so long in purgatory.

And Luther thought this all sounded a bit silly.

Because the sales people were saying you could also

buy tickets for your already dead relatives who were,

presumably, stuck in purgatory at that point,

and you'd be able to release them straight away.

And they were playing well at fast and loose

with this doctrine.

So Luther drew up this list of problems he had with this.

If he'd done it these days, he'd have done it--

I'm sure-- as a listicle.

It would've been on BuzzFeed.

You know, 95 crazy questions the pope

must answer about indulgences.

But of course, it wasn't.

It was 1518, so he didn't do that.

Instead, he wrote them in Latin and pinned them to the door

to church in Bittenburg where he was a theologian.

And this was the notice board for the university.

So he was inviting people to come and debate

with him about this.

Now, this was so explosive that people

started to copy down the theses and circulate them

to their friends.

These are the theses that he wanted to debate.

The 95 theses.

And so far, this sounds like a Roman distribution system.

You've got people copying stuff down in Latin

and sending it to their friends, manuscript form.

But of course, what's happened since the Roman period is

the printing press has been invented.

And so eventually, some printers get hold of this

and they print them.

And print 1,000 copies, so that's a very big increase

in the number of copies in circulation.

Those copies get carried to other towns.

Those printers there get hold of it, they print it.

Some of the printers translate this into German

so that more people can read it.

And the result is that these 95 propositions--

written in, frankly, very impenetrable theological

Latin-- spread very, very quickly.

And a contemporary of Luther's says

that in fact it took two weeks for the theses

to spread throughout Germany, and only a month

for the rest of continental Europe.

So this was extraordinary.

And it was a complete surprise to Luther.

He wasn't expecting to do this.

He said, the theses "are printed and circulated

far beyond my expectation."

But he realized this presented him with an opportunity.

If he wanted to take his message about problems

with the corruption of the Catholic Church

and the need to reform it to the people,

he could use this mechanism.

So he followed up with a series of pamphlets, mostly written

in German.

And a very easy to understand German which

avoided any sort of dialectic-- regional dialects.

And he would simply take the text on one of these pamphlets

that he would write and give it to a printer in his town.

And they would print 1,000 copies.

And then those copies would ripple to other towns.

And printers there would print them as well.

They would spread and spread in this way.

And he didn't have to do anything.

The audience was sufficiently interested in his message

that they amplified it themselves.

And the printers were sort of special super nerds

who could make this application much, much more efficient.

And so you could measure how effectively his campaign

worked.

Today, we measure social media campaigns by how many +1s

or likes or retweets or reblogs or repins they get.

But for Luther it was the number of reprints

by printers that's the really crucial thing.

And it shows that you can do Martin Luther's traffic stats.

And it looks like this.

And this shows you have a great big spike in traffic in 1523,

which is the height of the Reformation.

Where you've got all the order world

353 prints of 1,000-- maybe 2,000--

copies of these pamphlets.

What's happening here is that the blue pamphlets

are Latin ones and the red ones are German ones.

And the dark bits are the number of new pamphlets

that Martin Luther is issuing each year.

And the white ones are the number of reprints.

So you see, mostly what he's doing is writing in German.

But he did write some in Latin because he was also

addressing the theological audience

to who he wrote in Latin.

You can see that the retweets of existing pamphlets

are sort of more important than the number

of the actual pamphlets that he's putting out.

And overall, there was something like 5 to 7 million pamphlets

by Luther and others floating around Europe

within the first 10 years of the Reformation.

And the result was the splitting of Western Christendom,

and the emergence of Protestant churches and Protestant

Christianity.

So this is the result of social media campaign that

is helped along by improvements in the technology

of propagation, in this case printing.

Here's another example very dear to me which is coffee houses.

And coffee houses were particularly popular

in England.

And they became popular in the second half

of the 17th century.

And coffee houses were media sharing platforms.

You went to them because they had

all sorts of things to read.

So this is an example on the right

of what a pamphlet would look like.

And again, pamphlets were very often written

in the form of letters, even if they weren't actually

letters to real people.

So this is a letter from a gentleman in Kent

to a friend in London.

And this is a literary device just

to say a particular thing about what's going on.

But it was the sort of thing you'd find in coffee houses

where you could go and you would find a very free conversation.

And you could read all manner of printed news instead

of being used books-- which are precursors of newspapers.

There would be pamphlets, there would

be handwritten newsletters that were called "Letters of News."

These were gathered by the precursors of journalists.

They were people who went around listening and talking

and exchanging gossip and then they'd write it down

and they would send these "Letters of News"

to paying subscribers in the countryside.

And again, that's quite a Roman sort of way of doing things.

So you can find all of these things in coffee house

and you could discuss stuff with people.

And it was a very alluring information environment.

And we see this from the diary of Samuel Pepys.

He often says, "service to the coffee house."

And he tells you all the sorts of amazing people he would meet

and things you would learn.

That he would meet a merchant from the South Seas who'd

seen people who'd learn to write with their feet.

Or there's a new kind of fruit called a pineapple,

or that sort of thing.

And so it was a very alluring information environment.

In fact, some people thought it was too alluring.

And that people were spending too much

of their time just hanging out and coffeehouse networking

and sharing gossip with their friends.

So it's a very sort of recognizably modern

environment.

And one of the reasons that it was that people were encouraged

to mix socially in a way that they otherwise normally

wouldn't.

So there was a convention of politeness

in coffee houses and a convention

that you would leave distinctions of social class

behind as you entered there.

So you would enter, you would pay a penny

for dish of coffee-- and that was

the kind of admission price-- and then

you could join in the conversation.

And the idea was, as a contemporary description,

"gentleman mechanic, lord and scoundrel

mix and are all of a piece."

What this means is that ideas were

able to cross social boundaries in a way

that they previously couldn't have done.

And so this was what made going to a coffee house so exciting.

That you never knew-- the serendipity

was part of the attraction.

You never knew who you might meet or what you might learn.

And I have many more examples in the book.

This is a commonplace book.

Commonplace books were notebooks where

you would write down cool stuff.

And it might be a poem that had been

sent by a friend, a new sonnet by Shakespeare perhaps.

Or an aphorism-- maybe you're reading one of the classics,

and there was a particularly good quote

from Cicero or from Tacitus or something like that.

You think, oh that's great, I'm going to write that down

in my commonplace book.

And that way, when you wanted to remember it later,

you'd know that it was in your commonplace book.

And then you might also write a letter

to a friend saying, by the way, I've

come across this really great quote today.

And they would then-- if they thought it was awesome

as well, they would copy it into their commonplace books.

Sometimes people would exchange commonplace books.

Or they would sometimes share commonplace books

within families, within groups of friends, where people would

write these things down and write poems and comment

on each other's stuff.

And this looks to be very similar to what

we see with, say, tumblr and Pinterest,

where 80 percent of the content circulating on those networks

is rebills or repins of other people's stuff.

So it's self expression through the curation

of other people's content.

And some of what you post is original,

but actually the vast majority is

the selection of other people stuff.

So that is quite a striking parallel

I think, with the way some social platforms work today.

And there are others as well.

I talk about pamphlets in the English Civil War,

the circulation of poetry in the Tudor Court,

the circulation of pamphlets in the run up

to the American Revolution, the circulation

of poems on tiny slips of paper in the run

up to the French Revolution.

And all of these have characteristics

that are very similar to different aspects

of social media today.

So the idea, that is, that this has all

got a much deeper and richer history than we might think.

So what happened it?

Why is it that we've failed to notice this before?

Well, I think the reason is that we had this big shift that

took place in the 19th century where

we went from this sort of network topology

to this sort of thing.

And essentially, machines were invented

starting with the steam press and later radio and TV

transmitters.

That made it possible to deliver information single message

to a large audience very, very efficiently.

And this changed the way that information travelled.

People still wrote each other letters

and exchanged information socially.

But this is was much more efficient

that more of their media diet came from these centralized one

way broadcast sources.

If you look at newspapers in the beginning of the 19th century,

the average circulation newspaper was 1,000 or 2,000/

they were very, very local and they were sent

to the local's social platforms.

Most of what was in newspapers was

letters sent in by readers, reports of speeches, and so on.

It was not articles written by professional journalists.

And what happens by the end of the 19th century

is that steam presses make it possible to have newspapers

with a million copies being produced a day.

And what this does-- because the equipment needed

to do this to reach a large audience

is so expensive-- that gradually,

the scale of these platforms goes up

and the barrier to entry gets bigger and bigger.

This means that the access to that technology--

the ability to send your thoughts to lots of people--

is concentrated into the hands of a very small number

of people-- journalists and opinion leaders, politicians.

And most people are not participating

in the system other than to be recipients of information.

And I think the most sort of the infamous example of this

is the Nazi Volksempfanger.

So we've heard of the Volkswagen, the people's car.

This is the people's receiver.

And the Nazis recognized the power of radio

to impress their view of the world on the German people.

And the Volksempfanger was deliberately

designed not to be able to pick up foreign broadcast.

So all you could listen to was the Fuhrer banging on.

"Dans Deutschland hurt dem Fuhrer."

So, "the whole of Germany is the Fuhrer."

You could see that there they all are,

gathered symbolically around this radio.

This is as far away from the social media distribution

as is possible to get.

This is a single man imposing his view

of the world on an entire nation.

This is one way.

And this is as unequal as it's possible to be.

But of course what happened in the past 10 years

is that the internet has massively

reduced the cost of delivering information to large audiences.

So it's now possible for social distribution systems to compete

with broadcast and with mass media in a way that it

previously couldn't.

And we can see information to shifting.

We can see people are spending less time watching

TV and reading newspapers, and more time on social platforms

getting their friends to filter interesting stuff towards them.

And there are lots of surveys of young people showing

that they don't read newspapers at all.

And my children don't watch television,

they kind of watch YouTube.

And a lot of what they watch on YouTube

is usually generated content made by people like them

for people like them.

So I think this means we need to look at the history of media

in a very different way.

We used to think of it like this--

where we had old media, which was analog, and broadcast.

And then the internet came along,

and we have new media and digital

and it was more social in nature.

And this is a part of the picture.

I think if we look at the last 2,000 years,

it looks like this.

We need to have this period of really old media

because nobody is not really that old.

I have the arbitrary date of 1833 here.

Because that's the year that the first penny newspaper was

launched, "The New York Sun."

And it was the first newspaper that adopted the new mass media

model where most of the money came from advertisers not

subscribers.

And you use the fact that you had a large audience

to appeal to advertisers who then gave you that money.

To bootstrap that model, the founder of "The New York Sun"

did a rather clever thing.

Instead of selling his newspaper at $0.06 like everyone else,

he sold it at $0.01 which means he'd lose money.

So he copied ad words from the other newspapers

and put them in.

And then he went to advertisers and said,

look, all of these other companies are advertising.

Maybe you should.

And they all fell for it and signed up.

So that was how he bootstrapped the model.

And that model worked very nicely,

thank you, for the media industry

until just a few years ago.

At the peak in 2007, an average American newspaper

got 87 percent of its revenue from advertising.

So that turned out to be unsustainable,

and they're now having to find new models.

So I think we need to look at it like this

and we have to recognize that there was this very long period

of really old media which, in many ways,

is similar to new media.

And what new media has done is brought back

the spirit of the coffeehouse and the other social platforms

that were around before the advent of mass media.

So that means I think given that similarity between really

old media and new media, that ancient old social media

systems have lessons for us today.

Many of the questions we have about social media today

actually arose in conjunction with these ancient social media

systems as well.

So I think that could be quite informative.

And again, in the book I look at several examples of this.

But I'm just going to touch on three of them now

that relate to the three examples

that I gave you earlier on-- so the Roman, Luther

and coffeehouses.

Let's start with this one.

Is social media merely a dangerous destruction

that wastes time?

This is very common to critique of social media today.

In particular, the idea that social networking

should really be called not working.

And it's a sort of way of avoiding work

rather in the way of doing anything useful.

And this turns out to be a timeless complaint.

So this is Oxford in the 1670's.

Anthony Wood, who was an academic in Oxford,

is very worried about the fact that, "solid and serious

learning is in decline."

And the students are not actually doing

work anymore because they're in coffee houses all the time.

And it's not just in Oxford.

Meanwhile in Cambridge, "Hours are spent in talking

and less profitable reading of newspapers-- scholars

are so greedy after news they neglect all for it."

And another pamphlet from the period

warns that coffee houses are "Great enemies

to diligence and industry-- the ruin

of many serious and hopeful young gentleman and tradesmen."

And so this is all quite a modern sounding critique

of these very alluring platforms.

They're so alluring that people go in and don't realize

what's happened and hours later as they

emerge realizing that the afternoon has disappeared.

It has turned out to be actually exactly wrong.

If you look at what coffee houses actually

did in the late 17th century, they

turned out to be-- rather than enemies of diligence

and industry-- they turned out to be crucibles of innovation.

Because of this mixing of ideas and people

who had previously not been able to encounter each other,

this was a really, really fantastic place

to come up with new ideas, new ventures,

whether that was joint stock companies, whether it

was the scientific revolution.

The Royal Society came out of meetings held in coffeehouses

by scientists.

Isaac Newton writes "Principa Mathematica," the foundation

stone of modern science in order to settle a coffeehouse

argument between Hook, Haley, and Rand

about the nature of the inverse square law of gravity

and its relationship to the shapes of orbits.

Lloyd's of London starts off as a coffeehouse

where marine shippers meet and discuss insurance.

And then they realize that this is

something they're all interested in.

You have Lloyd's list pinned to the wall.

It turns into Lloyd's of London.

It goes from coffeehouse to insurance market.

Similarly, there's another coffeehouse

called Jonathan's where all the stock traders would

meet that turns into the London Stock Exchange.

So all of this innovation comes out of coffeehouses,

because they're very fertile environments

where people and ideas can mix.

And I think there's a lesson for us

there, that social media offers us similar opportunities

within companies, between companies, and as scientists

or individuals or artists-- that we can encounter people

and exchange ideas and come up with new cool stuff

as a result of it.

Second question.

So again, this is a very sort of current question.

The role of social media in revolutions and to what extent

were Facebook and Twitter factors

in causing Arab Spring and that sort of thing.

Well, it turns out that this is also a very old debate,

and we can ask Martin Luther.

Martin Luther says, "From the rapid spread of the theses,

I gather what the greater part of the nation

thinks of indulgences."

So this is a phenomenon that media scholars

call synchronization of opinion.

If you were Luther and you saw your pamphlets

spreading like wildfire-- One description

was that they were more seized than sold.

So people really couldn't wait to get their hands on them.

Then that told you that there was

quite a lot of support for your views.

And more importantly, if you were one of the readers of one

of Luther's pamphlets, pamphlets were quite accessible.

They cost about the same as a chicken.

So they were much, much less expensive than buying

a book, which was like buying a car.

So they really were accessible to ordinary people.

And if you went to the printer in your town and said,

I hear there's a new Martin Luther, have you got a copy?

And the printer said, no, sold out.

Then you knew that lots of other people in your town

were interested in what Luther had to say

and probably agreed with you that he was on to something.

And so this was how people across Europe

were able to recognize that their views about the nature

of the Catholic Church and corruption in the higher

echelons of the Catholic church was shared

by large numbers of other people.

And that's ultimately what enabled

the Reformation to get going.

And so I think the way of thinking about this--

And we saw the same with the Arab Spring,

where previous efforts by governments

had been successful to stifle outbursts

of local dissent, local protests.

But social media eventually allowed people

in one part of Tunisia to tell people

in the rest of Tunisia what was going on.

And then people across Tunisia could say, well,

hang on a minute, we all think that this isn't on.

And then you actually get change.

And so I think the way that you should

think about this is that social media doesn't actually

trigger or start revolutions.

There's an underlying grievance in both cases

here about the corruption of the Catholic church

or of the despotic leaders in various Arab countries.

And that's the ultimate cause.

And once there's a spark, social media

synchronizes opinion and allows the protest

to spread much more quickly.

So it's like an accelerant.

It doesn't start a fire, it helps it spread more quickly.

This is Jared Cohen's idea, a Google person.

And I think he's put his finger on it by saying,

it's the accelerant, is the right way of thinking about it.

Finally, is social media a fad?

Well, I hope that my very brief tour 2,000 years of it

has convinced you to actually this

is a very old idea with very deep roots and a very

rich history.

If we go back to this chart here you

can see that actually it's old media that

is the historical anomaly here.

This was just a consequence of the fact

that technologies to propagate information really

quickly to large audiences used to be really expensive.

And they used to be only available to a small number

of people.

And there were business models you could build around

that to do with scarcity and local monopolies.

But they don't work anymore, as we've

seen what's happened to the newspaper industry

in particular.

So that was the anomaly.

And really, new media and its similarity to really old media

is a sort of reversion to the way things used to be.

So I think this is a fad at all.

I think historically, the broadcast era

was the sort of fad-sh bit.

It was the historical anomaly.

So I think that means that we, users of social media today,

are as to a centuries long tradition even

if we didn't realize it.

What I've to tried to do is to put our use of social media

today in historical context.

And there are these very direct parallels

between the source of social media we use today,

and the source that existed in the past like this.

So I hope I've convinced you that social media doesn't just

connect us to each other today, it also links us to the past.

Thank you.

Oh, this is my book on the subject.

This is what it looks like.

AUDIENCE: So I was wondering what

lessons you can draw from the really old media in terms

of something else you mentioned, which was the business

models for newspapers that have kind of become obsolete now?

TOM STANDAGE: Well, I think all media companies are struggling

with now is how they make sharing their friend.

And we saw in-- the music industry was hit first by this.

And the model of the music industry

has sort of ended up with is that the emphasis on selling

music-- that's going to be of much

more part of their revenues in future.

And much more of it is going to come from basically tickets

to live events and merchandise and so on.

So there's been that shift there.

Similarly, newspapers are shifting away

from advertising funded models to subscription funded models.

Some of them can do advertising from it,

but they can't-- the number of papers,

the number of publications that that model will sustain is--

because they're all competing globally--

is nothing like as big as it used to be.

But my favorite example is actually the Asian video game

model.

Where instead of the consoles and selling

the games and the licensing fees to model

that we have in the West, you have

to model of distributing the client software.

And you actually want as many copies of it

to be made as possible, and to be as easy as possible

to download it.

And then you get a very large number of people playing a game

and it's free to play.

And then you sell in-game upgrades.

And that's where you'll model comes from.

So this is a model that works.

The more widely your client software is pirated,

the better it works.

And I think what we're all trying

to do in different parts of the industry

is work out how we make sharing our friends

in our particular industry.

AUDIENCE: So for every person that creates something great

based on social media or every group of people that does,

there's the average person.

Where it is genuinely just a big time suck

and they're not going to create the next "Principia

Mathematica".

So are there any lessons we can glean from the really old media

model to increase the amount of the great things that

come from social media?

TOM STANDAGE: Well, one of the timeless complaints

about media, whenever technology makes it easier

to distribute stuff is that there's then too much.

And that the wrong people are publishing the wrong thing.

So we see this now about the trivialization,

the coarsening of debate.

And one man's trivialization is another man's democratization.

And if we look at what happened to-- So Erasmus

is complaining around the time of Luther

that there are all these pamphlets flying around.

They're really short.

They're in German so they're really easy to read.

And this means no one's reading the classics in Latin and Greek

anymore, which he thinks is a big-- terrible.

So it's very similar to sort of modern complaints

that as media becomes easier to consume and more people

access to it that it's a bad thing.

But if you look at what happened-- and then

there was a sort of huge increase

in the number of books that were published.

And people felt very overwhelmed by it.

And people feel overwhelmed by what's happening now.

But what actually happened in the case of printing

in the last big step change here,

was that people figured out mechanisms, technologies,

to cope and to sift the good stuff from the bad.

So things like-- in the case of books-- book reviews

and tables of contents and bibliography and indexes.

And what all of those things are is

they are ways to figure out whether a particular book is

relevant to what you're doing and to find

the bits that are relevant to you quickly.

Without having to read-- because you can't plausibly

read all of the books about everything.

We're used to that now.

We're never going to be able books.

So instead, we rely on these other mechanisms

to identify the good stuff.

And I think that's what we're going

to have with-- we've obviously seen this with the internet.

We had the Yahoo directory model.

That was great for a while.

Then we had the search engine model.

That also got its merits.

Now, we seem to be in a world where we are using social

as part of the filtering process.

And there's this combination of search and social

that Google is doing as well.

So I think all of this is the process by which we determine

where the valuable stuff is.

And what's really good about these versions of it

is that it's capable of producing different answers

for different people.

So what I think is the really cool stuff

will be different from what you think is the really cool stuff.

But as far as I'm concerned, this

is the task you are engaged in which

is helping people find the-- organizing the world's

information.

And so what you're doing is part of this very, very long

historical continuum of some of what

people have been trying to do before.

AUDIENCE: What are your thoughts on the rate of information

delivery and how that's changed and maybe effected

attention spans or anything like that?

TOM STANDAGE: Well, certainly the analogy

isn't perfect in the sense that the internet is global,

instant, searchable, and maybe, permanent.

We don't know how permanent it is.

So the analogy though I think is close enough

to be informative because we see the same social reactions.

And my thesis is, in all of my writing about the history

of technology, that we essentially-- our brains

are still running the same Stone Age

software and different technologies

come and go and just push the same buttons in our brains.

So the Twitter pushes the same button for me

as coffeehouses did for the Samuel Pepys.

So in that sense, I'm sort of arguing that the rate of change

doesn't--

You know, people have always complained about this before.

A good example would be the step change

in the range of information that occurred with the telegraph

in the 19th century.

If you look at how stockbrokers used

to deal with their clients, you might

meet your stockbroker once a year, or maybe twice a year.

And you might say, I'm going to sell tea,

I'm going to buy gold.

What you think will happen to the price of tea

in next six months?

And then the telegraph meant that you

could have multiple price updates every day, globally.

And stockbrokers were not really terribly impressed by this.

Because it meant that they had to work a lot harder,

they were always getting messages

to buy or sell this, that and the other.

And they thought this was a big problem.

But of course, then the next generation of stockbrokers

thought this was totally normal and got used to it.

So we actually see this pattern again and again.

And we see the complaint that attention spans

are getting shorter.

We particularly see it with the telegraph, actually.

That it makes people nervous.

That we only skim the surface of things.

That it leads to politicians speaking in soundbites.

These are all actually complaints

that arrive in the 19th century.

So they're not actually new and the world didn't end then.

People have gotten used to it.

So I think that just tells us that we will just

get used to it again.

We'll have to find and identify and create

these coping mechanisms.

Some of which are technological, like tables

of contents or search engines.

And some of which are social technologies,

customs about how we should and should not use things.

But that's what's particularly bewildering about this.

And living through a period where we're still figuring out

our answers to those questions.

AUDIENCE: I was just looking at your timeline

and wanting to go back the other way.

I think you can add two more giant blocks of time

to that view which is the Dark Ages.

Which was a very centralized media from the church world.

There's a thousand year block where it wasn't the old media.

TOM STANDAGE: So what's the other block?

AUDIENCE: There was another block

before that was in the age of primitives and ziggurats.

Again, strong central control.

TOM STANDAGE: Well, yes I see what you mean.

Especially, it depends what you mean

by the consumption of media.

So most people aren't consuming it at all.

In the Dark Ages, you've got--

AUDIENCE: Well, it's the church.

TOM STANDAGE: You've got monks writing stuff out,

and then you've got the pulpit as a sort of quasi broadcast

medium.

Yes.

But I think that most people are not-- where

are they getting-- they're just not consuming media at all.

So the actual-- so it's very hard to work out what

the balance of distributed versus--

centralized versus social media is--

I should also stress this is very much Western centric view.

I have been looking for non Western examples,

and there's some quite nice cases of social poetry

in 10th and 11th century Japan, for example.

And what I'm hoping will happen is

that the publication of this book

will sort of flush out some more examples

and I'll be able to broaden it.

Going back to the period before the Romans,

I think basically the literacy rates were very low.

If you look at-- there are examples of-- you'll see,

there are a couple I have in the book where they're

are scribes in Egypt who have a sort of poetry club.

And they send each other poems.

But they were really very, very few examples of it

because literacy is so so restricted.

And in fact, in Egypt's, the scribes deliberately

avoided adopting the much more efficient technology

of the alphabet because they wanted

it to be hard to read and write.

Because they wanted to preserve their special status

as people who could do it.

And so, they actually fought against this far more efficient

way of the way of doing things.

So that's why I think it really starts with the Romans

where you have a reasonably widespread use of media

by ordinary people and then they are sharing it in a social way.

AUDIENCE: The Library of Alexandria comes to mind.

Also, the retrieving of the Buddhist [INAUDIBLE] from India

and spread of Buddhism on the Silk Road is another--

TOM STANDAGE: So the retrieval of-- So

that's involving written documents.

AUDIENCE: Written documents, yes.

TOM STANDAGE: Oh, brilliant.

They-- yeah.

So this is the kind of thing that is being flushed out.

That's what I want to find.

Thank you.

AUDIENCE: You were saying that if your book was copied

or your letter was copied in-- that's like re tweeting.

And now, people whenever they publish something

or your YouTube videos if a lot of views

then you're theoretically-- right-- making more money?

But that didn't seem to be part of it.

Because if that happened today, right,

there would be all this copyright, oh my gosh,

people are selling my book.

So was they're not-- I mean, were people

not trying to earn money?

There's definitely some difference here, I'm not--

TOM STANDAGE: Yeah no, that's true.

So I mean, copyrights are a relatively modern idea.

It goes back to the beginning of the 18th century.

And so Roman authors didn't expect

to be able to make money because they knew

that the only way to get their book out

there was unrestricted copying by the audience.

And that was-- they couldn't imagine

that any other way of doing it.

And they wrote books with a view to becoming more famous,

winning patronage, getting a nice job.

And that's how they benefited from them.

So that's clearly a different way of doing things.

What then later happens with printing

is that pamphleteers would be paid

little or nothing to write pamphlets.

They would be paid in the form of copies of their pamphlets

that they could give to people.

And again, it was a patronage thing.

So it's rather like the deal I have with Wordpress.

Which is that I don't pay them, but I give them content

and then they gave me distribution.

So I'm paid back in the ability to reach an audience.

So that's quite a similar model.

And this idea that you own stuff and you have a right

to make money from it is actually quite recent.

And as we can see, it it's now become harder

to enforce than it used to be.

So that sort of ownership of content

is very much a mass media way of looking at the world.

And we do see some people asking,

how you look beyond that?

Should you have your music on Spotify and then make money?

But you hardly make anything from it at all.

And make money from other things if you're a musician?

And to what extent?

Cory Doctorow gives away his books as ebooks.

And we're all trying to work out what the sort of new models

are around that.

But there were people in the past

you managed to make a living from doing things

in a sort of indirect way.

So maybe we can borrow some of their models.

AUDIENCE: I haven't read the book,

so I'm not sure if there's a chapter that

talks about the culture difference like West

or East difference in terms of the influence of social media

revolution?

And also--

TOM STANDAGE: I only consider Western.

AUDIENCE: Western, OK.

TOM STANDAGE: So I'm aware of a few examples in Asia,

but like I don't feel I can see into the literature

there so I don't think I have a sort of-- I'm

very aware of my limitations of my understanding of that.

So I'd be grateful for any suggestions you have.

How do you see the difference in the attitude towards those?

AUDIENCE: I'm from China.

At least, you know I don't know too much on the old media

phase.

But even in the current phase, right, after 2000, there's

no social network but there's a similar-- Facebook, Twitter,

like that.

But they all are kind of run differently.

At the least, it's not truly distributed.

You still have a little bit censored

under government control.

So that's kind of a very hybrid model.

TOM STANDAGE: Well, yes.

I mean, to be honest, one of the striking things

about social networking in the West as well today

is that it's extremely centralized

and it's run by private companies.

So we treat it as though it's a public sphere,

but it's not really.

It's not a town square, it's more like a mall.

It's privately owned.

And if Facebook doesn't like something that you say

or whatever they can shut down your page.

But again, I think there's a historical analogy there.

Which is if you look at what happened to AOL and CompuServe,

they were swept away by the open standards of web publishing.

And I wonder whether the same is true for social media.

There have been various attempts to build open distributed

standards for social media.

But it seems weird that I can set up my own web

server or my own email server, but I

have to go to Facebook or Twitter

or Google to do social networking.

So that's one of things I'm very interested to see

how that changes.

Because that may be a historical anomaly.

It's just that doing timely, in order delivery

of social streams is really, really hard distributing.

Usenet used to do this.

And it didn't do it terribly well.

It was very slow.

So there are advantages to a centralized model,

but there are drawbacks as well.

AUDIENCE: So there's a concept called

WeMedia is that you can comment.

WeMedia.

I think at least in China it's very popular.

You just set up some site, and the public,

some journalism just quit that job.

It run some sites themselves a--

TOM STANDAGE: But it's still a centralized site then.

I mean, I think we need a sort of equivalent to iMap or HTTP

that does establishing social connections-- basically

friend connections, status updates, that sort of stuff.

And there have been various attempts to do it.

The most recent one was called Temp.iO,

which was quite clever I thought.

But it's hard to see how any of these things

can get off the ground because you

need to get the ball rolling.

And the existing networks have such a big advantage

because they have these massive advantages of scale.

So I don't know.

But it happened with the web, so maybe it can happen.

Thank you.

Great, well, thank you all very much,

and it's great to be here.