Social Media: Nothing new under the sun

I started listening to Writing on the Wall: Social Media - The First 2000 Years by Tom Standage. It is a popular history of human communication beginning with ancient times until the present. It's been an interesting "read" because even though technology has changed, human nature has not. The following snippets are from memory since I don't have a written text in front of me.

In Ancient Greece, the use of spoken language and subsequent memorization was the way information was transmitted and preserved. Then came the the new fangled idea of writing ideas permanently down on a scroll. Horrors! Plato decried this arguing that people would stop thinking if they could just look something up in a book rather than remembering it. Sound familiar?

Graffiti in Ancient Rome was quite common and not considered vandalism. The specimens that have survived are from excavations in Pompeii and Herculaneum, which were preserved by the ash of Vesuvius. There is everything from "Marcus ate here" to reviews of an inn scrawled on the wall, like an early form of Yelp. Archaeologists have found messages from a swain wondering why his lady love did not return his affection followed by a reply from the young woman's current boyfriend calling his rival "a loser" or whatever that would be in Latin. The author also lists a series of one-liners that would almost be like the tweets of today.

Standage also discusses how Christianity spread via social media. He cites the Apostle Paul but also Ignatius and Clement as examples of how the faith was propagated through their letters. Martin Luther has a chapter devoted to the power of social media in spreading the message of the Reformation. The timely (providential) invention of the printing press was instrumental in spreading his theses in German to the common people. This left the Roman Catholic Church in a quandary. They were losing support and yet appealing to the people directly would imply that they had some say in the dispute. One supporter of the Pope referred to Luther's message as a rampant disease that infected those who heard it. In other words, Martin Luther had gone viral.

One last snippet, and I will be done. When the telegraph was invented, the speed of communication was beyond what anyone had imagined before. This also connected communities by telegraph wire as well as the operators themselves. Standage writes of telegraph writers playing chess or checkers via telegraph. There are even instances of romances forming via this medium. However, a doctor wrote a pamphlet greatly concerned that this fast flow of information has resulted in a degree of nervousness and stress that would be dangerous for society.

This is where I've left off in my listening for now. Again technology may have changed, but people have not. There is nothing new under the sun.

If you are interested, Standage has written three other popular histories - The History of the World in Six Glasses, which I enjoyed, An Edible History of the Humanity, and The Victorian Internet, which focuses on the telegraph.