 Good morning everyone. Welcome to Sonny Croydon. It's funny being here actually last time I was on this stage was playing in a school concert. I was playing the drums. It was probably timpani or something and it would have been 25 years ago so I feel really old. Anyway I hope you've all had enough coffee. I understand from Twitter there was a pub crawl last night so I hope you've all recovered from that. Those of you that went on it. So yes, I'm a digital editor at The Economist and one of my responsibilities is editorial oversight of our website, Economist.com. And we have an excellent technical team. Where are they? They're kind of spread out. Okay. I'm very pleased to say they've recently completed a very painful migration from a certain other content management system. Cold Fusion, boo, hiss. To a much more flexible and open and capable content management system. Name me Drupal. Hooray. And this was handled extremely smoothly and it's great. So we ritually killed Cold Fusion earlier this month. We wanted to burn the disks and shred the manuals and everything. We couldn't actually find anything. But anyway, that means we can now concentrate fully on adding new features to our site. So what are we going to add? We're going to add, of course, lots of social and community features. And, of course, this is what everyone's doing. As you'll all be aware, websites aren't so much the way they were in the Web 1.0 era where it was about pushing stuff to people. Today it's all about enabling connections between the people on those sites. That means comments, debates, discussions, social features in general. And the modern web is all about participation and discussion and collaboration and so forth. It's a social medium. And everyone's crazy about anything to do with social media today. So what I want to argue today is that the notion of social media, this whole phenomenon of the horizontal exchange of information between people, rather than the vertical delivery of information from above, from a central source, this whole idea is not new. It's an idea that goes back a long way, at least as far as the Roman era, in fact. Before the advent of technologies of mass dissemination, and that really starts with the steam press and then the radio and then television, there was no efficient way of getting information to large numbers of people quickly. And the only way it could travel was from one person to another person. So it's not too much of an exaggeration to say that before the rise of the mass media in the 19th century, all media was social. Sure, there are some differences. Today, social media is global, it's instant, it's permanent, it's searchable. And back in the day, though, it was actually more social. People used to gather in taverns and coffee houses and discuss things and talk to each other as they passed them around and then they went to other places and passed them on again. So there are some differences. But the underlying dynamics, I would like to argue, are actually the same. So another way to look at this is that we're used to the idea that new media is different from the old media that came before it. But my point is it's really quite similar to the really old media that came before that. So I'm going to tell you about some historical examples of social media. And I think the parallels are very informative with what we're all doing today. We can see history with new eyes as a result of our familiarity with social media today. And at the same time, I think we can learn a lesson or two, because many of the questions people are asking today about social media also arose in the past. So let's get started with some Romans. So here is a Roman using a laptop. This isn't a fake, this is real. And there are Greek vases that look the same. The Romans, it turned out, had laptops, and they had tablets. The tablets, and there are some pictures of these on Flickr, actually, they're amazing. People have reconstructed them. They look exactly like the iPad. But unfortunately, the image that showed this best wasn't something I could really nick of Flickr. But go and look at it. It's got a border. It's about the same size as an iPad. It's got a wooden border, and it has a surface of black wax, and you would scrape on it with a stylus. So it's like one of those old tablets that no one ever used that had a stylus. And then this thing here, well, this is one of those reading tablets. You'd use that for sketches and notes and that sort of thing. And then the way scribes used to write on papyrus scrolls. Amazingly, the Romans hadn't actually hit on the idea of a writing desk. So scribes used to sit down, and they used to essentially stretch the surface of the papyrus between their knees on their toga. They was literally on their lap. Anyway, what's going on? Well, in the Roman era, the first century BC in particular, Rome had become a very sprawling, it wasn't an empire yet, but it had quite sprawling territories. And unlike the Greek civilization, which involved autonomous city-states without central control, Rome was a centralized system of government. And so the only way it could really run things and stay in touch with what was going on in the provinces was by sending letters backwards and forwards. So there was this blizzard of letters going backwards forwards. Everyone wanted to know what was going on in Rome. What were the latest political machinations? What were the latest speeches? There was a sort of newspaper that Julius Caesar founded. And it was published, but it was only published in one copy. And that one copy was put up in the forum. So if you wanted to know what was going on, like this, this woman here, I think, you'd send your scribe down to the forum and they would write down the bits of this news sheet that was relevant to you. And then you could read it at your leisure while you were having breakfast. And you might have it read to you, in fact. But what you'd then do is when you were writing to your friends outside the city, you would say, I hear that this has happened, and you would send them the most important bits of the news. And you would also send them snippets of information you'd heard from other people in letters. And so merchants and soldiers and officials in distant parts would circulate news from the heart of the republic within their social circles. And they would share extracts from letters and speeches and that sort of thing. So the information really was traveling along these social networks. And letters were weird. They were semi-public documents in the Roman era. It was quite difficult to keep them private. You often had to give them to people you maybe didn't trust to carry. There wasn't a postal service, so you had to ask friends or travelers or anyone moving in vaguely the right direction if they would take letters for you. And in addition to the letters not being terribly private and secure, they were very widely copied and passed around. So if we look at the letters of Cicero, which are the best-preserved set of letters from this period, here's a letter where he says, I sent you, on March the 24th, a copy of Balbus's letter to me and of Caesar's letter to him. Then on that very day I got a letter from Gaius Pedius saying that Caesar had written to him as follows. So you can see what Cicero is doing is he's sending chunks of letters and in some cases copies of entire letters along with his own letters. Another example, Caesar has sent me a short letter of which I subjoin a copy. It's like an attachment. Anthony has sent me a copy of a letter from Caesar. So these letters are all being passed around. They're semi-public documents. So this was absolutely normal and accepted. If you wanted to keep things quiet, you'd have to use a code or really request that things be kept quiet and send the message, the hands of somebody you really trusted. And Cicero, back when he's the governor of Cilicia, which is near Syria now, he had all of this news coming at him from Rome. He had one of his protégés copy the Roman newspaper every day and send that and then everyone else was writing him letters and Cicero said others will write, many will bring me news, much too will reach me even in the way of rumor. And at times Cicero went to his friend Atticus every day for weeks at a time so that all these letters going all over the place. At the same time Caesar in fact was said to be able to dictate two letters at once. So they were just constantly living in this bubble of media. Books and speeches were also published in this way. You couldn't really publish something in large quantities because there was no printing. So instead the way you got your stuff out there was you had a couple of copies made by your scribes and then you gave them to your influential contacts and they would read them and if they wanted to they could have them copied and they'd pass them on. And this is how books were published in the Roman era. We know of one Roman doctor whose epitaph says that he wrote 77 books on medicine. Only his epitaph survives. None of the books do and they probably just existed in a single copy. He would write this book scroll and then he would read bits of it to his friends and lend it to them and they could read it and if they wanted to they could copy it. But that was what publishing was. It was just passing things around within a social network. And we know that speeches were passed around like this as well. If you wrote a particularly good speech then you might let your friends have copies of it so that they could refer to it. And also because the accounts of it that might be circulating otherwise might not be accurate. And so Cicero delivered a series of speeches called the Philippics. But the second of them he was unable to deliver it because he couldn't get to the to the Senate House and so it was in fact just sort of published in that way. And that counted as publishing it and in fact more people would have read it than would have heard it anyway. So again you've got speeches and books traveling along these social networks. And this is essentially news from your social network. It's social filtering, social distribution, it's commenting, it's recommending, it's liking. And the enabling technology of all of this were the scribes. So this is some two Roman pupils being forced to learn how to read or possibly training as scribes. You've got the teacher in the middle and the guy on the right has arrived a bit late. But that looks like a scroll case that he's carrying there. Anyway scribes are the enabling infrastructure here. In fact scribes were kind of a bit like broadband in the sense that when you had one the marginal cost of information was zero. If somebody lent you a book and you thought this is a pretty good book I'd like a copy of this in my library. You give it to your scribe and say you make a copy of this please. Then make a copy of it and then you could pass the book on. So you just had to wait for the book to sort of appear in your library and then you knew it would always sit there. And Cicero about had a particularly good scribe called Tyro who among other things it seems to have been the inventor of shorthand. And this meant that Cicero had a higher bandwidth than other Romans when it came to dealing with this deluge of information that was flowing all over the place. So this is all one form of conversational of social participatory media in the Roman period. There's another one which also looks quite familiar. This is from Pompeii. It turns out the Romans were very keen on writing things on people's walls. Some of them were official announcements and some of them were just silly old graffiti. So some examples of graffiti from Pompeii. We have examples from Pompeii and Herculaneum because they were buried by the eruption of Vesuvius. But presumably the same was true on the walls of other Roman towns throughout the Roman period. So this should be representative of the kinds of things that Romans saw as they walked around wherever they were. So from Pompeii we have quite a boring advert to rent from the first day of next July, shops with floors over them, fine upper chambers and a house in the Onius Polio block owned by Gnius Alius. Prospective less seas may apply to primus, his slave. Oh also, 30 pairs of gladiators provided by Gnius Alius together with their substitutes will fight a Pompeii on November the 24th, 25th and 26th. There will also be a hunt. And it goes on like this. There are political slogans. Vesonius primus urges the election of Gnius Helvius as Idele, a man worthy of public office. The goldsmiths unanimously urged the election of Gnius Cuspius Panzer as Idele. And here's a slightly more prosaic message. A copper pot has been taken from this shop. Whoever brings it back will receive 65 cisterces. And if anyone shall hand over the thief he will be rewarded. Then there's something that reads a lot like a status update. At Niseria, I won 8,552 denarii by gaming. Woo, fair play. And my favourite piece of Roman graffiti is actually addressed to the wall itself. And it says, I admire you, wall. I admire you for not falling down when you have to carry so much tedious writing. So even in the Roman period, people are saying, oh, God, all this over-sharing of all this stuff, people writing all this tedious rubbish on their walls. And in fact, Cicero complains when he's got this stream of information coming into him in Syria that there's too much that he doesn't need to know about the trivia. In particular, he doesn't need to be told the gladiator results. He regards those as superfluous for his political purposes. Anyway, the streets in Pompeii and Herculaneum with the most graffiti are those that lead towards the gates of the city and they're the most highly trafficked bits of the town. So this was a media environment in which official and personal messages were mixed. The funny thing about Roman graffiti is that you actually get it inside people's houses as well. And it wasn't, you even get it in the high status houses, in the high status rooms. So it wasn't regarded as defacing the wall to write a message on it. And the messages are quite small. They're not prominent, but you can see them. And in a sense, it was a way of saying, look, I'm literate. You're literate. We can write messages to each other. It was kind of, you were showing off the literacy of your friends on your walls. This is kind of what people do on Facebook today. They're quite small and unobtrusive little messages. So one man leaves many incontinual greetings to his brother. And the brother replies, and lots of greetings to you too. And then we see in other cases we see sort of back and forth messages, both inside houses, inside apartment blocks, and on the walls of public streets. My favorite example comes actually from the inside of an apartment block, where somebody writes a few lines of poetry on the wall. And other people then sort of riff on it, and they try and outdo each other, and follow up on it. And it's like a little comment thread. And the question here is, how literate were the Romans? Well, the idea that literacy as binary is just wrong, and I think we can see that today with computer literacy. People say, are you computer literate or not? Now, I don't know, would I say my mother was computer literate? Well, there are some things she can do, but there are some things that she can't. There's clearly a continuum of literacy, and the same is true of ordinary literacy. So some of these messages, you can actually see it says a, you know, there's a slogan or something that's written. And then underneath it says, so and so wrote this. And what that means is that somebody has asked somebody else to write something on their behalf. And this is what would happen. You would get your friends who were more literate than you to help you out, as we do today with our computers. Anyway, so you've got this idea of public discussion and information flying around. And who made the best use of this? Surprisingly, it was someone that the Romans didn't initially approve of. And it's Paul of Tarsus, best known as St. Paul. He was probably the most successful user of Roman social media because he used open letters, otherwise known as epistles, to churches in different towns and regions, as he spread the Christian faith around the Mediterranean. And he wrote these letters to resolve doctrinal disputes and arguments, to offer advice, to offer support during periods of persecution and that sort of thing. And this meant that even though a letter was written in a particular context to a particular church, it had great interest to other churches, to other Christian communities in other places and in fact in other times later on. And these epistles enabled Paul to maintain the stability and unity of the new church that he was establishing. His letters were read out, discussed, copied, passed to other churches. And eventually they became part of the New Testament. And in fact, they're still being read out in churches today. They're still going. This is Roman social media that's still going today. Now that's what I call social distribution. And there are scholars who talk about a Christian media revolution because the early Christian church made very skilled use of the technology of literacy at the time. And of course, ultimately papyrus books gave way to modern books in the form of a codex with pages and with paper. But today we're still using some of the technologies of the Roman period. We're still using their alphabet. And now that we're using computers again, once again we actually scroll through the news, which people didn't do for a long time. OK, let's leap forward. We're going to leap forward to the Reformation. So there was a guy called Johann Tetzel. And he was given the job by the Vatican of raising the money to pay for St. Peter's Basilica, which is the enormous church in Rome. And he came up with a brilliant idea of selling indulgences, which are basically tickets into heaven. And he had this great slogan for them as well. As soon as the gold in the casket rings, the rescued soul to heaven springs. And the idea was, no matter how bad you'd been or were planning to be, you could buy an indulgence and then everything would be fine. You'd still get into heaven. Now, the fact that this actually conflicted with Church doctrine at the time didn't stop him. But Martin Luther, who was a priest in Germany at the time, thought this was absolutely outrageous. And he wrote to his superiors saying, this is not at all. It won't do. He wrote the 95 theses arguing against indulgences. He sent this to his local bishop and archbishop. And his friends started to pass this around. And they were then translated into German and printed in January of 1518. It's sometimes said that he'd nailed the theses to a door. And that doesn't seem to be true. It's a nice idea, but it doesn't seem to be the case. Anyway, they quickly spread throughout Germany in the space of about two weeks because people discussed them. Preachers who agreed with Luther read out what he'd written. And that meant people in their congregation said, oh, I want to find out more about this. I'm going to go and see if I can get ahold of a copy of this pamphlet. And then they would take it to other churches and other towns. And the printers in those towns would be being asked about this. Have you got this pamphlet by Luther? So they would make copies of it. Not everyone could read or afford to buy pamphlets, but they would be exposed to the ideas by talking to other people, by discussing them in church, by hearing from preachers. One preacher said that he had, on one occasion, spread Luther's words to 3,000 people. So you've got these incredible sort of multiplying effects. And there was a huge public debate. Was this right? Was it correct that selling indulgences was wrong? Did Luther have the right to challenge the supremacy of the Vatican? And Luther followed up with 21 further published works by the end of 1518, including his sermon on indulgences. And that alone was reprinted 14 times in 1518. And he continued to respond to his critics, because some people started objecting and writing back. And he was one of those people who, if someone disagrees with you, he has to respond. He absolutely has to rebut whatever you say. And I think we all know bloggers like that. One of his pamphlets in 1520 sold 4,000 copies in five days and went through a further 15 editions. And each of these pamphlets cost about four phoenixes, which is about the same as a chicken. And if you think about what a chicken costs today, it's about the same as, you know, buying a glossy magazine like Vogue or something like that. So, you know, it was not cheap but affordable for working people. Now, obviously, Quantcast and Omniture and all that sort of thing didn't exist in 1518. But it turns out that you can reconstruct Martin Luther's traffic stats. And it also turns out that you can divide them between the German and the Latin user bases. And this is because if you're writing a pamphlet that's mainly for ecclesiastical consumption, you write it in Latin because they're going to speak Latin. And if you're writing one for a general audience, then you write it in German. And so you can see there's this massive spike of 1523. Now, what this is actually measuring is the number of times that an individual pamphlet was reprinted. So it's not the number of sales. It's essentially, it's like the retweets or the reblogs on Tumblr, something like that. But it meant that when there was something that was particularly popular, it would spread very quickly and it would get reprinted. There was no copyright. People just reprinted things. And it said, in fact, that the initial pamphlet spread within Germany in two weeks and throughout Europe in two months. Anyway, the best estimates are that between 6 million and 7 million religious pamphlets were sold in Germany. That's the overall number of pamphlets. This is the number of editions in the first decade of the Reformation. And quite a lot of them were actually written by laymen and women. They weren't written by members of the clergy. And I'll come on to why that was in a minute. But that was the interesting thing, that these were ordinary people. Access to the press was, if you could afford to just buy the paper and pay someone to print things. It really wasn't that expensive. You do a run of a thousand or something like that. And buying a pamphlet was a badge of identity for Luther's supporters. It was very often the first printed work they'd have bought. Buying a Bible was incredibly expensive. It was several years' wages. But you could buy a pamphlet and that showed where you stood and you could show it to other people. So his writing defined a community of people who signed up, who liked what he did. And Luther also wrote vernacular hymns that the congregations could sing that were in German instead of in Latin. And again, he wanted to get people to participate in the service in a way that they previously couldn't. But the main thing, what was really brilliant about this was that Luther's message was reinforced by the medium in which he presented it, the pamphlet itself. It could be bought by anyone. It could advance an argument. And then the reader could make up their own mind. This was a really radical idea because it circumvented authority. It circumvented the decision-making elite of the Catholic Church. And Luther's message was brilliantly congruent with that because his message was that the clergy was fraudulently claiming to have to mediate between ordinary people and God. And he said, that's silly. We should be able to deal with God directly. And so by cutting out the authority figures by talking directly to people with pamphlets, he was doing the same thing that he wanted them to do, which is deal directly with God. You don't need to go through a priest. Now, this was a massive problem for the Catholic Church. And they faced a dilemma that's very similar to the problem that, say, a large multinational company faces today when people start being nasty about them on Twitter. Should they respond? What should they do? Is it right to even dignify a crazy critic with a response? Well, that was initially the position that the Catholic Church took because their position was it was inappropriate for the common people to even discuss religious disputes. So to respond to Luther and say he's wrong and his why and please buy our pamphlet that tells you was actually going against everything that the Catholic Church believed in. By their very existence, in fact, Catholic pamphlets rebutting Luther did what they argued should not be done. And worse than that, in order to explain Luther's views and say why they were wrong, the Catholic pamphlets actually spread them even further. And my favorite example of this is that Luther wrote a rather obscure pamphlet in Latin called On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church. So this would be one of these black things down here. And this was pretty obscure liturgical, theological argument, but it particularly irritated the Catholic Church. And so one of Luther's opponents went to the trouble of translating it from Latin into German so that people could read it and so that he could rebut it. And the problem was that his translation was really popular, but his rebuttal wasn't. This is because people actually wanted to read what Luther had to say. So by translating it into German, he thought this would make his point for him. Everyone would be able to see how wrong Luther was. And in fact, the opposite was the case. People agreed with Luther. So a papal bull of 1520 described Luther as a wild boar escaped and the church is vineyard and he was excommunicated. But by his use of social media of the day, he triggered the reformation. He had taken on the biggest authority in his world at the time. And that's really striking illustration of the power that grassroots media can have in taking on enormous authoritarian governments, companies and so on. That's a very early example. Let's move now to England, which is where the action shifts to. The reformation alerted everyone to the power of printing plus social distribution and its power to spread radical ideas and the result was a clamp down against printing across Europe. So Germany introduced censorship. The Catholic Church issued a list of banned books England limited the right to print to members of the station as company. A French printer was burnt at the stake causing most of the other printers in France to flee to the Netherlands, which became a haven for printers and typographers. And of course it still is, where the font industry is based. And the result was actually a reconstitution of the Roman style news system. People actually felt happier writing to each other in manuscript form because letters were less likely to be intercepted and censored, although they were occasionally. But essentially the Roman system reconstituted itself. But then in the 1640s, something rather interesting happened in England. As England slid into civil war, the crown lost control over printing and the result was a profusion of pamphlets and news books and broadsides and other printed matter. And in fact, you could pretty much publish anything for a while. And as a result, people could see what a really free press looked like. And this was something that could happen in England in particular, because there was an unusually high level of literacy in England. After Henry VIII had broken away from the Roman Catholic Church, having a Bible in English and separating the Church of England from the Church of Rome became an important part of British national identity. And so being able to read the Bible in your own language was something the government was quite keen on. And so there was actually a higher level of literacy in England than there was in other parts of Europe at the time. Anyway, this then opened the door to the rival pamphleteers of the civil war period. And they attacked each other and provided wildly differing accounts of battles, often within a few days of the events they described. And there was, for the first time, a battle for public opinion. And this was new. Both sides were, yes, fighting on the battlefield, but they were also fighting in the marketplace of ideas. To give an example, the Battle of Edge Hill, one of the battles of the English Civil War on October the 23rd, 1642, was a Sunday. And four pamphlets about the battle were available on sale in London by the following Friday. And all of them took the form of reprints of letters from soldiers who'd been at the scene or claimed to have been. And pamphlets of the speeches given by the king beforehand to encourage his troops and to thank them afterwards were also published. And this was published, and then the parliamentarian side issued a rebuttal against that pamphlet. And then the royalists responded to that. And so there was this sort of war of the pamphlets going on. People would copy them and reprint them and send them to their friends. And there were also news ballads which were essentially the news set to a popular tune. So it could be sung in a tavern and this would also give you a bit of cover when you wanted to say something a bit satirical in more difficult times where there was actually censorship because you could just say it was just a silly song. But we have accounts of battles, speeches, political maneuverings from politicians, from people at the time, from soldiers all the way throughout the Civil War, being passed around, discussed, copied, reprinted. The authors were mostly not paid. What the customer at the time was that you did this in return for a few free copies of your pamphlet. So somebody would agree to put up the money to print it if they thought what you had to say would sell. You would provide the copy and you get some free copies back which you could give to your friends or sale or whatever. So it was a sort of Huffington Post model that you were doing it for the publicity. The interesting thing about the pamphlets of this period is that for the first time we get this dialogic presentation where you reprint bits of other pamphlets in order to argue against them. So it's like when you block quote things in blog posts and you sort of argue against people appointed at a time. And this encourages readers to seek out the original. And if you actually misquote someone deliberately to make them look stupid, you'll be found out because people will go and find the originals. And this means you've got an argument that's actually based on ideas and reason and not just appeals to divine authority. And the idea is that you're trying to lead the reader to a particular conclusion which they may or may not agree with. So that's a very interesting step forward that instead of just saying I'm the king or I'm the pope and therefore I'm right, you're trying to argue with people. And as parliament tried to reassert control over printing, John Milton published a famous pamphlet that's very hard to pronounce. And it's called Areopagitica. And it was one of the first philosophical defenses of the principle of free speech. It was written as a speech, but Roman style it was never actually delivered as a speech. It was just distributed as a pamphlet. But his point was that the contest between rival views helped people discover the truth. Ultimately, even if some of what some people said was wrong or misguided or whatever, if you just had as many people as possible expressing their opinions, then people could figure it out for themselves. And he said, let truth and falsehood grapple. Whoever knew truth put to the worst in a free and open encounter. So that's the origin of the idea that freedom of expression, freedom of speech, freedom of the press are a good thing because they elect people, figure stuff out for themselves. And the same spirit, the doctrine of the marketplace of ideas animated the scientific revolution instead of just accepting information from an infallible authority, in this case, the Greeks. So scientists just thought the Greeks were right about everything and they weren't. They got all sorts of things wrong. They thought that the earth was the center of the universe, well quite a lot of them did. They thought that heavy objects fell faster than light objects. They thought the heart was a furnace that heated the blood and so forth. In the 17th century, people started saying, hang on a minute, they might have got this wrong. Let's go and do some experiments. Let's actually test nature directly ourselves and let's find out the truth. And interestingly, scientists of this period also decided that instead of sitting on their results, hoarding them as secrets, they would share them with each other and cross-check them and build on each other's work. And this is when we get the first scientific journals. It's another form of social media. And they start off as pamphlets and summaries of meetings, often held in coffee houses. And the papers were then, they were written by scientists for their peers so that they could build on each other's work. And this is also, I would argue, the origins of the open-source movement. I mean, this is the basic idea. The open-source movement is the scientific method applied to software. So I think this all goes back to the 1660s and the coffee houses, of course, were still fueled by caffeine today. It's still a fuel of the information economy. And I hope you've all had enough this morning. The interesting thing about these coffee houses is you could get your mail in a coffee house because there was no street numbering. So you'd say, right to me at the Rainbow Coffee House, you could read the news because they would have all the latest pamphlets and news sheets on the table. You could talk to people, you could write a pamphlet in the corner and then have it published. And coffee houses actually specialized in the discussion of particular topics, marine insurance, the stock exchange, science. There was one where the actors went, there was another where the sailors went, and so forth. And these actually turned into the embryos of modern institutions. Jonathan's Coffee House turned into the London Stock Exchange. It's where the traders went to do business. Lloyds was a coffee house turned into an insurance company. And summaries of coffee house discussions were republished in magazines to enable people outside the city, out of the provinces, to get a flavor of the discussion. So coffee was this fuel of innovation and I've talked about the Coffee House internet in one of my books. And there were also invisible colleges, as they were called. These were groups of scientists who never actually met. They just corresponded by letter. It was very much like a mailing list approach and they would discuss new theories and new experiments. So the modern ideas of free speech and the free press and modern science and even open source, I would argue, stem from this period. And the idea that openness and sharing and testing ideas against each other in this sort of open shared information environment means fewer errors, makes it easier to build on other people's work. And I think that's something we can all relate to. Okay, so now to America. The idea of freedom of expression spread like a virus from Britain and in particular to America. The papers in the American colonies were pretty hard for the authorities to control anyway from London. They were far away. And by this stage, the government itself had actually bought into the idea of freedom of expression. It was part of the Bill of Rights in Britain. And so it's preferred approach now to try and actually limit the spread of information was simply to tax newspapers and tax paper. And the idea was that this would keep information out of the hands of the really poor and terrible people who couldn't be trusted for some reason. And so there was a tax on paper and there was a stamp tax that was introduced in America in 1765 as part of this. And this required that printed materials in the colonies be produced on stamped paper from London. And of course, this led to complaints about taxation without representation, which you may be familiar with. The stamp tax was so unpopular that it was repealed after a year, but it was just one of the things that irritated the colonists in America. And Parliament in London still insisted that it had the right to make laws for the colonies. And this is ultimately what led to the American Revolution. Now, on the face of it, taking on the British Empire, which the colonists in America did, was a really daft thing to do because the British Empire was the biggest military power in history and they thought they could beat it. Why did they think they could? Well, it really didn't go very well to start with. The hostilities began in April 1775 and by the winter of that year, things were looking pretty grim. Most of the colonists in America were probably on the fence at that point. They thought, well, we can't win. Maybe we should arrange some sort of compromise with the king. We'll recognise him in some form, but we want a certain amount of self-determination. That was the kind of mood in the winter. And Tom Paine, who we see here, was one of those who thought this was wrong. He said, no, we have the chance to start all over again here. We should seize it. We should say no to hereditary monarchs. We should go our own way. And he wrote a pamphlet called Common Sense that argued this. And he had 1,000 copies of it printed. And he handed them to his friends and it started to become available in the print shop where it was printed on January the 10th, 1776. And through one sort of social connection and another, a copy of it reached George Washington. And he read it in one sitting and he was so impressed he showed it to his aides and he said, this is what we need to motivate everyone. And so he instituted the custom that the officers in the colonial army all had to get themselves a copy of Common Sense. And every evening they had to read it to their men to inspire them. They had to read bits of it. And it's actually written quite in sort of the mood of a sermon. And so between January and July, 1776, about 250,000 colonists were exposed to the ideas of Tom Paine. This was the nearest you could get to a broadcast network. But it wasn't broadcast, it was through social connections. Again, it's social distribution. And this had an amazing effect. It rallied the colonists behind the idea that they really should push to break away from Britain. And it turned out that actually, the British weren't as in a stronger position as everyone thought they were. The logistics of supporting troops by sea was a complete nightmare for the British. They had to bring, they had 35,000 soldiers. They had 4,000 horses. They had to bring 37 tons of food a day, over 57 tons of fodder by ship for the horses. And that's just the food. They also had to bring over weapons and boots and all that sort of thing and ammunition. They had to supply everything by sea because the army couldn't live off the land because that would alienate the local people. And that was just totally unsustainable. And ultimately, the British were unable to build up sufficient supplies to venture out of their camp and really take on the rebels. And whenever they did defeat them in a battle, they were unable to really follow through on it. So ultimately, America became independent. Now, there were lots of other examples of social media that I could have touched on, but I hope I've given you sort of flavor of what's going on here. There is the exchange of poetry in the Tudor and the Stuart courts. There's the handwritten news sheets of pre-revolutionary France, which are particularly great fun. But I think you get the idea. I am arguing that there were many, many conversational media cultures, social media cultures in history that are based on sharing, copying, recommending, commenting, that sort of thing. And then what happened? And then it all went wrong. Why is this wrong? Well, it's wrong in the sense that this is the first mass newspaper. It's the New York Sun from 1833. And when this newspaper launched, newspapers in America cost six cents. And this newspaper cost one cent. And it was based on a new business model. The steam press meant that you could print lots of copies really quickly. And if you then sold them at a low price, which people could afford because it was a sixth of the price of other newspapers, then you'd attract a big market, which you could then sell to advertisers who would subsidize the printing costs of a much larger number of copies. So it's a switch from being funded mostly by subscribers to mostly by advertisers. And it happens here first. At the time when the New York Sun launched in 1833, the most popular newspaper in America was the Courier and Inquirer, a newspaper based in New York. It had a circulation of 4,500 a day. Now, you've written blog posts to get more hits than that. So this is a very, very small newspaper and it is typical of newspapers across America. There are lots of them and they're all very small and very local. And in fact, most of the content in them is written by local people, sending letters to the print office and it all just gets put together. There aren't professional reporters. It's a very different model. This thing changes the model. It had a lot of crime news, had a lot of sensationalist stuff, it had a much bigger circulation. And it introduced this idea of mass media that within a couple of years it was selling tens of thousands of copies and it was up to 80,000 by the 1850s. I mean, it was incredibly fast. Other newspapers copied this model. And what happens here is that you end up with a newspaper where a small group of people, the journalists, like me, decide what goes into it and gather the information and filter it and then you have this distribution system that pushes it out. And media becomes a one-way push thing. Stop being two-way and conversational. It turns into a one-way medium. And then radio and TV go even further in this direction. You know, with radio and TV, it's really expensive to build the towers to cover the whole country. So you have this concentration of who controls the message into an even smaller group of hands. And this gave us the era of mass media. Now, the troubles we see in the news industry now are essentially down to the fact that it relied on this model. It became much too reliant on advertising revenue. American newspapers in 2008 at the peak got 87% of their revenue from advertising. The equivalent in Europe is about 50%. In some publications, it's as low as 30%. 87% means you're really, really exposed to advertisers and to changes in the market. So it's because they had this model, they were very successful, but it's now broken. And why is it broken? It's broken because of the internet. The internet, in particular, social media, social transmission on the internet has undermined this vertical transmission model. The internet is stealing attention from TV. It's stealing attention from newspapers. It's stealing advertising dollars. It's reinvigorated horizontal transmission. And once again, information can travel between people, whether it's a rumor or a silly YouTube video or actually important news like Tripoli has fallen. This is a big shift, absolutely, but it's not entirely unprecedented. In many ways, it's a return to the way the world looked before 1833. So today, we see social media being used as an accelerant in the Arab Spring. I don't think you can say it's caused the Arab Spring, but it certainly hasn't done it any harm. We see governments try to shut down the internet or shut it down or use it to their own ends to suppress dissent. We see politicians worrying that the internet can't be trusted because it spreads lies and rumors. We see companies embarrassed by information that they'd rather keep quiet coming out of the internet. We see Twitter used to circumvent restrictions of free speech like super injunctions over football as private lives. And this is just what we should expect because history tells us that social media is extremely powerful, it challenges authority, it promotes freedom of expression, it promotes collaboration and innovation, and it encourages political freedom in turn. So it's not a fad, it's not going away, it's an idea with a very, very long tradition. So I should probably make a couple of predictions. Well, I think on the political front we can expect social media to play a role, an important role in political change in China. We can already see early stirrings to this effect, particularly after the recent high-speed rail crash. It's very hard to censor social media. The volumes are very high. The Chinese language means you can actually pack a lot into 140 characters. So you can actually have whole paragraphs. And of course, it's ideal for the phone-based internet culture that you have in China in particular. I think the internet will also stimulate more innovation in science and in business. So we see some very interesting Web 2.0 social experiments like the Zooniverse Projects. I think they're wonderful doing that. And Mark Andreessen was recently talking to the Economist and he remarked upon how the internet and social media is speeding up innovation in Silicon Valley. He says it makes the 1990s look like the Stone Age. So I think we're going to see an impact there just as we saw innovation in coffee houses in the 1660s. I think we're going to see these network effects improving the speed of innovation. And then I think potentially the internet is a very, very good place for a new religion to gain traction. Now, what are recent new religions? Well, Scientology, they've got a bit of a problem with the openness part. But Christianity is a religion based on sharing and openness and spreading the word literally. So a religion that has a similarly enlightened view of the internet could potentially emerge in the coming centuries. As Jeff Jarvis said this week, it's only 1467 or something like that. What he means is we're very early in the era of the impact of the internet. And it's rather like the early days of the printing press in the beginning of the Reformation. So what I've tried to do for you today is put what you all do and what I do into historical context. And from a long-term historical perspective, what we're basically doing is contributing to the reawakening of the social aspect of media, which has lain largely dormant for about 200 years. So that's what you're doing when you're writing code and when you're commenting on things and sharing and so forth. So I hope that I've succeeded in convincing you that social media doesn't simply connect us to each other today. It also connects us to the past. Thank you very much. Thank you. Now, I should have mentioned at the beginning, I should have said at the beginning there's a hashtag and I believe Diana is going to, if there are any questions you've posed on that hashtag, we might have time to answer a couple of them. I also should have said follow me on Twitter. Anyway, Diana, do you want to, have we got time for a couple of questions? I do. So it says Diana Dupri and she actually works with us at The Economist making our site as wonderful as it can possibly be. What have we got? That's a great way to start, thank you. So there was some interest in social media as a profession or maybe attempts to monetize it pre-U.S. So in Roman area, in Roman era? Yes. So, well, the reason it wasn't a profession was that a lot of the scribes were slaves. So you bought them. And so, but that interestingly, interestingly it was a route to freedom. It was a route to becoming a freed man. So Tyro, who is Cicero's slave, is initially his slave and he is this amazingly good scribe and he can write on a wax tablet, looks like an iPad, as quickly as Cicero can speak and then reconstruct it all afterwards. And so, Cicero values him a great deal and actually frees him part of the way through his service and Tyro loves working with Cicero so much that he continues to work with Cicero as his secretary. So he continues to do it. So in that sense, he made a career out of it and there are other examples we can see of entrepreneurs. So in the case of when Cicero goes to Syria and he has the news sent to him from Rome, he asks his protege, Kylius, to do this and Kylius actually outsources it to a Greek scribe called Crestus and Crestus seems to have made a living copying down the rumors from the forum and the news sheet of the forum and sending them to paying subscribers. So there were people who were doing the job of filtering, curating and if you couldn't be bothered to read all of the stuff that was out there, you could pay someone to do it for you. I think that's the role of the mass media now. That's what we do at The Economist. I like to say, sift, crunch, pack. So we try and work out what's important each week and wrap it all up in a bundle that you can actually finish. You can actually get to the end of it unlike Twitter or the internet. And for some people, that's particularly time-press people, that's something they're really willing to pay for. Someone tweeted about how excited they were to be combining their history degree with Drupal. There you go, now you know how to do it. Can you recommend further reading that people who are interested in exploring this more? Well, there isn't a book about this and I think there should be, so I'm writing it. So my plan is, because I wrote this book, The Victorian Internet, which was about how telegraphs were just like the internet. And I wrote that in, actually I wrote it in 1997. It came out in 98 in the web 1.0 days. And the thing that's changed about the internet since then is the 2.0 part. So I really want to kind of go back and revisit it. So this is essentially the praisey of the book, which I'm supposed to finish writing by the middle of next year and should be out late next year or the year after. And my working title is Cicero's Web. So I hope you will look out for it and I hope that it doesn't differ too strikingly from what I've just said. Thank you. We can say we were there at the beginning. You can. So last question was early on in the Thomas Payne era, was there the same kind of differences between media created in the private interest versus the public interest or from perhaps a group that had an agenda in media? Yeah. If you look at, and I recently did a special report on this in The Economist on the news industry in particular, if you look at the early news industry, so essentially it's from the coffee house era onwards, up to 1833, and in fact, for much of the 19th century, it's incredibly partisan. So in a sense, what Fox News and what MSNBC do now and what the newspapers in Europe, which tend to be pretty open about their political biases, you know the Guardian is a left-wing paper and the Telegraph is a right-wing paper, we're seeing a return of partisanship to media, particularly in America, which has tried to get away from it. But actually, again, in a sense, that's a return to the way things used to be. And so that means that, yes, it makes it harder to figure out what's going on, but that's what everyone had to deal with those days. And I talked to the creator of Google News about this and he said, well, the internet makes it easier to synthesize multiple points of view and figure out for yourself what's going on. And that's really the skill that we need to inculcate into people. You shouldn't believe anyone. You should go and test what they say against the evidence and you should subject yourself to as many points of view as possible. And that was John Milton's point and it's still true today. So the idea that, I know that some people think this represents decline of the modern media, but it's really a return to the way things were historically. And in fact, you wouldn't believe how partisan the newspapers of the post-revolutionary era as well were. There's a good book on that called Infamous Scribblers, if you want to know more about that period in particular. Well, thank you very much and thank you for attending. Thank you very much.