[inaudible conversations] tom standage appeared on c-span's communicators to discuss his latest book "writing on the wall: social media going back to the times of cicero." this is about 30 minutes. >> best-selling author tom standage has a new book out called "writing on the wall." tom standage, what do cicero and twitter have in common? >> guest: well, the idea of the book is that social media is a very old idea. we think that it's recent and that only people alive today have ever done it. but really what i'm arguing there's a very long and rich tradition of social media that goes back in fact to the era of cicero, the late roman republican of the first century bc. the point is you don't need a digital network to do social media. if you have one it goes faster but cicero did it with papyrus rolls, and members of the legion were linked to him and they spoke to each other. and there were many other examples that occur throughout history. martin luther, using pamphlets. poetry. tom paine and his pamphlet, common sense, and the pamphlets were used in the runup to the revolutions. when we use social media today it's the a version of the way media operated. >> you write for wealthy romans the distinction between letter writing and conversation was further blurred by the custom of dictating outgoing letters to describes and having incoming letters red aloud to them. >> guest: indeed. if you were someone like cicero or julius cesar -- caesar was famous for being able to dictate two letters at once so you would dictate letters and have a staff of messengers, and then when incoming messengers brought a scroll you describe would perhaps read it out to you. romans like cicero and cease kerr were cave -- capable of reading and writing. the the role of describe is akin to role that broad band works. and it is clean and fast. and the romans had slavery and it was cheap. so the romans were able to have this sort of social media ecosystem where they passed messages to each other, sometimes several times a day, and looks verse familiar to people -- very familiar to people who use twitter and facebook. >> host: what are the wax tablets? >> guest: the romans had devices which are extraordinary, like modern ipads or smartphones. if you were sending a message within the city of rome, then rather than using a piece of pa pie russ, you might use a wax tablet, which is reusable. so it was wooden and had wax in the middle and you would scratch your message log -- using a sty russ, and it would be sent across the city and the recipient would write and then it was brach to you. sort of roman texting, and also used as a note pad and people learned to write using these things. so they look really astonishingly like ipads. they're the exact same size and shape and a one-inch wide frame around the outside, and quite a lot of examples of roman murals where people are depicted holding what looked like frankly smartphones, smartphones that use styleuses to write on. and they're using small wax tablet as notebooks so one of these ewan expected connections between the wail we do things today and the way the romans did two thousand year ago. >> host: you talk about the fact the romans had their own lol. >> guest: right. they used awe abbreviations because they're not much space to write on the wax tablet. and if you wanted to write a longer letter, you glued them together but it was yes ear to use one so there's a premium on space, just like a text message or tweet. so they used abbreviations, one was fbp, which is sends greetings to, and another one that said, i'm well, i hope you're well, and if you are, that makes my happy, and you would say that in four or five letters and then get an with the actual important part of the messaging. so it's very similar to the way we use aabbreviations in tweets and texts today. >> host: martin luther, you write that luther had unwittingly revealed the power of a decentralized media system whose participants took care of distribution. >> guest: this is very interesting. he is obviously 15 centuries after cicero, but initially what he does, looks quite roman. luther is a theologian, and he thinks the catholic church has got it wrong on the doctrine of indulgence sis. the church is selling bits of paper that get you out of purgatory other than you would have after you die. so they're sell these to raise money to construct the st. peter's basilica. and luther things this is -- he draws up a list of reasons why he disagrees with it. 95 of them in latin, and he says, let's have a debate. here are the things i think we should debate. he pins this to the door of the church, and that is how you announce a debate. the church door was the university notice board, and people would read them and say, this is hot stuff. they started copying them down and sending them to friends and discussing them. this is the same thing as manuscript transmission of latin text. since the roman period, the printing press was invented and printers get ahold of the list and say, people want to hear about this. so they print 1,000 pieces piecd people take them to other towns and printers make other copies. so the reason things that lead to the debate, they spread throughout whole of germany in two weeks and the whole of western europe within four week. luther is amazed and everybody is. luther senses an opportunity. if he wants to take his message of reform to the public, he can have his message distributed without having to do much. so he follows up with a series of pamphlets written in german, rather than latin so more people could understand them. and he writes in straightforward german so people in the different parts of the german speaking land would be able too understand him. and he gives the text to the printer in his town directly. no money changes hands. he says, here you go. the printer prints a thousand copies. they go to the nearby town, another one from luther. print another thousand copies and so on. and it ripples. ask for several years lose their has this campaign that essentially he is using the fact that the printers and the audience or collectively amplifying his message. they're handling the distribution for him. they're recommending it to their friend, and if you have a message that people are interested in, that people want to headquarters that people want to recommend to their friends, then you can gets this kind of moral thread. we recognize that today on the internet. that it what's martin luther took advantage of in the 1520s, and the result was the split in the church, the reformation. >> host: mr. standarch how does that differ, martin luther, from mass media. >> guest: the difference is when you have a social media system, whether it's today on the internet or whether it's in the old days using pamphlets or papyrus, a social media system is a bosh way conversational environment in which people are passing stuff directly to and from your friends. so you're exchanging information along social networks and that's why we call it associate networking, it's social media. and this creates a distributive discussion or community. that's what a social environment looks like, and we're familiar with that on facebook and twitter where we get stuff, we see stuff from people that we follow. so, it's a lot of social network. the difference with mass media is mass media is one-way and impersonal, and it's basically top-down broadcast. so, the radio, for example, sits in the corner of the room it's not social. just sitting there. you're not having a conversation with it, and there's no social networking -- personal recommendation involved. and so we have come to sinkholes, mass media channels which can reach a very large audience efficiently so newspapers, radio, tv. we have come to texas -- think of them as old media, and the rise of the internet and social media is unprecedented, and now we can get views from our friends and don't need to be a newspaper editor or the head of a tv channel to decide what message is going spread. but tillly this is how things worked in the era before mass media. mass media is a recent invention. only gets going in the second half of the 19th century. after the 1850s, and we have come too see that period as the way media always was. but the period before old media, the period of really old media, then actual live it looks very, very familiar. it's social. it's social. right from the romans up to the french revolution, the american revolution. only after that we get mass media. and so the thesis of the book is social media is a reversion to the way things used to be and therefore we can learn from the hold social media systems that came before. it turns another that many of the questions we have about social media today, it's impacting the quality of public discourse, whether it's a west of time. can it start revolutions? these are all modern questions but they arose in the past with previous versions of social media. that means there are lessons we can learn by looking at history. >> host: in fact you write in your chapter, let throughout and falsehood grapple, you talk about the year 1579 in england, trying to restrict these systems. >> guest: exactly. it a timeless problem. today we understand when an embarrassing video or something bees on the internet and people try to take it down you can't do it with a distributive media environment where there's no center. there's just lots of interconnected things. then you -- it's very hard to control. we see this, and after luther, after he caused this amazing split in the church, with extraordinary ramifications for politics and religion in europe, rulers across europe think, oh, dear, this is bad news. we need to control this. so they started imposing controls on the press. they say that you can't own a printing press until yous have a license from the government. all documents have to be checked by censors before they can be principled. but almost immediately this fails. ways of getting around the licensing requirement. and you can do things like when you're given a license to print something, you have to say, under license on it. you can just write, under license, on the document anyway. you can list a completely different printer from the one who actually printedded, or make one up. print under a sued him in and it's been hard for the authorities to figure out who principled the document and punish them. so you get this point between the decentralized nature of the media environment and the desire to control it by government, which we recognize as a phenomenon of the internet era. >> tom standage is a best-selling author. besides writing on the wall, which we're talking about with him now, what's your day job? >> i'm a digital editor at the economist. so it's my job at the economist magazine to work out how to best use digital platforms and part of that is what led to my interest in historical social media, because essentially we are returning to the way that things used to work, and the economist came out of a culture of coffee shop and pamphlets and clubsed and discussion, and so i think there's a lot we can learn from modern youth organizations today by looking at history, hoe to deal with the changes taking place in the media environment today. >> host: how did tom paine contribute via social media to the american revolution? >> guest: well, tom paine took advantage of a social media environment that had in fact been mostly constructed by ben franklin. ben franklin did two very important things. the mark zuckerberg of the 18th century. he constructed a platform for social discourse. he was newspaper publisher, among many other things, of course, and he was also one of his many jobs was to be postmaster general for the american colonies so he improved the efficiency. ... in the run-up to the american revolution. just spread the idea that america should be coming from great britain. it's also one of the things that's recommended. but it's also newspapers and learn about what tom paine has to say. he was able to ripple throughout the colonies had become extremely widely known. and franklin prepares the ground for it in tom paine and other writers of evolutionary. richie used his sister to spread the idea that it's a way forward >> let's move forward in history. let's talk about the 1900s, 1920s, the rights of ham radio. amateur radio. >> guest: the interesting thing about radio is initially it was a social media. if you look at the rise of the 20th century, they were to build radio centers. with both the transmitter and receiver could do audio. this is promoted in the family teaching your kids how to program today, building robots, that kind of stuff, which i like to do. we think these are the skills that will be useful. radio is promoted as a way to improve your child because marconi had made his parents attic and develop the whole technology. so if he wanted to get the radio, the way to do it is to give the senate radio checking he would learn morse code and communicate with other people. it is all great fun and social. the problem was normal people did it, the fact they were all operating on the same frequency became a problem. the airways filled out. had been interrupted by boys saying there's a sinking ship over here. companies want to use it as well. so what happens after the first world war as the radio goes from being social media to eat to a media to the very regulated one way media. this is interesting because it's quite familiar looking because it's sort of online chat remember what these of any particular city that the morse code transmitters and receivers. but then it goes from opposite of that to being a one-way channel.social at all. if this whole switchover and social to mass media that took place. now it's a more social media and revival. >> host: you write that the titanic led to one of the first regulations of the airwaves. >> guest: yes. this is a growing problem, the idea that boys who are enthusiasts and all this was unregulated were starting to cause problems with things like rescuing sick people and sinking ships. in fact, it wasn't true the use of amateur radio hampered the efforts. this a convenient way for the white star line after the disaster because when the titanic went down, it's a bit like when there's a sort of breaking news on twitter. like when osama bin laden was killed and everything goes nuts on twitter. it is the same. they lit up with radio transmitters. there is a certain amount of misinformation being passed around. it did in the end hamper the efforts because i was flawed for other reasons. who is very convenient for the owner of the titanic to say would've been fine if it hadn't been for these ham radio guys. the first two days after the disaster they use that as their excuse for the white house called the summit and said we need to sort this out. we need to regulate the use of radio and that's the point at which it had come down and radio ceases to be such a social medium. the titanic is really involved and not. >> host: something our viewers may find familiar. our say in the 1920 for the tagline worldwide wireless. >> guest: that's right. w. w. w. was their logo. it was going to be communication company to provide transatlantic telegraphy services because up to that point, telegraph messages were sent using wires. radio meant was to build this incredibly expensive network. you can add just a few towers and so on. marconi, who was european is making great progress. there is real concern is the monopoly on the business. he can pay this entertainment counsel in the 20s. again, a very familiar debate is how do you pay for this? initially rca was radios. it's using the lure of three broadcast. free content to get people to buy the hardware. once everyone but the hardware during the replacement cycle, and people started wondering how they're going to do this. so you have to have a license to use the radio. in america, that didn't turn out well. so advertising was proposed. it was you've got to listen to add. just like how people reacted to the idea of advertisement ahmed. they're going to muck up twitter orients a program. this is exactly what happened with radio. it turned out to be the way of the model. but it's a very familiar debate for those of us who use the internet today. >> october 29, 1969, bob taylor, charlie kline and leonard pine route. what happened? >> guest: this is the turning of the internet. they didn't really bet the time, but it was to become the modern internet. this is an excremental at the time. they were trying to login. they were on the line they were trying to connect ucla to stanford. they were trying to login. as soon as they press g, the whole thing crashed. the first attempt to do it just worked. subsequently, they got it working. it's a very small network. it is essentially built to link together the various computers to use the military resurgence. the guys who are finding that had many of these people that they had hoped to set up. so they wanted to be able to see what was going on. they didn't want the remote channel for every machine around the country. they wanted to have a single that could see all of them. this is an interesting thing that seems to happen when you have computers that allow people to connect your users of a particular mainframe would get more collaboration between the researchers say they can share that work. if you connect lots of computers together come you get more collaboration. the internet has collaboration of all sorts. not just between military research and those are people for different fields. this is what makes the internet so powerful as a means of stimulating innovation and collaboration. it allows people and ideas who would not be able to come into contact with each other to me. again, and historical parallel in the 1600s. anyone can go in as long as they brought the team. she went into a house, you're expected to have the talk for anyone, regardless of social cost. this is a big deal in england. it means you can't the garments rose 1.8 gentlemen board mechanic all shall mix until you get people and ideas collating that haven't previously collided with each other. it's such an alluring environment. you never know who you're going to meet. people and that's how it's coffeeshop good or extremely for child is an intellectual innovation. you've got the rainbow coffeehouse that it was society. isaac newton writes a scraper, particularly mathematica about the nature of gravity. determined to go to london. the coffee house turned the one doc exchange. the coffee houses turn out to be this great place for unix people and ideas. they allow people in different places to meet virtually and exchange ideas. >> host: trickery, look back, the growth in the change in what we know as the internet, is it faster than in the past? >> guest: yes, it's definitely faster. modern social media operates on a scale that is unprecedented in history. so it's global, instant, searchable. they may be permanent. we don't know how permanent it is. that is definitely unprecedented. but the idea that social media environment has never occurred before if not unprecedented. even though there are these differences, the analogy is close enough that this sort of social reaction you get to social media throughout the centuries that will trivialize debatecome only two revolutions come at things like that. they're the sort of issues the internet in social media today have also raised. the analogy is imperfect and merry things you do on the internet that you couldn't do. but the similarities are close enough we can learn a lot a lot of lessons by looking at history. >> host: mr. standage, you read another possibility is to be social in a transitional state like aol and compuserve in the 1990s. >> guest: yes, something quite striking about the way social media is operating on the internet today. if you look at the e-mail or web publishing works, if you don't like the idea that google is looking up for your mail come you can set up your web server. it is theoretically possible. you can set up your web server that runs the open standards of the internet and plug into the internet and it will just work. similarly, if you don't want some companies to host your blog or whatever publishing on the internet, you can set up your own web server, plug it in and it will work. this is based on mobile standing. if you look silly social media is done, it centralized that way. on by large companies like facebook and twitter. it's very different. so i wonder whether that the permanent state of affairs is of course just what happened with aol and compuserve in 1990s. they had their own access to the can in american internet. people just bought straight nl assets as it were to the network itself. they didn't need these proprietary clients for aol and compuserve provided. i wonder why face that could twitter are the compuserve in this story. it's a difficult computer science challenge to build a distributed social system that works in a timely manner. we know this because he used to exist. anyone using the internet will remember that an essentially was a social media discussions this. but it was rather slow and quickly became rather unwieldy. so this clearly has a lot of technical challenges that can be overcome for this to happen. aspects like.net and aspera have been a whole bunch to create an open social media and social networking. they were swept away. the same could happen to facebook and twitter in the next decade. >> host: whatever form social media takes the future, one thing is clear, it is not going away. social media is not new. just cannot first entries. monmouth at new pamphlets, michael dobbs and the new coffee houses. media sharing sites are the new commonplace books. there are shared, social platforms that enable ideas to travel from one person to another through networks of people connected by social bonds rather than having to squeeze through the privilege bottleneck of broadcast media. that said, mr. standage, social media has a portion contribute less public discourse. mr. answer to that? >> guest: well, one man's trivialization is another man's democratization. every time as the technology to make it easier for more people to publish us. half of it was later restated. before the alphabet, is very complicated and hard to learn. every time there's a way for people to publish, the people who used to be in charge always complain that the wrong people will use this to say the wrong things. the contemporary says s.

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