WEBVTT

00:00:02.417 --> 00:00:05.260
(Applause)

00:00:05.260 --> 00:00:07.502
I'm going to talk to you
about social media.

00:00:07.502 --> 00:00:10.780
And you may say: "Not someone else
waffling on about social media !"

00:00:10.780 --> 00:00:14.020
But I am going to give you a different way
of looking at social media,

00:00:14.020 --> 00:00:16.872
one that I am pretty confident
you won't have heard of before.

00:00:16.872 --> 00:00:19.598
I want to give you a historical
perspective on social media.

00:00:19.598 --> 00:00:22.780
But to do that, we have to decide first
what social media actually is.

00:00:22.780 --> 00:00:24.580
So this is my definition of it, here.

00:00:24.580 --> 00:00:27.260
It's media we get, crucially,
from other people.

00:00:27.260 --> 00:00:29.493
And then it's exchanged
along social connections,

00:00:29.493 --> 00:00:31.913
and it creates a distributed 
discussion or community,

00:00:31.913 --> 00:00:34.393
beyond the room and the people
you're physically with.

00:00:34.393 --> 00:00:38.000
So it's very different from getting, say,
an impersonal voice out of a radio.

00:00:38.032 --> 00:00:39.476
So this is my definition.

00:00:39.502 --> 00:00:42.095
If you define it this way,
then it becomes apparent.

00:00:42.095 --> 00:00:43.813
This is how it works, here.

00:00:43.813 --> 00:00:46.971
We've got a group of people over here.
They all tweet each together.

00:00:46.971 --> 00:00:49.602
One, in the middle, is connected
to this group over here.

00:00:49.602 --> 00:00:51.126
And so it ripples across.

00:00:51.152 --> 00:00:54.430
We understand how this works today on
Internet based social networks,

00:00:54.456 --> 00:00:57.283
on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram
and all the rest of it.

00:00:57.283 --> 00:00:59.561
But actually, this kind of model,

00:00:59.587 --> 00:01:01.620
this horizontal
person-to-person transmission

00:01:01.620 --> 00:01:04.060
doesn't require a digital network
to happen.

00:01:04.060 --> 00:01:08.500
I spent the past few years
looking at examples that occur in history.

00:01:08.500 --> 00:01:12.692
Because I think social media environments
have actually existed for centuries.

00:01:12.692 --> 00:01:16.465
So, what are the conditions you need
for a social media environment ?

00:01:16.465 --> 00:01:17.860
You need a bunch of things.

00:01:17.860 --> 00:01:21.002
You need literacy, because to send
messages to people far away,

00:01:21.028 --> 00:01:23.913
you need to be able to write,
and they need to be able to read.

00:01:23.929 --> 00:01:28.696
You also need the cost of sharing,
copying and delivering that information

00:01:28.696 --> 00:01:30.408
to be relatively low.

00:01:30.408 --> 00:01:34.890
Today, it's almost free because
we have our smartphones and broadband.

00:01:34.890 --> 00:01:38.619
But it turns out that these conditions
have arisen in history before.

00:01:38.619 --> 00:01:43.528
And as far as I can tell, the first time
was in the late Roman Republic.

00:01:43.528 --> 00:01:46.417
So this is Terentius Neo and his wife.

00:01:46.443 --> 00:01:48.836
He was a baker in Pompei.

00:01:48.869 --> 00:01:51.678
They are holding signs of their literacy.

00:01:51.704 --> 00:01:54.918
He is holding a scroll,
and she is holding a wax tablet.

00:01:54.942 --> 00:01:57.656
This was a sort of notebook,
if you were a Roman.

00:01:57.680 --> 00:02:00.339
They're basically saying :
"Look at us, we're literate."

00:02:00.339 --> 00:02:02.267
They are very proud of their literacy.

00:02:02.293 --> 00:02:05.020
Romans, you know,
it was a relatively literate society.

00:02:05.020 --> 00:02:07.897
Romans wrote to each other quite a lot.

00:02:07.897 --> 00:02:10.870
As far as I know, the first
social media ecosystem

00:02:10.870 --> 00:02:12.472
is within the Roman elite.

00:02:12.472 --> 00:02:15.135
They all write letters to each other.
They pass on news.

00:02:15.135 --> 00:02:18.390
The Roman elite were a bunch
of intermarried families.

00:02:18.390 --> 00:02:21.785
So the political news
was the same as the social news.

00:02:21.785 --> 00:02:25.620
So and so has fallen out with so and so,
so and so is divorcing so and so, etc.

00:02:25.620 --> 00:02:29.980
So if we look at the letters of the statesman
and orator Cicero for example,

00:02:29.980 --> 00:02:34.100
we see this very clearly.
Here is an excerpt from one of his letters :

00:02:34.100 --> 00:02:36.783
"I sent you on March 24th
a copy of Balbus' letter to me...

00:02:36.783 --> 00:02:38.664
… and of Caesar's letter to him."

00:02:38.664 --> 00:02:41.500
So we can see letters being passed on
second and third hand.

00:02:41.500 --> 00:02:44.310
This seems to have been 
quite widespread.


00:02:44.310 --> 00:02:46.790
Letters were essentially 
semi-public documents.

00:02:46.790 --> 00:02:49.930
Here's another one.
Cicero in this case has written a letter

00:02:49.930 --> 00:02:52.516
stating his views on something.
It's an open letter,

00:02:52.516 --> 00:02:54.010
so he sends it to the recipient

00:02:54.010 --> 00:02:57.013
and also gives copies to his friends.
He's been asked for it :

00:02:57.013 --> 00:02:59.693
"I hear you wrote
a good letter, so and so… " (Laughs)

00:02:59.693 --> 00:03:05.450
He's keeping all of his outgoing mail.
We have Cicero's outbox and his inbox.

00:03:05.450 --> 00:03:07.010
So we can see what he did.

00:03:07.010 --> 00:03:09.330
This is what he's doing here.
He's saying :

00:03:09.330 --> 00:03:11.619
"I hear my letter
has been widely published."

00:03:11.619 --> 00:03:12.764
Which is what he wanted.

00:03:12.764 --> 00:03:15.370
This is also how books were published
in the Roman world.

00:03:15.370 --> 00:03:17.010
There were no printing presses.

00:03:17.010 --> 00:03:20.059
To write a book, you'd write it.
There would be lots of scrolls.

00:03:20.059 --> 00:03:23.812
You would give it to the richest, 
most influential person you knew,

00:03:23.812 --> 00:03:26.302
who had a lot of traffic
going through their library.

00:03:26.302 --> 00:03:28.970
Then scholars would 
go to the library, read it and say:

00:03:28.970 --> 00:03:30.762
"This book is good.
Can I have a copy ?"

00:03:30.762 --> 00:03:33.990
Then this wealthy patron would have
his scribes make them a copy,

00:03:33.990 --> 00:03:36.056
and take it to their library.
It would ripple.

00:03:36.056 --> 00:03:38.852
Only when books were rippling,
and people were talking about them

00:03:38.852 --> 00:03:40.397
and asking for copies,

00:03:40.397 --> 00:03:42.692
would the bookmakers 
start to produce them.

00:03:42.692 --> 00:03:46.242
Roman authors wanted their book 
to be as widely pirated as possible.

00:03:46.242 --> 00:03:47.822
This was a peer-to-peer system.

00:03:47.832 --> 00:03:51.742
The other thing distributed in a peer-to-peer 
manner, was the Roman newspaper.

00:03:51.742 --> 00:03:55.932
It was called the Acta Diurna,
founded in 59 B.C. by Julius Caesar.

00:03:55.932 --> 00:03:59.252
It was published every day. Do you know
how many copies were produced ?

00:03:59.252 --> 00:04:02.818
Spectator : One.
Tom Standage : One. Exactly. One copy. (Laughs)

00:04:02.818 --> 00:04:04.978
It was in the forum.
If you wanted to read it,

00:04:04.978 --> 00:04:06.573
you had to go and read it yourself.

00:04:06.573 --> 00:04:08.578
If you wanted to read it
somewhere other,

00:04:08.578 --> 00:04:11.800
it was up to the audience
to do the distribution.

00:04:11.800 --> 00:04:15.135
So you would send your scribe down.
You would say : "Go down for me,

00:04:15.135 --> 00:04:17.644
note down the headlines
I might be interested in.

00:04:17.644 --> 00:04:19.856
Because I want to read the news
over breakfast."

00:04:19.856 --> 00:04:23.335
Your scribe would do that.
He would bring you back the news.

00:04:23.335 --> 00:04:26.215
This is the device you would read
it on. Looks quite familiar.

00:04:26.215 --> 00:04:29.976
This is a Roman iPad.
(Laughs)

00:04:29.976 --> 00:04:35.416
It's actually a wax tablet,
but the aspect ratio is exactly the same.

00:04:35.416 --> 00:04:37.732
The size is identical.
(Laughs)

00:04:37.732 --> 00:04:39.856
If we go back to that previous one,
the woman,

00:04:39.856 --> 00:04:44.582
she's got a Roman Galaxy S4.
(Laughs)

00:04:44.582 --> 00:04:48.621
The buttons were in the middle
of the long end, which is quite interesting.

00:04:48.621 --> 00:04:52.456
So this is the way the news got around.
If you were going out of town,

00:04:52.456 --> 00:04:55.056
and you wanted to be kept 
informed of the news,

00:04:55.056 --> 00:04:57.469
your friends would copy 
bits of the Acta Diurna,

00:04:57.469 --> 00:04:59.698
and other bits of the letters
they had received.

00:04:59.698 --> 00:05:03.412
You got the news from your friends.
It was a social media system.

00:05:03.412 --> 00:05:06.176
Let's move forward a bit.
Here is another example.

00:05:06.176 --> 00:05:09.056
This is from 1500 years later,
this is Martin Luther.

00:05:09.056 --> 00:05:12.190
Martin Luther picks a fight
with the Catholic Church

00:05:12.190 --> 00:05:13.866
over the doctrine of indulgences, 


00:05:13.866 --> 00:05:16.722
or the sale of 'get out of purgatory' free cards.

00:05:18.270 --> 00:05:22.016
He thinks this is a silly idea,
so he writes 95 theses,

00:05:22.016 --> 00:05:26.727
essentially questions he wants to debate,
questions he wants the Pope to answer.

00:05:26.727 --> 00:05:29.885
These days it would be a listicle
on BuzzFeed. It would be called :

00:05:29.885 --> 00:05:32.297
"95 reasons why the Pope
is wrong on indulgences",

00:05:32.297 --> 00:05:33.578
or something like that.
(Laughs)

00:05:33.578 --> 00:05:35.854
If it was on BuzzFeed,
it would be called :

00:05:35.854 --> 00:05:38.339
"95 crazy reasons
why the Pope is wrong…"

00:05:38.339 --> 00:05:42.138
What he actually does, though,
is he writes this out, longhand,

00:05:42.138 --> 00:05:44.499
and pins it to the Church door
in Wittenberg, to say :

00:05:44.499 --> 00:05:46.659
"I want to have a debate on this."
That was how you did that.

00:05:46.659 --> 00:05:48.859
People start copying it.
It starts to spread.

00:05:48.859 --> 00:05:50.645
Then printers get hold of it.

00:05:50.645 --> 00:05:55.057
It's in Latin. They print copies of it,
it spreads to printers in nearby towns.

00:05:55.057 --> 00:05:59.339
It's causing such a stir, they reprint it.
It spreads to other towns. It spreads.

00:05:59.339 --> 00:06:01.745
Luther doesn't do anything himself.

00:06:01.745 --> 00:06:04.229
Some of the printers 
translate it into German,

00:06:04.229 --> 00:06:06.459
so it reaches people 
who don't read Latin.

00:06:06.459 --> 00:06:09.459
It spreads incredibly fast.
This is a contemporary of Luther:

00:06:09.459 --> 00:06:11.613
"It takes 2 weeks to spread 
throughout Germany,

00:06:11.613 --> 00:06:14.099
and a month to spread 
throughout the whole of Europe."

00:06:14.099 --> 00:06:16.059
This comes as a total surprise
to Luther.

00:06:16.059 --> 00:06:19.577
He says he can't believe "they are printed
and circulated" - his theses -

00:06:19.577 --> 00:06:21.621
"far beyond my expectation."

00:06:21.621 --> 00:06:24.012
Now a light bulb comes on
and he goes : "Hang on...

00:06:24.012 --> 00:06:27.101
… this is the way to spread my views
about indulgences."

00:06:27.101 --> 00:06:29.927
So he writes his next pamphlet in German,

00:06:29.927 --> 00:06:32.753
gives it to the printer 
in Wittenberg, where he lives.

00:06:32.753 --> 00:06:35.579
He prints a thousand copies.
They get carried to nearby towns

00:06:35.579 --> 00:06:37.459
where more printers 
print more copies,

00:06:37.459 --> 00:06:40.708
and it spreads and spreads.
This is how he gets his message out.

00:06:40.708 --> 00:06:44.859
How do we know that this was effective ?
How can we measure this ?

00:06:44.859 --> 00:06:48.301
Today, we measure the effectiveness
of a social media campaign

00:06:48.301 --> 00:06:51.847
by counting retweets, likes, reblogs etc.


00:06:51.847 --> 00:06:55.393
It turns out you can do this 
for Martin Luther as well,

00:06:55.393 --> 00:06:58.939
because you can count the number of times
that his pamphlets are reprinted

00:06:58.939 --> 00:07:00.630
- the number of new editions.

00:07:00.630 --> 00:07:03.525
If you do that and
you look at Martin Luther's traffic stats,

00:07:03.525 --> 00:07:05.500
it looks like this. (Laughs)

00:07:05.500 --> 00:07:09.888
If any of you have a WordPress blog,
you will be used to looking at things like this.

00:07:09.888 --> 00:07:11.852
Luther would be pretty pleased
to see it.

00:07:11.852 --> 00:07:14.092
You see, that massive spike is 1523.

00:07:14.092 --> 00:07:19.571
The red ones here are the German pamphlets,
the blue ones are the Latin pamphlets.

00:07:19.571 --> 00:07:21.612
The lighter colour is the reprints,

00:07:21.612 --> 00:07:24.332
the darker colour is the original
new pamphlets by Luther.

00:07:24.332 --> 00:07:30.092
You can see massive spikes in reprinting.
Each one is another thousand copies.

00:07:30.092 --> 00:07:35.451
This causes his message to spread
throughout the German lands and beyond,

00:07:35.451 --> 00:07:39.099
and the result is the split in the Church
between Catholics and Protestants.

00:07:39.099 --> 00:07:40.652
The Reformation comes out of this.

00:07:40.652 --> 00:07:44.172
Here's another social media platform.
This one is connected to Oxford.

00:07:44.172 --> 00:07:48.149
This is the first coffee house 
in England, here in Oxford.

00:07:48.149 --> 00:07:50.966
Coffee houses were
a fantastic media sharing platform.

00:07:50.966 --> 00:07:53.490
They were where pamphlets would come in,

00:07:53.490 --> 00:07:56.014
and news books, which were 
an ancestor of the newspaper.

00:07:56.014 --> 00:07:58.540
People would gather,
read them and discuss them,

00:07:58.540 --> 00:08:01.141
and they'd send them by post
to other coffee houses.

00:08:01.141 --> 00:08:03.819
They would take place
in a massive distributed discussion

00:08:03.819 --> 00:08:06.138
that was going on by people
inside coffee houses.

00:08:06.138 --> 00:08:09.941
What was notable about coffee houses
wasn't just that they had coffee,

00:08:09.941 --> 00:08:12.767
it was also that people 
of different social classes


00:08:12.767 --> 00:08:15.593
were expected, 
were invited to mix.

00:08:15.593 --> 00:08:18.419
So you get the gentleman, the mechanic,
the lord and the scoundrel,

00:08:18.419 --> 00:08:19.898
all talking to each other.

00:08:19.898 --> 00:08:21.328
Ideas were able to cross over


00:08:21.328 --> 00:08:23.658
between different groups 
and social circles,

00:08:23.658 --> 00:08:25.539
in a way that they couldn't before.

00:08:25.539 --> 00:08:29.934
This went on to have
some pretty far-reaching impacts.

00:08:29.934 --> 00:08:32.326
But the main thing this does,

00:08:32.346 --> 00:08:35.208
is allowing people 
to be exposed to new ideas,

00:08:35.218 --> 00:08:38.851
and to take part in a broader discussion
of things that are going on.

00:08:38.851 --> 00:08:40.859
People call coffee houses
penny universities.

00:08:40.859 --> 00:08:42.659
You paid a penny
for your coffee,

00:08:42.659 --> 00:08:45.700
and you could take part
in an incredibly alluring and addictive

00:08:45.700 --> 00:08:47.539
media sharing environment.

00:08:47.539 --> 00:08:51.620
There are many more examples.
I have been collecting these for a while.

00:08:51.620 --> 00:08:55.755
This is a commonplace book,
where you wrote interesting stuff,

00:08:55.755 --> 00:08:58.658
like on Tumblr or Pinterest :
"Oh, that's interesting !" (Laughs)

00:08:58.658 --> 00:09:02.659
It's very rarely stuff by you. This is why
I say it's like Tumblr or Pinterest.

00:09:02.659 --> 00:09:05.220
80% of stuff on Tumblr and Pinterest
is re-shared.

00:09:05.220 --> 00:09:09.734
It's the same here
with these commonplace books.

00:09:09.734 --> 00:09:12.497
It's mostly other people's poems, 
lists and aphorisms.

00:09:12.497 --> 00:09:15.100
You share the book 
and friends copy the bit they like.

00:09:15.100 --> 00:09:18.720
What you choose to share with them,
and what you choose to put in your book

00:09:18.720 --> 00:09:20.973
is a way for you
to define and express yourself.

00:09:20.973 --> 00:09:23.340
Other examples :
poems before the French Revolution,

00:09:23.340 --> 00:09:27.180
pamphlets in the English Civil War,
pamphlets before the American Revolution...

00:09:27.180 --> 00:09:29.260
I have a whole lot of examples.

00:09:30.620 --> 00:09:33.980
The question then is : if social media 
is commonplace around history,

00:09:33.980 --> 00:09:36.368
what happened to it ?
Why haven't we noticed before ?

00:09:36.368 --> 00:09:39.200
The answer is that we went
from this kind of environment,

00:09:39.200 --> 00:09:41.740
where people are sharing stuff
on social networks,

00:09:41.740 --> 00:09:44.580
and in the 19th century,
we switched to this kind of model.

00:09:44.580 --> 00:09:49.046
This is where a small number of people
are delivering a message very efficiently

00:09:49.046 --> 00:09:51.700
to an enormous audience,
but in an impersonal way.

00:09:51.700 --> 00:09:55.340
This starts off with the steam press
and with mass circulation newspapers.

00:09:55.340 --> 00:09:58.606
It then goes on to radio and TV 
and that sort of thing.

00:09:58.606 --> 00:10:03.220
They allow a very small selective group
of people, let's call them journalists…

00:10:03.227 --> 00:10:06.494
… to reach a large number of people.
They are not always journalists,

00:10:06.494 --> 00:10:08.335
because this is the most
notorious example

00:10:08.335 --> 00:10:10.666
of the effectiveness with which you can

00:10:10.666 --> 00:10:12.997
propagate a message: propaganda.

00:10:12.997 --> 00:10:15.328
This is the Nazi Volksempfänger.

00:10:15.328 --> 00:10:17.328
We know the Volkswagen,
the people's car.

00:10:17.328 --> 00:10:20.940
This is the people's radio,
but it was the people's radio because

00:10:20.940 --> 00:10:24.096
it was built so that it could only
pick up domestic German broadcast.

00:10:24.096 --> 00:10:27.368
You couldn't pickup foreign news on it.
So you had to listen to Hitler

00:10:27.368 --> 00:10:30.008
droning on all the time,
and making his speeches.

00:10:30.008 --> 00:10:31.827
This sort of centralised control


00:10:31.827 --> 00:10:33.866
is the absolute opposite of social media,

00:10:33.866 --> 00:10:37.447
and this is what happened in the 19th 
and then mostly the 20th century.

00:10:37.447 --> 00:10:40.722
I think this gives us
a new way to look at media,

00:10:40.722 --> 00:10:43.589
because now, "Social media 
is back, thanks to the Internet."

00:10:43.589 --> 00:10:46.819
The Internet makes it cheap
to reach a large audience of people.

00:10:46.819 --> 00:10:50.926
You don't need an expensive printing press
or radio transmitter anymore.

00:10:50.926 --> 00:10:53.852
You can just go out there
onto your social platform of choice,

00:10:53.852 --> 00:10:58.256
and potentially, what you write or publish
can reach an audience of millions.

00:10:58.256 --> 00:11:02.332
I think this means instead of looking
at the history of media like this,

00:11:02.332 --> 00:11:04.252
as a division
between old and new media,

00:11:04.252 --> 00:11:07.678
- "old" was analog, 
print, broadcast,


00:11:07.678 --> 00:11:11.214
"new" is digital, the Internet, 
and more social -

00:11:11.214 --> 00:11:13.172
I think that's not the whole story.

00:11:13.172 --> 00:11:15.300
We need to think of it like this.
(Laughs)

00:11:15.300 --> 00:11:17.048
There was this thing 
called "really old" media,

00:11:17.068 --> 00:11:21.066
and it was quite similar to "new" media.

00:11:21.086 --> 00:11:23.631
The cutoff is 1833, 
which is when the first


00:11:23.631 --> 00:11:25.426
penny paper is launched in New York.

00:11:25.426 --> 00:11:28.721
That's for me the beginning of "old" media,
of this centralisation.

00:11:28.721 --> 00:11:35.692
I think that this pre-"old" media period
can tell us a lot today.

00:11:35.692 --> 00:11:38.871
This means ancient social media systems 


00:11:38.871 --> 00:11:41.350
have a whole bunch of lessons for us.

00:11:41.350 --> 00:11:44.179
Let me just do three of them very quickly.
Here is the first one :

00:11:44.179 --> 00:11:47.459
"Is social media merely a
dangerous distraction, a waste of time ?"

00:11:47.459 --> 00:11:51.344
I'm sure you've been told this,
it's a very common complaint, that

00:11:51.344 --> 00:11:53.759
"We shouldn't be calling it
social networking...

00:11:53.759 --> 00:11:56.000
… we should be calling it
social notworking."

00:11:56.000 --> 00:11:57.011
(Laughs)

00:11:57.021 --> 00:11:59.703
This is a very old complaint.

00:11:59.703 --> 00:12:04.499
Here is somebody making exactly 
this complaint in Oxford in the 1670s.

00:12:04.499 --> 00:12:08.019
Anthony Wood says : "Why are the
students not doing any work anymore ? ...

00:12:08.019 --> 00:12:10.132
… because they're all 
in the coffee house,


00:12:10.152 --> 00:12:12.685
sharing media with their friends." (Laughs)

00:12:12.685 --> 00:12:15.569
It turns out this also happened
in Cambridge. (Laughs)

00:12:15.939 --> 00:12:19.179
Equal opportunities, right ?
Oxbridge!

00:12:19.369 --> 00:12:21.972
Exactly the same complaints 
in Cambridge :

00:12:21.972 --> 00:12:25.013
students don't work anymore
because they're in the coffee house.

00:12:25.013 --> 00:12:28.972
Here is a pamphlet
that is complaining the same thing :

00:12:28.972 --> 00:12:31.452
coffee houses are enemies
to diligence and industry,

00:12:31.452 --> 00:12:33.862
and the ruin of serious young men

00:12:33.872 --> 00:12:36.652
because people are just wasting time.

00:12:36.652 --> 00:12:40.692
Is this true, though ? Well, look at what
happened at the end of the 17th century.

00:12:40.692 --> 00:12:45.557
You'll see that instead of being enemies
of diligence and industry,

00:12:45.557 --> 00:12:47.692
coffee houses were crucibles of innovation.

00:12:47.692 --> 00:12:50.293
They allowed people and ideas
to mingle in new ways.

00:12:50.293 --> 00:12:52.053
Incredible things came out of that.

00:12:52.053 --> 00:12:54.396
The scientific revolution, for example.

00:12:54.436 --> 00:12:57.679
You get scientists meeting in coffee houses.

00:12:57.679 --> 00:13:00.493
The Royal Society grows out
of people meeting in coffee houses,

00:13:00.493 --> 00:13:02.373
here in Oxford and in London.

00:13:02.373 --> 00:13:05.373
They sometimes even do experiments
and lectures in coffee houses.

00:13:05.373 --> 00:13:09.653
My favourite example is that
Isaac Newton writes Principia Mathematica,

00:13:09.653 --> 00:13:13.253
the foundation of modern science,
in order to settle a coffee house argument

00:13:13.253 --> 00:13:15.373
between Wren, Hooke and Halley.
(Laughs)

00:13:15.373 --> 00:13:17.613
Blame the coffee house.

00:13:17.613 --> 00:13:20.293
Similarly, coffee houses lead to 
commercial innovation.

00:13:20.293 --> 00:13:23.452
Lloyd's of London starts off
as a coffee house called Lloyd's.

00:13:23.452 --> 00:13:26.029
Another coffee house round the corner
called Jonathan's

00:13:26.029 --> 00:13:28.490
turns into the London Stock Exchange.
(Laughs)

00:13:28.490 --> 00:13:31.093
You get amazing innovation
from this collision of ideas.

00:13:31.093 --> 00:13:33.203
The same is possible
in social media today.

00:13:33.203 --> 00:13:36.616
Some companies are realising this,
and are using social media internally

00:13:36.616 --> 00:13:39.356
to foster collaboration and innovation.

00:13:39.356 --> 00:13:42.053
"What is the role of social media 
in revolutions?"

00:13:42.053 --> 00:13:44.452
We heard a lot about this, 
after the Arab Spring.

00:13:44.452 --> 00:13:47.212
To what extent did Facebook 
and Twitter play a role,

00:13:47.212 --> 00:13:50.562
in what happened in Tunisia and Egypt?
Can we call them Twitter revolutions ?

00:13:50.572 --> 00:13:53.875
It turns out we can find out 
by asking history.


00:13:53.875 --> 00:13:55.238
We can ask Martin Luther :

00:13:55.238 --> 00:13:57.572
"From the rapid spread of the theses,

00:13:57.572 --> 00:14:00.696
I gathered what most of the nation
thought of indulgences."

00:14:00.696 --> 00:14:04.295
That is, the popularity of his pamphlets
was a signalling mechanism,

00:14:04.295 --> 00:14:06.597
to him and to the readers 
of the pamphlets,


00:14:06.597 --> 00:14:09.459
that they all felt the same way
about indulgences.

00:14:09.499 --> 00:14:13.332
Modern media scholars
call this synchronisation of opinion.

00:14:13.332 --> 00:14:17.962
It means that people who aren't quite sure
they share the same views as other people,

00:14:17.962 --> 00:14:19.212
can find out that they do.

00:14:19.212 --> 00:14:22.892
Today, you can do it because
when 80,000 people like a Facebook page,

00:14:22.892 --> 00:14:25.892
that says : "Let's go and have
a demonstration on Saturday."

00:14:25.892 --> 00:14:29.883
In those days, you could do it because
when you went to the pamphlet seller,

00:14:29.883 --> 00:14:32.052
he'd say : "Sorry, 
sold out of the new Luther."

00:14:32.052 --> 00:14:34.652
Then you'd know other people
were trying to buy it

00:14:34.652 --> 00:14:36.852
and were interested
in what he had to say.

00:14:36.852 --> 00:14:40.212
I think that tells us that social media
doesn't cause revolution,

00:14:40.212 --> 00:14:42.842
as an underlying grievance, obviously,

00:14:42.842 --> 00:14:46.852
but they help them 
and allow them to spread more quickly.

00:14:46.852 --> 00:14:51.132
One way this has been put by Jared Cohen
at Google, is that they're an accelerator.

00:14:51.132 --> 00:14:53.452
They don't start a fire,
but they help it to spread.

00:14:53.452 --> 00:14:55.640
I think that's a good way 
to think about it.


00:14:55.640 --> 00:14:57.628
Finally, "Is social media a fad ?"

00:14:57.628 --> 00:15:02.298
I hope I've convinced you that 
it has been around for a very long time.

00:15:02.298 --> 00:15:06.972
It's not at all a fad. If anything was 
a fad, it was the "old" mass-media period.

00:15:06.972 --> 00:15:10.292
That was a historical anomaly,
if you look at it in these terms.

00:15:10.292 --> 00:15:13.812
Now we have gone back
to a more social model

00:15:13.812 --> 00:15:16.620
like we had before
at the middle of the 19th century.

00:15:16.620 --> 00:15:18.652
This time it's supercharged 
by the Internet.

00:15:18.652 --> 00:15:20.509
"Social media is not a fad.

00:15:20.509 --> 00:15:23.126
It was the mass-media era 
that was a anomaly."

00:15:23.126 --> 00:15:25.365
Social media is here to stay.

00:15:25.365 --> 00:15:29.572
I hope I have convinced you that
modern social-media users,

00:15:29.572 --> 00:15:31.880
- all of you,
I hope you're all on Twitter -

00:15:31.880 --> 00:15:34.081
are heirs to a centuries-long tradition.

00:15:34.081 --> 00:15:37.533
I hope this will change
the way you look at social media,

00:15:37.533 --> 00:15:42.529
that you'll realise all these modern activities
have these historical predecessors.

00:15:42.529 --> 00:15:45.964
I hope I have convinced you that social media

00:15:45.974 --> 00:15:48.159
doesn't just connect us to each other today,

00:15:48.159 --> 00:15:51.166
it also links us to the past.
Thank you.

00:15:51.166 --> 00:15:56.360
(Applause)