Social media brought attention to and was even the force behind several social revolutions in the past 12 months. However, The Economist show that the use of social networks for societal change is nothing new, citing how Luther went viral in the 16th Century.
The rate of technological progress creates a strong urge to believe the world we live in today is unique and different from everything that’s come before, but looking at other periods of technological change in history reveal the similar routes revolutions take when new technological tools become available.
Modern society tends to regard itself as somehow better than previous ones, and technological advance reinforces that sense of superiority. But history teaches us that there is nothing new under the sun. Robert Darnton, an historian at Harvard University, who has studied information-sharing networks in pre-revolutionary France, argues that “the marvels of communication technology in the present have produced a false consciousness about the past—even a sense that communication has no history, or had nothing of importance to consider before the days of television and the internet.” Social media are not unprecedented: rather, they are the continuation of a long tradition. Modern digital networks may be able to do it more quickly, but even 500 years ago the sharing of media could play a supporting role in precipitating a revolution. Today’s social-media systems do not just connect us to each other: they also link us to the past.
(via The Economist)