Tom Standage: Lessons from Ancient Social Media at TEDxOxbridge (Transcript)

Tom Standage at TEDxOxbridge

Full transcript of journalist and author Tom Standage’s TEDx Talk: Lessons from Ancient Social Media at TEDxOxbridge Conference.

Tom Standage – Journalist and author

I’m going to talk to you about social media. And you may say, “Oh, no. Not someone else waffling on about social media!” But I am going to give you a different way of looking at social media, one that I am pretty confident you won’t have heard of before. I want to give you a historical perspective on social media.

But in order to do that, we have to decide first what social media actually is. So this is my definition of it, here. It’s media we get, crucially, from other people. And then it’s exchanged along social connections, and it creates a distributed discussion or community, beyond the room and beyond the people you’re physically with.

So it’s very different from getting, say, an impersonal voice out of a radio. So this is my definition. If you define it this way, then actually it becomes apparent. This is how it works, here. We’ve got a group of people over here. They all tweet each together. And then one of them, in the middle, is connected to this group over here. And so it ripples across. We understand how this works today on Internet based social networks, on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and all the rest of it.

But actually, this kind of model, this horizontal person-to-person transmission doesn’t require a digital network to happen. And what I spent the past few years doing is looking at examples that occur in history. Because I think social media environments have actually existed for centuries.