Scribimus Indocti Doctique Poemata Passim: how the Romans invented Facebook, sort of.

• Author: Peters, Justin
• Position: Writing on the Wall: Social Media - The First 2,000 Years - Book review

Writing on the Wall: Social Media--The First 2,000 Years

by Tom Standage

Bloomsbury, 278 pp.

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About three or four times a month, social media makes me hate my life. If you've ever spent any time at all on social media, you probably know what I mean: You go to bed realizing that you somehow wasted seven hours of your day commenting on Facebook photos of people you don't even like, or trading insipid jokes with strangers over Twitter. Then you massage your temples, realize that your parents already had two kids and a house when they were your age, and think "This is the future?"

Not only is social media the future, writes the Economist's Tom Standage, it's also the past. In his clever new book, Writing on the Wall: Social Media--The First 2,000 Years, Standage argues that today's prominent social platforms are but the latest iterations of phenomena that have endured since the days of Caesar, and that modern users of Twitter and Pinterest are "the unwitting heirs of a rich tradition with surprisingly deep historical roots." "What if the ancient Romans had been on Facebook?" sounds like the beginning to an odd comedy routine, or an essay question from a history class at an unaccredited college. But Standage argues that it's not at all silly to imagine the Julio-Claudians on Facebook, because, in a way, they were on Facebook--and so were Saint Paul of Tarsus, Thomas Paine, Martin Luther, and the inventor of the flush toilet, for good measure.

I know. I rolled my eyes, too. But this is actually less of a stretch than you might think. Standage defines social media as "an environment in which information was passed from one person to another along social connections, to create a distributed discussion or community." Those informal networks flourished for centuries as society's main sources of information and commentary, before mass media emerged to turn news into a one-way conversation. Standage argues that modern mass media was a 200-year aberration: a function of the high production costs associated with large printing presses and broadcast machinery. The rise of the Internet made everyone a potential publisher, and, thus, media reverted to its natural, social state. Everything old is new again.

With that as his thesis, Standage traces the rise of social media systems throughout history, finding interesting parallels hither and yon. The European coffeehouses of the seventeenth century were social networks of a sort, Standage...