‘New media’ follows old models
Print Edition
For nearly 20 years, we’ve thought of “new media” as the brash young upstart and “old media” as the stalwart if increasingly embattled establishment. But what if new media aren’t as new as we assume — and old media not really old at all? So argues Tom Standage in “Writing on the Wall,” a provocative book that asks us to look at media less in terms of technology — digital or analog? — than in terms of the role they invite us to play. Are we passive receptors? Or are we participants? The second is characteristic of the Internet in general and social media in particular. But there’s nothing revolutionary about this, Standage says. Instead, it’s the role of consumer, typical of 20th-century mass media, that’s unnatural — and a historical blip.
Standage, the digital editor at The Economist and the author of such unorthodox chronicles as “A History of the World in 6 Glasses” and “The Victorian Internet,” a steampunk classic about the rise of the telegraph, makes a convincing case. Today we equate media with conglomerates and moguls. But far more representative in media history may have been Cicero, who like other upper-class Romans got his news on papyrus rolls that were copied, annotated and passed from person to person.
Literacy fell with the Roman Empire. Not until the advent of the printing press did people have much reason to read again. Once they did, Standage says, their behavior reverted to that of the early Romans. The 95 Theses Martin Luther posted on his church door in Wittenberg, printed and passed from hand to hand, spread rapidly and within a month were known across Europe. Two and a half centuries later, Thomas Paine’s inflammatory anti-British pamphlet “Common Sense” coursed through the American colonies in much the same way.
The 18th-century gazettes that served as Paine’s forum, filled as they were with pseudonymous essays, commentary from readers and news cribbed from other sources, were more like blogs than anything we would recognize today as newspapers. But that began to change with the Industrial Revolution. In 1833, just as high-capacity, steam-powered printing presses were made available, a 23-year-old printer named Benjamin Day started The New York Sun, which sold for a penny while other dailies sold for 6 cents. Day’s scheme could work only if the paper attracted a lot of paid advertising. He hired reporters — a relatively novel idea — who wrote lurid crime reports and fantastical stories. Success brought imitators, and as it did the role of the press changed. Once a quasi-open platform became an outlet for ads and reporting.
The shift happened even faster with radio and television. Standage gives us a fascinating account of the early days of radio, when a profusion of teenage hobbyists treated the new medium as the occasion for a freewheeling conversation — until they were silenced by commercial forces and complaints of antisocial behavior.
The question is, what now? The real threat to the Internet would seem to be from governments and copyright holders, which have repeatedly sought to circumscribe its usage in the name of fighting piracy. But Standage addresses the first only briefly and the second not at all.
Even when Standage considers social media on their own terms, he can be a bit short on insight. But he makes a crucial point: Social media, whether of the digital or the preindustrial variety, fill a universal human need for connectedness.
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