Agile Business Change Blog Thoughts on Agile Strategic Business Change and Agile Delivery

Tom Standage from the Economist gave some fascinating insights into historical parallels to social media in his keynote today at DrupalCon London - "The Future of Social Media - A Historical Perspective". The examples he gave included Martin Luther's traffic statistics in his pamphlet "blog posts" on the excesses of the Catholic Church, the "flame wars" of differing accounts of battles from the two sides in the English Civil war and St Paul as the most successful social media user in the Roman Empire with his letters, copies of which spread throughout the empire.

The common characteristics of most of these examples were that multiple people contributed to many discussions, with popular letters being copied and distributed widely and responses being written.

Tom made the interesting suggestion that the advent of the mass circulation daily newspapers in 1833 disrupted social media. Advertising funded newspapers, followed by radio and TV, are broadcast only media with little or no opportunity for dialogue.

This all changed in 2008 with the rise of internet social media and crash of newspaper advertising revenue. Status quo restored!

Tom is in the process of writing a book about this, which should be published in early 2013. I'm looking forward to it.