E(pistle) mail - or how this isn't the first time that new technologies and social media have turned the world upside down

Craig Newmark of Craig's list fame has an interesting post on how today's evolving social media environment is simply an extension of what has happened before.

Around five hundred years ago, another nerd, Johannes Gutenberg, invented some tech, but lacked the marketing skills to go really big. That took a social media practitioner, Martin Luther, who started with a posting on a church door. That had impact similar to a really good Facebook Wall post.

However, Luther made use of a social networking platform, the Church store-and-forward network, which really got his stuff around, to considerable effect, in the Western hemisphere. That played out over maybe a few hundred years and led to a new balance of power in Europe and a loss of message control, resulting in many strains of Protestantism, and the democratization of Christianity. The latter led to greatly increased literacy.


The social network platform was built by a much earlier social media practitioner, Paul of Tarsus, or St. Paul, to successfully effect mass change. Paul used what I call “e-mail”, or “epistle mail”.

His frame of reference is a bit too lefty for my taste (shadowy groups controlling the tea party and all that) but his point is well taken:  the elite institutions that have historically controlled the narrative have lost control - and are not being replaced with other elites but with....us.  Much like Luther's assertion that individuals could know the Truth through their own comprehension of scripture made the invention of the book into a force that changed the world.

Walter Russell Mead makes a similar point in his magisterial three part jeremiad against Al Gore and the traditional cultural elite.

Beyond the South, the idea of better governance through specially trained and impartial experts has been losing favor from one end of the United States to the other.  In 1911, only a handful of Americans had a college education.  Southern sharecroppers and northern mill workers had little education and little leisure time for politics.  Today growing numbers of Americans resent and reject the tutelage of well meaning elites — and they view with suspicion the claims of ‘experts’ to be dispassionate and disinterested custodians of the public good.  They don’t see civil servants as unselfish and apolitical experts who can be trusted to regulate and rule; they see them as a lobby like any other, a special interest more interested in preserving fat pensions and easy working conditions — and at foisting their own ideological hobby horses and preferences on the public at large.

Two talented men:  a lefty and a righty, both pointing out that being Mr. Big ain't what it used to be.  Oh, and by the way:  as both Paul and Luther demonstrated, the key to the transformation is not simply the medium or mechanism but the message.

Fun.