16世纪的社交媒体编辑本段回目录
IT IS a familiar-sounding tale: after decades of simmering discontent a new form of media gives opponents of an authoritarian regime a way to express their views, register their solidarity and co-ordinate their actions. The protesters’ message spreads virally through social networks, making it impossible to suppress and highlighting the extent of public support for revolution. The combination of improved publishing technology and social networks is a catalyst for social change where previous efforts had failed.
这是一个耳熟能详的故事：经过几十年压抑的愤怒后，一种新媒体成为强权专制的对手来表达自己观念，并团结一致协力行动。抗议者们的言论病毒般地遍布社交网络，让镇压无从下手并扩大了公众对革命支持的范围。从前的努力都白费的情况下，改良后的出版技术加上社交网络成为了社会变革的催化剂。
That’s what happened in the Arab spring. It’s also what happened during the Reformation, nearly 500 years ago, when Martin Luther and his allies took the new media of their day—pamphlets, ballads and woodcuts—and circulated them through social networks to promote their message of religious reform.
这就是在阿拉伯之春发生的一切。这也是将近500年前的宗教改革中发生过的事，当年马丁·路德和他的同盟们利用那时候的新媒体——小册子、民谣和木刻画——并让它们流通于社交网络来传播推动宗教变革的思想。
Scholars have long debated the relative importance of printed media, oral transmission and images in rallying popular support for the Reformation. Some have championed the central role of printing, a relatively new technology at the time. Opponents of this view emphasise the importance of preaching and other forms of oral transmission. More recently historians have highlighted the role of media as a means of social signalling and co-ordinating public opinion in the Reformation.学者们长久以来就一直在争论印刷媒体、口头传播和凝聚民心的形象三者在宗教改革中的相对重要性。一些人拥护印刷的中心地位，在当时这是一门相对新兴的技术。反对这个观点的人们则强调布道和其他形式的口头传播的重要性。直到最近历史学家们强调了媒体在宗教改革中起到了社会信号传输和调节公众观念的作用。
Now the internet offers a new perspective on this long-running debate, namely that the important factor was not the printing press itself (which had been around since the 1450s), but the wider system of media sharing along social networks—what is called “social media” today. Luther, like the Arab revolutionaries, grasped the dynamics of this new media environment very quickly, and saw how it could spread his message.
如今，网络给这场持久的辩论提供了全新的看法，也就是说印刷机本身（从14世纪50年代起就走红了）并不是重要因素，重要的是通过社交网络更为广泛的媒体分享系统——也就是今天我们所谓的“社交媒体”。路德和阿拉伯革命者们一样，很快地抓住了新媒体环境中的动态，并知道怎样来利用它传播自己的观点。
New post from Martin Luther
来自马丁·路德的新对策
The start of the Reformation is usually dated to Luther’s nailing of his “95 Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences” to the church door in Wittenberg on October 31st 1517. The “95 Theses” were propositions written in Latin that he wished to discuss, in the academic custom of the day, in an open debate at the university. Luther, then an obscure theologian and minister, was outraged by the behaviour of Johann Tetzel, a Dominican friar who was selling indulgences to raise money to fund the pet project of his boss, Pope Leo X: the reconstruction of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Hand over your money, went Tetzel’s sales pitch, and you can ensure that your dead relatives are not stuck in purgatory. This crude commercialisation of the doctrine of indulgences, encapsulated in Tetzel’s slogan—“As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, so the soul from purgatory springs”—was, to Luther, “the pious defrauding of the faithful” and a glaring symptom of the need for broad reform. Pinning a list of propositions to the church door, which doubled as the university notice board, was a standard way to announce a public debate.
宗教改革的开始要追溯到1517年10月31日，路德将他的《关于宽恕的力量与效力的九十五条论纲》钉在维滕贝格的教堂大门上。《九十五条论纲》用拉丁文写成，都是他希望在当天学术惯例——大学的公开辩论上讨论的主张。路德这位鲜为人知的神学家和牧师，被多明尼加修士约翰贩卖赎罪券并为他的上司里奥十世教皇筹集其钟爱项目资金的行为所激怒——重建罗马的圣彼得大教堂。交出你的钱，推广约翰的宣传，就能保证你死去的亲人们不会驻留在炼狱。宽恕教条的商业化赤裸裸地呈现在约翰的宣传口号当中——“当金币投入集资箱的一刹那，灵魂也得以从炼狱中释放”，对于路德而言是“对虔诚伪善的欺骗”和急需广泛改革的强烈信号。在教条门口和大学告示板都钉上了主张表，就是一种宣布公开辩论的典型方式。
Although they were written in Latin, the “95 Theses” caused an immediate stir, first within academic circles in Wittenberg and then farther afield. In December 1517 printed editions of the theses, in the form of pamphlets and broadsheets, appeared simultaneously in Leipzig, Nuremberg and Basel, paid for by Luther’s friends to whom he had sent copies. German translations, which could be read by a wider public than Latin-speaking academics and clergy, soon followed and quickly spread throughout the German-speaking lands. Luther’s friend Friedrich Myconius later wrote that “hardly 14 days had passed when these propositions were known throughout Germany and within four weeks almost all of Christendom was familiar with them.”
尽管《九十五条论纲》是用拉丁文写成的，却立即引起了极大骚动，先是在维滕贝格的学术圈子里，后来越传越远。1517年12月，小册子和大报上印刷版的论纲同时在莱比锡、纽伦堡和巴塞尔出现，是路德向朋友们寄出论纲抄本，由他们出资印刷。翻译成德语后，除了说拉丁语的学者和神职人员以外更普遍的大众都能读懂，随后很快在整片说德语的土地上传播开来了。路德的朋友弗里德里希后来写道：“仅仅过去14天，论纲便传遍了德国上下，在四周内几乎整个基督教世界都对其耳熟能详了。”
The unintentional but rapid spread of the “95 Theses” alerted Luther to the way in which media passed from one person to another could quickly reach a wide audience. “They are printed and circulated far beyond my expectation,” he wrote in March 1518 to a publisher in Nuremberg who had published a German translation of the theses. But writing in scholarly Latin and then translating it into German was not the best way to address the wider public. Luther wrote that he “should have spoken far differently and more distinctly had I known what was going to happen.” For the publication later that month of his “Sermon on Indulgences and Grace”, he switched to German, avoiding regional vocabulary to ensure that his words were intelligible from the Rhineland to Saxony. The pamphlet, an instant hit, is regarded by many as the true starting point of the Reformation.
《九十五条论纲》无心却又迅速的传播使路德意识到媒体通过一人传一人的方式能够快速聚集大批听众。他于1518年3月向纽伦堡出版了德语翻译版的一位出版者写道：“它们的印刷和流通是远远超出了我的意料。“但是学术性地用拉丁文写成，再翻译成德语，不是普及大众的最好方法。路德写道他”应该用截然不同的方式表达，也应更清楚地明白会发生什么“。后来那个月他出版的《论赎罪券与恩典的布道》（Sermon on Indulgences and Grace）转而使用德语，为了避免地域性的词汇，从而保证了莱茵到萨克森等地都能读懂他写的意思。这本小册子一举成名，许多人认为这是宗教改革真正的起点。
Mubarak and Leo X, the anciens régimes
穆巴拉克和里奥十世，社会及政治制度
The media environment that Luther had shown himself so adept at managing had much in common with today’s online ecosystem of blogs, social networks and discussion threads. It was a decentralised system whose participants took care of distribution, deciding collectively which messages to amplify through sharing and recommendation. Modern media theorists refer to participants in such systems as a “networked public”, rather than an “audience”, since they do more than just consume information. Luther would pass the text of a new pamphlet to a friendly printer (no money changed hands) and then wait for it to ripple through the network of printing centres across Germany.
路德自己驾轻就熟的媒体环境和今天网络系统中的博客、社交网络和讨论线路有许多共同之处。这是一个参与者们负责分流的分散系统，通过分享和推荐来集体决定扩大哪些信息。现代媒体理论家所指的系统中的参与者是“网络大众”，而不是“听众”，因为他们不只是消耗信息。路德可以把新册子的文本传给印刷工（不需要钱转手），然后就能坐等它通过网络传给德国各地印刷中心。
Unlike larger books, which took weeks or months to produce, a pamphlet could be printed in a day or two. Copies of the initial edition, which cost about the same as a chicken, would first spread throughout the town where it was printed. Luther’s sympathisers recommended it to their friends. Booksellers promoted it and itinerant colporteurs hawked it. Travelling merchants, traders and preachers would then carry copies to other towns, and if they sparked sufficient interest, local printers would quickly produce their own editions, in batches of 1,000 or so, in the hope of cashing in on the buzz. A popular pamphlet would thus spread quickly without its author’s involvement.
不像印刷大规格的书需要数周或者数月，一本小册子一两天就能印好。初版的印刷费和一只鸡差不多，首先会传遍整个镇。路德的支持者们会把册子推荐给朋友们。书商推销它，卖宗教书的小贩四处兜售它。接着旅行商人、经商者和传教士会把册子带去其他镇里，如果他们感兴趣，当地的印刷工很快会以每批1000本左右来印刷自己的版本，在印刷的嗡嗡声中希望赚钱。无需作者的参与，这本风靡的小册子就会因此很快传播开来。
As with “Likes” and retweets today, the number of reprints serves as an indicator of a given item’s popularity. Luther’s pamphlets were the most sought after; a contemporary remarked that they “were not so much sold as seized”. His first pamphlet written in German, the “Sermon on Indulgences and Grace”, was reprinted 14 times in 1518 alone, in print runs of at least 1,000 copies each time. Of the 6,000 different pamphlets that were published in German-speaking lands between 1520 and 1526, some 1,700 were editions of a few dozen works by Luther. In all, some 6m-7m pamphlets were printed in the first decade of the Reformation, more than a quarter of them Luther’s.
有了今天的“喜欢”和“转推”，再版的数量就是受欢迎程度的象征。期路德的小册子受追捧程度就像当时人们说的“与其是卖不如说是抢”。他的第一本用德语写成的册子《论赎罪券与恩典的布道》仅在1518年就再版14次，每版至少印了1000份。1520年至1526年间在德语地区发行的6000本不同册子中，约1700本都是路丁作品的版本。宗教改革开始后的第一个十年里，部分6m-7m的册子的印刷总数比路德的要多出四分之一。
Although Luther was the most prolific and popular author, there were many others on both sides of the debate. Tetzel, the indulgence-seller, was one of the first to respond to him in print, firing back with his own collection of theses. Others embraced the new pamphlet format to weigh in on the merits of Luther’s arguments, both for and against, like argumentative bloggers. Sylvester Mazzolini defended the pope against Luther in his “Dialogue Against the Presumptuous Theses of Martin Luther”. He called Luther “a leper with a brain of brass and a nose of iron” and dismissed his arguments on the basis of papal infallibility. Luther, who refused to let any challenge go unanswered, took a mere two days to produce his own pamphlet in response, giving as good as he got. “I am sorry now that I despised Tetzel,” he wrote. “Ridiculous as he was, he was more acute than you. You cite no scripture. You give no reasons.”
虽然路德是最多产和最受欢迎的作者，还有许多人各抒己见。贩卖赎罪券的约翰是第一个用自己已经出版的论文集反击他的人。另一些接受新册子的人们对路德的观点发表是非评论，就像好辩的博客用户一样。西尔维斯特在他的《驳马丁·路德的放肆言论》中拥护教皇，反对路德。他把路德称为“一个黄铜脑袋铁鼻子的麻风病人”，并在教皇至高无上的基础上驳斥了他的观念。路德拒绝对任何挑战置之不理，仅仅用了两天就发表小册子应战，并尽其所能。“很遗憾我看不起约翰。”他写道：“尽管他很可笑，他比你敏锐多了。你列举不出经文也给不出理由。”
Being able to follow and discuss such back-and-forth exchanges of views, in which each author quoted his opponent’s words in order to dispute them, gave people a thrilling and unprecedented sense of participation in a vast, distributed debate. Arguments in their own social circles about the merits of Luther’s views could be seen as part of a far wider discourse, both spoken and printed. Many pamphlets called upon the reader to discuss their contents with others and read them aloud to the illiterate. People read and discussed pamphlets at home with their families, in groups with their friends, and in inns and taverns. Luther’s pamphlets were read out at spinning bees in Saxony and in bakeries in Tyrol. In some cases entire guilds of weavers or leather-workers in particular towns declared themselves supporters of the Reformation, indicating that Luther’s ideas were being propagated in the workplace. One observer remarked in 1523 that better sermons could be heard in the inns of Ulm than in its churches, and in Basel in 1524 there were complaints about people preaching from books and pamphlets in the town’s taverns. Contributors to the debate ranged from the English king Henry VIII, whose treatise attacking Luther (co-written with Thomas More) earned him the title “Defender of the Faith” from the pope, to Hans Sachs, a shoemaker from Nuremberg who wrote a series of hugely popular songs in support of Luther.
一来一去地遵循和交流意见，每位作者都引用对手的话加以辩驳，这样巨大和分布式的辩论带给人们前所未有的参与和震撼体验。他们自己社会圈子内关于路德观点价值的争论可以被看做更为广泛口头和书面布道的一部分。许多小册子号召读者在读完之后和其他人讨论内容，并大声地读给不识字的听。人们读完后在家里和家人讨论小册子，在朋友圈子里讨论，或是在客栈和小酒馆里讨论。路德的小册子在萨克森的纱纺聚会和蒂罗尔的面包坊由人们大声朗读。在某些情况下，特定城镇的整个纺织或是皮革工人协会会宣称他们支持宗教改革，这说明路德的思想已经普及到了工作场所。1523年，一位观察员表示在乌尔姆的小旅馆内能听到比教堂更动人的讲道，1525年在巴塞尔有人对镇内小酒馆里来自书和小册子的讲道表示不满。波及辩论的范围很广，从著有攻击路德论文（和托马斯·莫尔合写）的英国国王亨利八世——被教皇授予“信仰捍卫者”称号，到来自纽伦堡的鞋匠汉斯·萨克斯，他谱了一系列支持路德并广受欢迎的歌曲。
A multimedia campaign
多媒体活动
It was not just words that travelled along the social networks of the Reformation era, but music and images too. The news ballad, like the pamphlet, was a relatively new form of media. It set a poetic and often exaggerated description of contemporary events to a familiar tune so that it could be easily learned, sung and taught to others. News ballads were often “contrafacta” that deliberately mashed up a pious melody with secular or even profane lyrics. They were distributed in the form of printed lyric sheets, with a note to indicate which tune they should be sung to. Once learned they could spread even among the illiterate through the practice of communal singing.
宗教革命时代通过社交网络传播的不止是文字，也有音乐和图像。新闻民谣和小册子一样是一种相对新兴的媒介。它将时下的事件转化成诗意又夸张的描写，成为人们极易上口并传诵的熟悉曲调。新闻民谣常常故意用虔诚的旋律配上世俗甚至亵渎的歌词来“反呈文”。它们被印成不同形式的歌词单派发，并附有短笺注明对应的曲调。一旦人们学会以后便会通过公共练习被广泛传唱，连文盲之间也不例外。
Both reformers and Catholics used this new form to spread information and attack their enemies. “We are Starting to Sing a New Song”, Luther’s first venture into the news-ballad genre, told the story of two monks who had been executed in Brussels in 1523 after refusing to recant their Lutheran beliefs. Luther’s enemies denounced him as the Antichrist in song, while his supporters did the same for the pope and insulted Catholic theologians (“Goat, desist with your bleating”, one of them was admonished). Luther himself is thought to have been the author of “Now We Drive Out the Pope”, a parody of a folk song called “Now We Drive Out Winter”, whose tune it borrowed:
改革家和天主教徒都用这种新方式传播讯息并攻击敌人。“我们正开始唱一首崭新的歌曲。”路德首次用新闻民谣的形式讲述了1523年在布鲁塞尔两名修道士在拒绝放弃路德信仰后被处决的事。路德的敌人在歌曲中斥责他是反基督教的人，而他的支持者们为教皇做同样的事并侮辱天主教神学家（“山羊，别再咩咩叫了”，其中一人被劝诫）。路德本人被认为是“现在我们赶走了教皇”的作者——借用民谣“现在我们赶走了冬天”的曲调的恶搞版：
Now we drive out the pope
现在我们赶走了教皇
from Christ’s church and God’s house.
从基督教堂和上帝住所里
Therein he has reigned in a deadly fashion
在那儿他统领了一股致命风尚
and has seduced uncountably many souls.
无数的灵魂受其诱惑
Now move along, you damned son,
现在走开吧，你这该死的
you Whore of Babylon. You are the abomination and the Antichrist,
你这巴比伦的妓女，你这可耻的反基督徒
full of lies, death and cunning.
充满了谎言、死亡和诡诈
Woodcuts were another form of propaganda. The combination of bold graphics with a smattering of text, printed as a broadsheet, could convey messages to the illiterate or semi-literate and serve as a visual aid for preachers. Luther remarked that “without images we can neither think nor understand anything.” Some religious woodcuts were elaborate, with complex allusions and layers of meaning that would only have been apparent to the well-educated. “Passional Christi und Antichristi”, for example, was a series of images contrasting the piety of Christ with the decadence and corruption of the pope. Some were astonishingly crude and graphic, such as “The Origin of the Monks” (see picture), showing three devils excreting a pile of monks. The best of them were produced by Luther’s friend Lucas Cranach. Luther’s opponents responded with woodcuts of their own: “Luther’s Game of Heresy” (see beginning of this article) depicts him boiling up a stew with the help of three devils, producing fumes from the pot labelled falsehood, pride, envy, heresy and so forth.
木刻画是另一种形式的宣传。将醒目的图案和易懂的文字绘制成一张大字报，可以将讯息传达给文盲和半文盲，也可作为布道者的视觉辅助工具。路德认为“没有图像的话，我们既不能思考也看不懂。”一些宗教木刻画由复杂的暗语和多层的表达精心制成，只有受过良好教育的人才能看懂。举例来说，“热情的基督徒与反基督徒”就是一系列将基督的虔诚与教皇的腐败堕落进行对比的图像。一些图惊人地粗犷生动，就像“修道士的起源”（见图），三个魔鬼正排泄出一堆修道士。其中最好的一幅画由路德的朋友卢卡斯·克拉纳赫所作。路德的对手们用自己的木刻画作出回应：“路德的异教游戏”（见本文开头），描绘了他在三个魔鬼的帮助下煮沸一口大锅，里面飘出了标有虚伪、骄傲、妒忌、异教等等的烟雾。
Amid the barrage of pamphlets, ballads and woodcuts, public opinion was clearly moving in Luther’s favour. “Idle chatter and inappropriate books” were corrupting the people, fretted one bishop. “Daily there is a veritable downpour of Lutheran tracts in German and Latin…nothing is sold here except the tracts of Luther,” lamented Aleander, Leo X’s envoy to Germany, in 1521. Most of the 60 or so clerics who rallied to the pope’s defence did so in academic and impenetrable Latin, the traditional language of theology, rather than in German. Where Luther’s works spread like wildfire, their pamphlets fizzled. Attempts at censorship failed, too. Printers in Leipzig were banned from publishing or selling anything by Luther or his allies, but material printed elsewhere still flowed into the city. The city council complained to the Duke of Saxony that printers faced losing “house, home, and all their livelihood” because “that which one would gladly sell, and for which there is demand, they are not allowed to have or sell.” What they had was lots of Catholic pamphlets, “but what they have in over-abundance is desired by no one and cannot even be given away.”
铺天盖地的小册子、民谣和木刻画中，舆论显然偏向路德。“空谈和不正当的书籍”正败坏人们的道德，一位主教担忧道。1521年，里奥十世派去德国的使者阿兰德惋惜道：“每天在德国和拉丁那些路德的小册子可以称得上是名副其实的倾盆大雨……这里除了路德的小册子什么都不卖。”60个共同支持教皇的牧师中多数在学术上这么做，拉丁语是德语不可及的传统神学语言。路德的作品像野火般蔓延时，他们的小册子失败了。他们审查的企图也失败了。莱比锡的印刷厂被勒令禁止出版或者贩售一切路德或是其同盟的作品，但在其他各地出版的依然流入城市中。市议会向萨克森公爵抱怨印刷工人正面临“无家可归”的境地，因为“卖的好或者需求旺的都不被允许销售或是印刷”。“他们大量的天主教小册子”囤积过剩无人需求，甚至连送人都不可行。
Luther’s enemies likened the spread of his ideas to a sickness. The papal bull threatening Luther with excommunication in 1520 said its aim was “to cut off the advance of this plague and cancerous disease so it will not spread any further”. The Edict of Worms in 1521 warned that the spread of Luther’s message had to be prevented, otherwise “the whole German nation, and later all other nations, will be infected by this same disorder.” But it was too late—the infection had taken hold in Germany and beyond. To use the modern idiom, Luther’s message had gone viral.
路德的敌人把他思想的传播比作一种弊病。1520年，教皇用逐出教会的敕令对路德进行威胁，宣称其目的是“阻断这场瘟疫和癌症般的疾病，使其无法再蔓延”。1521年的“蠕虫敕令”警告人们禁止传播路德的思想，不然“整个德国，随后其他国家将同样受到疾病的传染”。但是为时已晚——传染已经凌驾于整个德国至上。用现代的成语来说，路德的思想已经走火入魔了。
From Wittenberg to Facebook
从维滕贝格到脸谱网
In the early years of the Reformation expressing support for Luther’s views, through preaching, recommending a pamphlet or singing a news ballad directed at the pope, was dangerous. By stamping out isolated outbreaks of opposition swiftly, autocratic regimes discourage their opponents from speaking out and linking up. A collective-action problem thus arises when people are dissatisfied, but are unsure how widely their dissatisfaction is shared, as Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, has observed in connection with the Arab spring. The dictatorships in Egypt and Tunisia, she argues, survived for as long as they did because although many people deeply disliked those regimes, they could not be sure others felt the same way. Amid the outbreaks of unrest in early 2011, however, social-media websites enabled lots of people to signal their preferences en masse to their peers very quickly, in an “informational cascade” that created momentum for further action.
在宗教革命传播支持路德观点的早期，通过直指教皇的布道、推荐小册子或是传唱新闻民谣是很危险的。通过迅速镇压单独爆发的反对势力，独裁政权从言论到行动上打压对手。正如北卡罗莱纳大学的社会学家 Zeynep Tufekci联系阿拉伯之春观察发现的那样，当人 民不满时因此出现了集体行动的问题，但也不能确定他们的不满有多广。她认为埃及和突尼斯的独裁统治一直得以存在是因为尽管许多人极度厌恶那些统治，但他们不确定其他人是不是也这么认为。然而，2011年年初爆发的动乱中，社交媒体网站使得许多人很快能向同辈们传达自己的观点，通过”信息瀑布“建立起下一步行动的势头。
The same thing happened in the Reformation. The surge in the popularity of pamphlets in 1523-24, the vast majority of them in favour of reform, served as a collective signalling mechanism. As Andrew Pettegree, an expert on the Reformation at St Andrew’s University, puts it in “Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion”, “It was the superabundance, the cascade of titles, that created the impression of an overwhelming tide, an unstoppable movement of opinion…Pamphlets and their purchasers had together created the impression of irresistible force.” Although Luther had been declared a heretic in 1521, and owning or reading his works was banned by the church, the extent of local political and popular support for Luther meant he escaped execution and the Reformation became established in much of Germany.
宗教革命中发生过同样的事。1523年至1524年小册子的飞速普及充当了一项共有的信号传输机制，绝大多数人赞成改革。正如圣安德鲁大学研究宗教革命的专家安德鲁·佩蒂格里在《宗教革命和信仰文化》中说的那样：“圣职的过剩倾泻造就了压倒性趋势的影响，不可阻挡的意见转变……小册子和购买者共同创造了无法抗拒的影响力。”尽管路德在1521年被称为异教徒，教堂禁止人们持有或阅读他的作品，但当地政治上和民众间支持路德的程度使他免受处决，并且宗教改革在德国的大多数地方开展起来。
Modern society tends to regard itself as somehow better than previous ones, and technological advance reinforces that sense of superiority. But history teaches us that there is nothing new under the sun. Robert Darnton, an historian at Harvard University, who has studied information-sharing networks in pre-revolutionary France, argues that “the marvels of communication technology in the present have produced a false consciousness about the past—even a sense that communication has no history, or had nothing of importance to consider before the days of television and the internet.” Social media are not unprecedented: rather, they are the continuation of a long tradition. Modern digital networks may be able to do it more quickly, but even 500 years ago the sharing of media could play a supporting role in precipitating a revolution. Today’s social-media systems do not just connect us to each other: they also link us to the past.
现代社会倾向于认为自身优于从前社会，科技进步增强了这一优越感。但历史告诉我们阳光底下无新事。哈佛大学研究法国革命前信息共享网络的历史学家罗伯特·达恩顿认为“现代通讯技术的成就造成了对过去错误的认识——甚至认为通讯无历史，或是在电视和互联网出现以前毫无重要性可言“。社交媒体并非没有先例：相反，它们是悠久传统的延续。现代数字网络可能会更快做到这一点，但是，甚至在500年前，媒体共享对促进革命有支持性作用。今天的社交媒体系统不光是连接你我：它们也将我们与过去连接到了一起。
