#drupalcon Day 2 Keynote by Tom Standage

Tom Standage, digital editor at the Economist, gave a great keynote giving an historical perspective on social media.

He started off describing in brief The Economist's move from Coldfusion over to Drupal giving one of the main reasons as the social and community features that are a core part of Drupal.

At the heart of Tom's talk was that new media is pretty much the same as old media.

What did the Romans ever do for us?!

Well it turns out that the Romans invented the tablet before Apple, that's right, back in Roman times tablets were used to note down and share information.

As time went on snippets of information were passed around on scrolls allowing for social sharing. Often these bits of information would be read by those taking the scrolls from one place to the next which is where the first encryption of data started to be introduced to keep messages private, sound familiar?

You would think that Facebook invented 'the wall' on which you share information with your friends, well it turns out the Romans also invented this too. Graffiti would be put on walls with messages including events, jokes and the like so it looks like Mark Zuckerberg possibly stole another idea.

St Paul was one of the most successful earlier adopters of social media, sharing letters that are now part of the New Testament.

Tom produced a great graph showing the traffic stats for print work of Martin Luther with a spike in 1523, very funny.

Open source could be seen to have started in coffee houses in 1660 where you would receive mail and news pamphlets would be left on the tables. Some  coffee houses would specialise in particular topics and were the best places for sharing and testing ideas.

Jonathan's coffee house in London actually turned into the Stock Exchange.

Tom feels media has gone full circle with governments trying to stop free speech, for example by shutting down Twitter. The Chinese language suits the 140 character limit of Twitter as you can get whole paragraphs into the same space most languages can only fit a short sentence. He sees China as being the next place where social media will push free speech to the limit.

Social media will enhance innovation and in Tom's eyes a new religion could be born, you heard it here first!

Overall a great keynote from Tom finishing with "Social media is not just about connecting us today, it's about connecting us with the past too."