Tom Standge On The Wall Summary

Social media is a system or application that enables users to create, construct, and share content as well as participate in social networking. In Tom Standage Writing on the Wall, Standage argues that social media is not new, but rather social media has been around for centuries. The book inspects and analyzes how social media has been a central element in human society ever since the development of language. He continues to show how social media hasn’t changed much but the technology we use to convey those messages have. In addition to the changes in technology, he looks at the similarities those technologies have with our current ones. He starts by looking at the Romans and their wax tablet and scrolls, as they were being used similarly

to our current postal service and Standage continuing through history until modern day, where he looks at our use of computers as a culmination of previous technology.
Overall, I found Standage’s book, Writing on the Wall, very interesting and insightful as it viewed the history and progress of social media. I found myself agreeing with Standage’s argument that everything that we think is “new” in social media has actually been around for thousands of years, and these “new” ideas are actually expansions and improvements of old ones. I found his arguments similar to Mitchell Stephens’ theory about communication revolutions. The only issue I had with the book is I felt that chapter ten titled “The Opposite of Social Media: Media in the Broadcast Era” felt like it wanted to change the direction of the book by creating a new argument.
To start, I felt that Standge makes very similar points toward the blending of new and old technologies as Mitchell Stephens.

In Stephens Which Communication Revolution Is It, Anyway he talks about how “new forms of communication are reduced primarily to imitating older forms of communication” (p .10). I believe that Standge strongly agrees with this passage as in the book almost every chapter looks at an “old” form of social media and compares it to the modern. For example, how King Henry VIII’s court‘s Devonshire Manuscript helped spread gossip and information as effectively as Facebook and other online social media websites do today, as well as how the internet has switched the society away from the pen and paper toward the new digital age with keyboard and screen. I particularly found these sections of the book very interesting, as it allowed me to look at social media in less of terms of technology, but rather its antecedent functions that have been around for

centuries.
But, I found the second to last chapter of the book was unwelcomed as it attempts to create a new thesis by stating that there is a historic media cycle that switches from social media toward mass media, then repeating the cycle.

I feel that only devoting one chapter to this idea of mass media as compared to the rest of the book about social media makes the idea feel week. I feel that he could have continued his original argument without trying to differentiate between social and mass media. I found that this chapter only really had a relation to the epilogue of the book as the author tries to classify the first nine chapters of the book as “very old media”, chapter ten being “old” media, and the last chapter being “new” media. I felt that the differentiation between these types of media only appearing in the epilogue of the book as well created confusion for me. Regardless of this, I still found his breakdown interesting even though I don’t find it as strong of an argument that social media hasn’t changed much but the technology we have used to convey those messages

have.
Overall, I found the book very enjoyable. I enjoyed the comparison of social media use with old technology and new technology, even though I didn’t think the author made as strong of arguments later in the book I found his idea interesting. In the end, I would recommend this book to anyone who may be interested in learning about the history of social media as the book leaves you wondering what form social media will take in the future.