Anyone who thinks there is something strange about us and our social media habits should really look at Victorian-era letter writing.
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Anyone who thinks there is something strange about us and our social media habits should really look at Victorian-era letter writing.
In London they’d had letters delivered and picked up potentially a dozen times day. You could exchange several letters a day. They’d copy letters to each other and send along clippings (boosts, anyone?)v verses, whatever.
They would fall into social media in a heart beat and even recognize some things. The notion of being able to post a letter instantly would have driven them wild. -
Anyone who thinks there is something strange about us and our social media habits should really look at Victorian-era letter writing.
In London they’d had letters delivered and picked up potentially a dozen times day. You could exchange several letters a day. They’d copy letters to each other and send along clippings (boosts, anyone?)v verses, whatever.
They would fall into social media in a heart beat and even recognize some things. The notion of being able to post a letter instantly would have driven them wild.@NullNowhere I did a paper on public discourse during the lead up to the American Civil War; I included a bunch of letters to the editor and references to popularly circulated political pamphlets.
Oh god there were so many tit-for-tat pamphleteers and endless flame wars in the papers. Whatever people were thinking at the time, dialed to 11 and put into ink however they could. Everything we associate with social media.
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@NullNowhere I did a paper on public discourse during the lead up to the American Civil War; I included a bunch of letters to the editor and references to popularly circulated political pamphlets.
Oh god there were so many tit-for-tat pamphleteers and endless flame wars in the papers. Whatever people were thinking at the time, dialed to 11 and put into ink however they could. Everything we associate with social media.
@alltherum@freeradical.zone Yes! They were the same chatty, catty bitches that we are often to each other. Maybe even more so, because lacking as ready access to entertainment, many of them had nothing else to do but sit and think about how Mr Johnson in the paper was SO WRONG and needed a STERN REMONSTRANCE, by God.
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Anyone who thinks there is something strange about us and our social media habits should really look at Victorian-era letter writing.
In London they’d had letters delivered and picked up potentially a dozen times day. You could exchange several letters a day. They’d copy letters to each other and send along clippings (boosts, anyone?)v verses, whatever.
They would fall into social media in a heart beat and even recognize some things. The notion of being able to post a letter instantly would have driven them wild.@NullNowhere What is old is new.
Bet anyone who did a time jump would initially be confused, but most would get used to stuff pretty quickly. Humans haven’t changed that much in 1000s of years.
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@NullNowhere What is old is new.
Bet anyone who did a time jump would initially be confused, but most would get used to stuff pretty quickly. Humans haven’t changed that much in 1000s of years.
@yon@sakurajima.moe That is the draw of history. Humans are not much different over the last ten thousand years. I could be dropped as a baby in ancient Rome, and no one would know me as anything other than roman once/if I made it to adulthood. You can learn a lot about humans by just looking at what they did previously.
There is just a strange exceptionalism that exists around social media; People think it's a distinctly modern phenomena and disorder. But the roots of all that exist in our psyche and history. People with the means wrote obsessively to their parents complaints, and those who didn't have the means complained bitterly. People even had public boards that they'd attach public replies to. It was for many also a form of entertainment. I think it gets lost how much people, in the absence of mass forms of cheap entertainment, just talked and thought about what they heard. With only some exaggeration, even a reclusive hermit in pre-modern times would probably be considered a shameless gossip today.
