SOCIAL MEDIA LITERACY

SOCIAL MEDIA literacy is going to change many games in unforeseeable ways. Since the advent of the telegraph, the infrastructure for global ubiquitous broadband communication media has been laid down, and of course the great power of the Internet is the democracy of access -- in a couple of decades, the number of users has grown from a thousand to a billion.

But the next important breakthroughs won't be in hardware or software, but in know - how, just as the most important after-effects of the printing press were not in improved printing technologies but in widespread literacy.

The Gutenberg press itself was not enough. Mechanical printing had been invented in Korea and China centuries before the european invention.. For a number of reasons, a market for print and the  knowledge of how to use the alphabetic code for transmitting knowledge across time and space broke out of the scribal elite that had controlled it for millenia.

From around twenty thousand handwritten books in Guternberg's lifetime, the number of books grew to tens of millions within decades of the invention of movable type. And the rapidly expanding literate population in europe began to create science, democracy, and the foundation of the industrial revolution.

Today, we're seeing the beginnings of scientific, medical, political, and social revolutions -- from the instant epidemiology that broke out online when SARS became known to the world to the use of social media by political campaigns. But we're only in the earliest years of social media literacy.

Whether universal access to many - to - many media will lead to explosive scientific and social  change depends more on know - how than on physical infrastructure. Would the early religious petitioners during the english civil war, and the printers who eagerly fed their need to spread their ideas, have been able to predict that within a few generations monarchs would be replaced by constitutions?

Would Roger Bacon and Isaac Newton have dreamed that entire populations, and not just a few privileged geniuses, would aggregate knowledge and turn it into technology? Would those of us who used slow modems to transmit black - and - white text on the early internet fifteen years ago have been able to foresee YouTube?

BY Howard Rheingold

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