Just back from a short break in a forgotten but beautiful corner of Germany (No, I won’t tell you where it is, I’ve read too many articles on overtourism recently).
With time off comes the boredom, so I listened to an early episode of my favourite podcast The Rest is History. This one was about social media. Is it really such a new and unique phenomenon?
Of course, it's not really. Podcaster-historian Tom Holland compared it with the invention of the printing press and presented Martin Luther as the first mega influencer of the modern era.
Other parallels:
- the tendency to attack people with different opinions quite viciously
- the tendency to use the new, fast and powerful medium as a self-promotion tool
- the creation of a new (literate) public which remained a minority but advocated, promoted and - more or less - managed (historical) change
What I found most interesting was the notion of the activist minority and the passivist (my words) majority who were not agents but silent endurers of change, the mould to be formed by the minority.
What happens, I wondered, if the (seemingly uneducated) majority's tendency to reject change and leave things as they are is politically exploited? What if a new, competing minority emerges who voices the majority's resentment about the arrogance of the elite and completely rejects their narratives? What happens if they have a medium at their disposal that is incredibly faster, more direct and less easy to control than leaflets, pamphlets, newspapers and books?
Well, you can guess the answer(s) and probably also have an idea in which corner of Germany I was.
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