Presentation from the second social media session given to students at the European Communication School, London October 29, 2012

1. Session 2
History, theory and the future

2. The aim of this session
• To understand the role of
media in shaping modern
societies
• To understand the rules of
media
• To see how social media
plays to a different set of
rules

3. Why did it happen?
• All at the same time
• In Europe (why didn’t China
have a Renaissance?)

4. 1450

5. Printing and science
• Made existing knowledge more available

6. Printing and science
• Solved the preservation and standardisation
problem
1543 De humani corporis fabrica
Andreas Vesalius

7. Printing and science
• Allowed new ideas to be built upon existing
knowledge, rather than being seen as
destroying knowledge. Knowledge became an
evolving process, not a fixed orthodoxy.
Aristotle Copernicus Kepler

8. Printing and science
• Prevented authorities from supressing
inconvenient truths

9. Printing and religion

11. Printing and institutions
Moneylenders Banks

12. Printing and popular culture
Mass entertainment before Mass entertainment
the book after the book
Entertainment became an intellectual, individual
experience, but ….

13. Printing and popular culture
Entertainment became a common, mass
experience (everyone sharing the same story)

14. Printing and popular culture
Pietro Aretino: Ragionamenti (Whore
Dialogues): sex lives of wives, whores and
nuns are compared and contrasted
One of the most popular
books of the 15th century
Aeneas Sylvius
Piccolomini

15. An interesting thing
No-one realised the
significance of the role of
printing at the time
We took the technology for granted and it became invisible

16. Did the woolly
mammoths think it
was cold?

17. Conclusion
• Printing (and its extension into other forms of
media) played a fundamental role in the
shaping of ‘modern’ society
• We live in a Print Culture (Mass Media
Culture)
• While the effects of print culture are highly
visible and closely studied, the basic rules
which control it are hidden and little studied

18. The euro crisis

19. The rules are changing

20. What are the Gutenberg Rules?
• Its purpose
• Its intended audience
• Its editorial policy - how
and why it selects its
content

21. Why is it like this

22. The Rules
• The means of information distribution control
what information is distributed
• Because information distribution is expensive,
the only information that gets distributed is
information of mass appeal (mass media)

23. Mass information
distribution costs nothing
Content has been
liberated
Everyone has the tools

24. What is the social media revolution?

25. What is the social media revolution?
Separation
Information Means of
distribution

26. Breaking the Gutenberg Rules
Could you create a
personalised newspaper

27. Let’s create a personalised
newspaper

28. It is not just media

29. Marketing plays by the Gutenberg Rules
• We need to put a message in front of all our potential
consumers or customers
• We therefore work out which channels (media) are the
most effective in doing this
• These channels are expensive to use, that means the
message has to be short and highly effective (creative)
• We also have to talk to everyone all at once, because
we can’t use expensive channels to target just a few
people
• Challenge: creating effective messages, devising
effective channel strategies

30. Marketing is a channel and
message identification challenge

32. Has the consumer really changed?

33. Where does information hang-out when it gets
Content
liberated from its means of distribution?

34. Information
(Google) space
Performance space (Big) Data space

35. Conclusion
• We live in a world shaped by the economics of
information distribution
• Information distribution is expensive,
therefore communication = concise single
messages delivered to the whole target
audience
• Social media is re-writing these rules