Sure, technology is great and all, but the historical analysis is simplistic.
> A patrician in ancient Rome might be able to make a name for himself around his neighborhood over the course of his lifetime.
Caesar, Spartacus, Cicero, and Cato are known over 2000 years after they lived. They are among the most famous people ever to have lived.
Our modern day "kings and emperors" retain vastly greater power and influence than we commoners, and they have the best command & control and surveillance systems in history. It is not at all clear whether information technology advances of the last century have contributed more to democratization or consolidation of power, Twitter notwithstanding.
Yup, that sentence made me wince. For what it's worth, Caesar and Cato were patricians. Spartacus was a slave (not even a Roman citizen), and Cicero was an eques.
All four of them did pretty well. Julius Caesar in particular would have had his name known from Britain to Parthia - one end of the known world to the other. He did it the old fashioned way: he went out into the world and killed people. (He was a hell of a writer too, but most of the people who knew his name couldn't read.)
The other side of this is that because we're all so connected, there is a lot of noise in the system. Your awesome app can and will get drowned out by the collective output of millions of teenagers on their iPhones.
Although distribution methods have evolved considerably, most of the traffic(and thus, the power) is still held by the same "old media" newspapers and traditional Hollywood celebrities.
It's great as long as you're the guy making the tweets, videos, and status updates that hundreds of thousands of folks read, admire, and share. But if you're some poor slob who did something stupid and are on the receiving end of a viral attack? It deeply sucks in a way that having crowds mad at you has never sucked before.
You don't get stuff for free. Yes, it's better, but cliques of hundreds of thousands of people thinking in sync is pretty freaking scary too, if you ask me. Have we all forgotten how mobs act?
I agree the distributed group-think is a huge problem on the internet. However, if you do some analysis, I think you'll find that twitter-fueled public lynchings are an order of magnitude less frequent than twitter-fueled viral awesomeness.
Something this article glazes over is that, while we have the infrastructure for mass information virality, actually making something go viral is still very difficult. This is just as true for videos of assholes doing stupid things as it is for releasing web-apps.
This is why people who say "ignore the trolls" are idiots. The internet makes trolling permanent and a mob affair. Your best strategy now is to fight back with your own better words, pranks, and trolling or else everyone simply assumes your silence means the mob is right.
Trust me on this, I am probably one of a handful of people who has been on the receiving end of a massive hateful mob and managed to kick the living shit out of them with just a blog and some hilarious jokes.
This is more about the ability to broadcast your thoughts instead of having actual power. I doubt that past kings and emperors, who held almost absolute power over millions of people, would envy a modern self-centered teenager venting on Twitter.
I can see where the confusion arises - I wondered too. Using the conditional tense would help a lot here, unless there was a reason for creating the impression that this was a real tweet.
So it would become:
>Today, a tenth grader who perhaps may not be our finest societal achievement judging from a cursory glance at her neck tattoo that proudly proclaims “To hot 4 you”, could drunkenly sit on her keyboard and mistakenly send out a tweet that six hundred thousand people read within the hour.
> A patrician in ancient Rome might be able to make a name for himself around his neighborhood over the course of his lifetime.
Caesar, Spartacus, Cicero, and Cato are known over 2000 years after they lived. They are among the most famous people ever to have lived.
Our modern day "kings and emperors" retain vastly greater power and influence than we commoners, and they have the best command & control and surveillance systems in history. It is not at all clear whether information technology advances of the last century have contributed more to democratization or consolidation of power, Twitter notwithstanding.