Combining publishing technology and social networks as a powerful catalyst for social change and revolution isn’t really something new. Indeed, says
The Economist in “Social media in the 16th Century: How Luther went viral,” a feature article in its December 17, 2011 issue, what happened in the Arab spring—when opponents of authoritarian regimes in the Middle East used the Internet and social media to mobilize for revolution—previously happened nearly 500 years ago during the Reformation in Europe. That was when an obscure theologian and minister named Martin Luther and his allies took the new media of their day—pamphlets, ballads and woodcuts—and circulated them through social networks to promote their message of religious reform.
LUTHER NAILING HIS “95 THESIS ON THE POWER AND EFFICACY OF
INDULGENCES” ON A WITTENBERG CHURCH DOOR IN 1517
On October 31, 1517, Luther got the Reformation started when he nailed to the church door in Wittenberg his “95 Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences,” an expression of outrage stated in academic terms to a Dominican friar’s selling of indulgencies to raise money to fund Pope Leo X’s pet project of reconstructing St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Luther condemned as “the pious defrauding of the faithful” this act of giving money to the church as insurance that one’s dead relatives are not stuck in purgatory, declaring it as a glaring symptom of the need for broad reform. The Vatican retaliated by declaring Luther a heretic in 1521, but his adroit use of printed tracts and social media enabled him to escape execution and put the Reformation in solid footing in much of Germany.
Observes the article in
The Economist: “The media environment that Luther had shown himself so adept at managing had much in common with today’s online ecosystem of blogs, social networks and discussion threads. It was a decentralised system whose participants took care of distribution, deciding collectively which messages to amplify through sharing and recommendation. Modern media theorists refer to participants in such systems as a ‘networked public,’ rather than an ‘audience,’ since they do more than just consume information.”
Read “Social media in the 16th Century: How Luther went viral” in The Economist now!
