Who blogged the American Revolution?
June 25, 2009 | Written by Darius Razgaitis
The Iranian uprising has been covered extensively these last couple of weeks, including coverage of the chatter on Twitter. The communication on Twitter struck me as interestigly similar to the description of communications from another revolution - the American one.
Inspired possibly by HBO’s “John Adams” series, I’ve been reading Bernard Bailyn’s pulitzer-winning “Ideological Origins of the American Revolution.”
During the American Revolution, there was a medium of communication that allowed for “complete freedom of expression,” yet could also “be more detailed than is ever possible in a newspaper,” and “can be produced much more quickly than a book, and in principle, at any rate, can reach a bigger public.”
This medium did not have to follow any standard rules. “It can be in prose or in verse, it can consist largely of maps or statistics or quotations, it can take the form of a story, a fable, a letter, an essay, a dialogue, or a piece of ‘reportage.’”
All that was required of it was that it be “topical, polemical, and short.”
Sounds a lot like blogging or micro-blogging, but these were pamphlets. Pamphlets, in many ways drove public sentiment in colonial America against the British, and as John Adams famously wrote:
“What do we mean by the revolution? The war? That was no part of the Revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The Revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected from 1760-1775.”
He goes on to say that the pamphlets of the time period are what should be inspected to learn what formed public opinion.
And much like Twitter and blogging, they were cheap, fast, and difficult to suppress.
Unlike today’s social media, however, pamphlets did not allow for certain social aspects like the instantaneous and public nature of comments, re-tweeting and Digg’ing. But they were similar in that they allowed for conversation in a way that resembles the modern day YouTube response video. It takes longer to put together than a “thumbs up” rating, but they’re not feature length productions that take months to make.
The key lesson here is that even though we’re in the digital age, the basic tenets of PR and communications remain the same. Oftentimes the most effective communicators are the ones who find the fastest, broadest, and most credible ways to put their messages across.
Tags: revolution iran twitter pamphlets 1776
Comments (0) | Add a comment | Permalink
