Social Media in 1857

By artappraiser on Wed, 11/01/2017 - 5:45pm |

Newspapers once featured telegraph items that bear a striking resemblance to tweets.

By Adrienne LaFrance @ TheAtlantic.com, Nov. 1

[....] In the 19th century, the telegraph was at the center of a crisis over the future of fact-based reporting. A few years ago, I stumbled upon a Times article published in 1858 that lamented “all telegraphic intelligence” as “superficial, sudden, unsifted, too fast for the truth.”

“Does it not render the popular mind too fast for the truth?” the author of that article wrote. “Ten days bring us the mails from Europe. What need is there for the scraps of news in ten minutes? How trivial and paltry is the telegraphic column?” [....]

URL:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/11/what-twitter-was-like-the-day-the-atlantic-launched/544727/