Creating networks of members and sharing information isn't a recent invention after all.
A 16th Century Avatar? |
According to scientists, there's nothing new about social media - apprently it dates back to the 16th Century. The discovery was made during a UK-based collaborative research project between Royal Holloway, the British Library and Reading University, in which a team of academics were cataloguing and investigating the works of the Italian Academies, dating from 1525 to 1700.
Apparently, young scholars in the Academies gave themselves nicknames, developed emblems and mottoes, formed groups and exchanged information.
The scholars shared much of the same kind of information that we do today - topical ideas, news of the day, poetry, plays and music. Of course, the big difference was the speed of sharing - with no internet in the 16th Century, scholars created yearbooks and volumes of letters and speeches.
Just as social networking does today, the scholars played around with satirical names for their groups - 'Intronati', for example, meaning dazed, stunned, knocked out and so not able to think straight - the name being chosen because they wanted to distance themselves from the noises of the world - by which they felt stunned, or dazed - so that they could cultivate literature.
The images in the emblems and mottos were often puzzling and contained hidden meanings. Does any of this sound familiar: internet avatars, for example?