2. How did we get to Twitter?
Printing Press
Telephones
The Internet
3. Printing Press (1456)
• Invented by Gutenberg who printed Bibles
• Spread printing technology across Europe
• 1470s: First books printed in English
• Mass production spread languages and beliefs
across the world
4. Telephone
• Invented in 1876 by Alexander Graham Bell
• First voice: “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to
see you.”
• 1915: First coast-to-coast telephone call
between Bell (in NYC) and Watson (San
Francisco)
5. The Internet
• Launched in 1969 as ARPANET by Lawrence Roberts
• Used as a way for some universities to stay in touch and
as emergency back-up for the military
• 1991: First friendly internet interface introduced
7. Understanding Media
(1964)
“Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended
our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both
space and time as far as our planet is concerned.”
“...since the inception of the telegraph and radio, the globe has
contracted, spatially, into a single large village.”
8. Global Village
• “McLuhan believed that an
electronic nervous system was
rapidly integrating the planet--
events in one part of the world
could be experienced from other
parts in real-time, which is what
human experience was like
when we lived in small villages”
-http://www.livinginternet.com/i/ii_mcluhan.htm
9. Twitter
• Created in 2006 by Jack Dorsey
• As of 2/2010, about:
-600 “tweets” are sent per second
-50 million “tweets are posted every day
-75 million people have Twitter profiles
10. McLuhan on Twitter
McLuhan’s Predictions Twitter Functions
• There are about 75 million
• People across the world will be
connected across multiple profiles from users around the
mediums world
• “The future of the book is the • Tell what you are doing in 140
blurb” characters or less
• Because of technology, the • Users are able to “follow”
world will become a people with profiles around the
“single, large village”
world, including celebrities
12. Decoding Twitter
• “tweet”: post made by a user
• “re-tweet”: posting something someone else
said, just like a quote
• “follow”: a request to receive post updates
from another user
• “trending topics”: popular topics that
multiple users post about at the same time
