mr. standage, social media has a portion contribute less public discourse. mr. answer to that? >> guest: well, one man's trivialization is another man's democratization. every time as the technology to make it easier for more people to publish us. half of it was later restated. before the alphabet, is very complicated and hard to learn. every time there's a way for people to publish, the people who used to be in charge always complain that the wrong people will use this to say the wrong things. the contemporary says s.

mr. standage? >> guest: i'm the digital editor at "the economist," so it's my job to work out how we should best be using digital platforms, and part of that is what led to my interest in historical social media. because, essentially, we are returning to the way that things used to work, and "the economist" came out of sort of a culture of coffee sops and clubs -- shops and clubs and discussion. so i think there's a lot we can learn from modern news organizations today by looking at history about how we should deal with the changes that are taking place in the media environment today. >> host: how did can thomas paine contribute via social media to the american revolution? >> guest: well, tom paine took advantage of a social media environment that had mostly been constructed by ben franklin. he was sort of the mark zuckerberg of the 18th century because he constructed a platform for social discourse. he was a newspaper publisher among many other things, of course, and he was also one of his many jo

mr. standage, social media has a portion contribute less public discourse. mr. answer to that? >> guest: well, one man's trivialization is another man's democratization. every time as the technology to make it easier for more people to publish us. half of it was later restated. before the alphabet, is very complicated and hard to learn. every time there's a way for people to publish, the people who used to be in charge always complain that the wrong people will use this to say the wrong things. the contemporary says this. he's very worried because they were reading the pamphlets loser is writing. the very short and easy to read. this means nobody is reading the classics anymore. the greeks and romans. and then we get this time and time again. we get it with twitter now the people say it's terrible. anyone could say anything. this is good because it's broadening access to publishing to more bald people in democratizing publishing. clearly what happens each time you have one of these expansions as it initially appears to be completely unmanageable and it takes some time to work u

mr. standage, social media as you ask, what is your answer to it being a trivialized d disadvantage? >> this happened with the printing press and literacy with writing the alphabet before that writing systems were difficult to learn. every time there is a way for more people to publish the people who used to be in charge complain the wrong people will use this. so it was said they were worried about everyone reading the pamphlets that are easy to read and no one is reading the greeks again. we get this time and time again. we get it with twitter and anyone can say anything. i think it is good and broadening access to publishing to more and more people. what happens each time you have an expansion is that it appears to be unmanageable. it takes time to work out the mechanisms from shifting to the stuff you see and don't see. when the printing press made it easier to print, there was an explosion and people felt overwhelmed. they came up with technology and tools for dealing with it. book reviews, table of context, and book indexes. and those let you work out what books are relevant to