Monday, April 7, 2014

Tweet Like a Roman with Tom Standage

Presenter: Tom Standage, Digital Editor, The Economist
Hashtag: #RomanTweet

This was one of the SxSW "Future 15" sessions, which I love as a presentation format. Normal sessions are one hour, but Future 15s pack four sessions into an hour session. It forces speakers to get to the best information quickly. If a session turns out to be less than stellar, you only have to wait for 15 minutes. If the session are great (and usually they are) you get four times the sessions in one sitting.

"Tweet Like a Roman" wasn't as professionally educational as some, but it was super fun and very interesting. Standage spent his 15 minutes explaining how early communication was actually social media. For example, Romans depended on social distribution of media. They used abbreviations to keep messages short. They used tablet-like devices to record messages. They also used social connections to get ahead.

Standage gave a TEDx talk very similar to his SxSW presentation. You can watch him pack an hour's worth of information into 16 minutes below. 

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