[转帖] [2011.12.17] How Luther went viral 路德也疯狂

http://www.ecocn.org/thread-61971-1-1.html
Social media in the 16th Century 16 世纪的社交媒体
How Luther went viral 路德也疯狂
Five centuries before Facebook and the Arab spring, social media helped bring about the Reformation
早于脸谱与阿拉伯之春五个世纪的社交媒体曾推动了宗教改革的爆发

Dec 17th 2011 | from the print edition

IT IS a familiar-sounding tale: after decades of simmering discontent a new form of media gives opponents of an authoritarian regime a way to express their views, register their solidarity and co-ordinate their actions. The protesters’ message spreads virally through social networks, making it impossible to suppress and highlighting the extent of public support for revolution. The combination of improved publishing technology and social networks is a catalyst for social change where previous efforts had failed.
这是一个耳熟能详的故事：不满情绪酝酿了数十年之后，一种新媒体形式赋予专制政权的反对者一种新的方式来陈述其观点、表达其团结、协调其行动。抗议者的信息像病毒一样通过社交网络四处蔓延，无法镇压，突显出公众对改革的支持度。在之前的尝试宣告失败后，改进的出版技术与社交网络相结合，成为社会变革的催化剂。

That’s what happened in the Arab spring. It’s also what happened during the Reformation, nearly 500 years ago, when Martin Luther and his allies took the new media of their day—pamphlets, ballads and woodcuts—and circulated them through social networks to promote their message of religious reform.
这就是在阿拉伯之春中发生的景象。近 500 年前，这一景象也曾在宗教改革运动中出现。马丁•路德 (Martin Luther) 与他的盟友通过社交网络采用当时的新媒体——小册子、歌谣以及木版画——来宣传他们的宗教改革信息。

Scholars have long debated the relative importance of printed media, oral transmission and images in rallying popular support for the Reformation. Some have championed the central role of printing, a relatively new technology at the time. Opponents of this view emphasise the importance of preaching and other forms of oral transmission. More recently historians have highlighted the role of media as a means of social signalling and co-ordinating public opinion in the Reformation.
长久以来，学者们都在辩论印刷媒体、口头传播以及图片形象在召集宗教改革公众支持度上的重要性。印刷术是当时相对新颖的技术，一些人就赞成印刷术所起的中心作用。此观点的反对者则强调布道及其他口头传播形式的重要性。近些时期，历史学家强调媒体在宗教改革中作为一种工具来表达并协调舆论的作用。

Now the internet offers a new perspective on this long-running debate, namely that the important factor was not the printing press itself (which had been around since the 1450s), but the wider system of media sharing along social networks—what is called “social media” today. Luther, like the Arab revolutionaries, grasped the dynamics of this new media environment very quickly, and saw how it could spread his message.
时至今日，互联网为这场旷日持久的争论提供了一个崭新视角，即重要的因素并不在于印刷机本身（印刷机自十五世纪五十年代就流行起来了），而是利用社交网络分享信息的更广阔的媒体系统——也就是今天所谓的“社交媒体”。同阿拉伯的革命者一样，路德迅速理解了这种新媒体环境的互动方式，而且知晓它会如何传播自己的信息。

New post from Martin Luther
马丁•路德的新帖子

The start of the Reformation is usually dated to Luther’s nailing of his “95 Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences” to the church door in Wittenberg on October 31st 1517. The “95 Theses” were propositions written in Latin that he wished to discuss, in the academic custom of the day, in an open debate at the university. Luther, then an obscure theologian and minister, was outraged by the behaviour of Johann Tetzel, a Dominican friar who was selling indulgences to raise money to fund the pet project of his boss, Pope Leo X: the reconstruction of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Hand over your money, went Tetzel’s sales pitch, and you can ensure that your dead relatives are not stuck in purgatory. This crude commercialisation of the doctrine of indulgences, encapsulated in Tetzel’s slogan—“As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, so the soul from purgatory springs”—was, to Luther, “the pious defrauding of the faithful” and a glaring symptom of the need for broad reform. Pinning a list of propositions to the church door, which doubled as the university notice board, was a standard way to announce a public debate.
宗教改革一般追溯到路德在 1517 年 10 月 31 日将《关于赎罪券效能的九十五条论纲》钉在维腾堡 (Wittenberg) 教堂门上这一事件。依当时的学术惯例，以拉丁语成文的《九十五条论纲》是路德希望在大学里公开辩论的提纲。当时，路德还是一位名不见经传的神学家兼牧师，而约翰•台切尔 (Johann Tetzel) 则是一位多明我会的传道修士。后者通过兜售赎罪券为教皇列奥十世 (Pope Leo X) 在罗马重修圣彼得大教堂 (St Peter’s Basilica) 的面子工程筹集资金。路德对台切尔的行为大为不满。台切尔的兜售宣传称，交出钱来则能确保死去的亲属不会陷入炼狱之中。这种赤裸裸的赎罪券教义商品化浓缩成台切尔的口号就是“钱币落入钱柜底响叮当，灵魂瞬间脱离炼狱升天堂”。对于路德而言，这是“对信徒虔诚的诈骗”以及必须进行广泛改革显而易见的征兆。将纲要张贴在教会大门（也兼作大学告示板用）上是通告公开辩论的通行做法。

Although they were written in Latin, the “95 Theses” caused an immediate stir, first within academic circles in Wittenberg and then farther afield. In December 1517 printed editions of the theses, in the form of pamphlets and broadsheets, appeared simultaneously in Leipzig, Nuremberg and Basel, paid for by Luther’s friends to whom he had sent copies. German translations, which could be read by a wider public than Latin-speaking academics and clergy, soon followed and quickly spread throughout the German-speaking lands. Luther’s friend Friedrich Myconius later wrote that “hardly 14 days had passed when these propositions were known throughout Germany and within four weeks almost all of Christendom was familiar with them.”
仅管以拉丁语行文，《九十五条论纲》立即引起了一阵轰动，先在维腾堡的学术圈内，然后波及到更广的范围。1517 年 12 月，这些论纲的印刷版本以小册子及宽幅报纸的形式同时出现在莱比锡、纽伦堡和巴塞尔等城市。路德的朋友们出资将寄送给他们的版本打印出来。德语译本紧随其后并迅速传遍德语地区。这些译本的受众超出了讲拉丁语的学者以及牧师范围，可以为更多公众所阅读。路德的朋友弗里德里希•米可尼乌斯 (Friedrich Myconius) 后来写道“14 天一过，这些论纲就在全德境内为人知晓；四周之内，几乎所有的基督教区都熟知这些论纲。”

The unintentional but rapid spread of the “95 Theses” alerted Luther to the way in which media passed from one person to another could quickly reach a wide audience. “They are printed and circulated far beyond my expectation,” he wrote in March 1518 to a publisher in Nuremberg who had published a German translation of the theses. But writing in scholarly Latin and then translating it into German was not the best way to address the wider public. Luther wrote that he “should have spoken far differently and more distinctly had I known what was going to happen.” For the publication later that month of his “Sermon on Indulgences and Grace”, he switched to German, avoiding regional vocabulary to ensure that his words were intelligible from the Rhineland to Saxony. The pamphlet, an instant hit, is regarded by many as the true starting point of the Reformation.
路德并未想到《九十五条论纲》会快速传播开来。这让他意识到，从一个人到另一个人的媒体传播方式可以快速达到一个广泛的受众。“这些论纲的印刷与传阅远远超出了我的想象，”他在 1518 年三月向纽伦堡的一位出版商如是写道。这位出版商之前已出版了这些论纲的德文译本。但以学术性的拉丁语成文，再翻译为德语，并不是向更广泛的公众发表演讲的最佳方式。路德写道，“如果他知道事情的来龙去脉，那么他就应该以一种更为与众不同、更为鲜明清晰的方式讲出来。”当月末发行的《论赎罪券与上帝恩赐》 (Sermon on Indulgences and Grace) ，他就改用德语行文，避开地方性词汇，确保措词对于从莱茵河兰到萨克森的人们都明白易懂。这本小册子立即轰动一时，也被许多人视为宗教改革运动真正的起始点。

穆巴拉克与列奥十世，两个旧政权

The media environment that Luther had shown himself so adept at managing had much in common with today’s online ecosystem of blogs, social networks and discussion threads. It was a decentralised system whose participants took care of distribution, deciding collectively which messages to amplify through sharing and recommendation. Modern media theorists refer to participants in such systems as a “networked public”, rather than an “audience”, since they do more than just consume information. Luther would pass the text of a new pamphlet to a friendly printer (no money changed hands) and then wait for it to ripple through the network of printing centres across Germany.
路德深谙其驾驭之道的新媒体环境与今天的博客文章、社交网络及讨论主题构成的网上生态系统有诸多共同之处。这是一个去中心化的体系。其参与者负责分配发行，通过分享与推荐集体决定哪些信息需要阐释。现代媒体理论家将这些体系的参与者称为“网络公众”，而非“受众”，因为他们不仅仅在消费信息。路德会将一本新册子的文本传给一位友善的印刷商（未发生金钱交易），然后坐等小册子乘着印刷中心网络的涟漪扩散至整个德国。

Unlike larger books, which took weeks or months to produce, a pamphlet could be printed in a day or two. Copies of the initial edition, which cost about the same as a chicken, would first spread throughout the town where it was printed. Luther’s sympathisers recommended it to their friends. Booksellers promoted it and itinerant colporteurs hawked it. Travelling merchants, traders and preachers would then carry copies to other towns, and if they sparked sufficient interest, local printers would quickly produce their own editions, in batches of 1,000 or so, in the hope of cashing in on the buzz. A popular pamphlet would thus spread quickly without its author’s involvement.
更大的书籍需要制作数周或数月，而一本小册子一两天就可以印刷完毕。最初的版本（约与一只鸡的成本相同）首先会在刊印地所在的城镇流传开来。路德的支持者把小册子推荐给自己的朋友们。书商们促销小册子；而游走的书贩子兜售小册子。旅行商人、贸易者以及牧师然后会携带者小册子到其他城镇。如果这些小册子激发了足够的兴趣，当地的出版商很快就会发行自己的版本，一批约 1000 本，希望闹中渔利。这样，一本广受欢迎的小册子未受作者参与就会很快传播开来。

As with “Likes” and retweets today, the number of reprints serves as an indicator of a given item’s popularity. Luther’s pamphlets were the most sought after; a contemporary remarked that they “were not so much sold as seized”. His first pamphlet written in German, the “Sermon on Indulgences and Grace”, was reprinted 14 times in 1518 alone, in print runs of at least 1,000 copies each time. Of the 6,000 different pamphlets that were published in German-speaking lands between 1520 and 1526, some 1,700 were editions of a few dozen works by Luther. In all, some 6m-7m pamphlets were printed in the first decade of the Reformation, more than a quarter of them Luther’s.
如同现在的“分享”与转发，重印数量就是某一主题受欢迎程度的指示器。路德的小册子最受追捧；一位同代人评论说这些小册子“简直不是卖掉了，而是抢光了。”路德第一本以德语写作的小册子《论赎罪券与上帝恩赐》仅在 1518 年就重印 14 次，每次至少印刷 1,000 本。1520 至 1526 年间德语地区发行的 6,000 种不同的小册子中，约有 1,700 种都是路德几十本著作的版本。总体而言，在宗教改革运动的前十年中，大约出版了 6-7 百万小册子，超过四分之一都是路德所著。

Although Luther was the most prolific and popular author, there were many others on both sides of the debate. Tetzel, the indulgence-seller, was one of the first to respond to him in print, firing back with his own collection of theses. Others embraced the new pamphlet format to weigh in on the merits of Luther’s arguments, both for and against, like argumentative bloggers. Sylvester Mazzolini defended the pope against Luther in his “Dialogue Against the Presumptuous Theses of Martin Luther”. He called Luther “a leper with a brain of brass and a nose of iron” and dismissed his arguments on the basis of papal infallibility. Luther, who refused to let any challenge go unanswered, took a mere two days to produce his own pamphlet in response, giving as good as he got. “I am sorry now that I despised Tetzel,” he wrote. “Ridiculous as he was, he was more acute than you. You cite no scripture. You give no reasons.”
仅管路德是最为多产、最受欢迎的作者，但是在这场辩论的双方也有许多其他的著者。赎罪券兜售者台切尔是以印刷刊物的方式回敬路德的首批作者之一，他用自己的论文集予以回击。其他人欣然接受这种新的小册子形式，加入到有关路德论据是非曲直的辩论中，有的支持，有的反对，颇像好辩的博主。Sylvester Mazzolini 在其著作《论马丁•路德自以为是的论点》 (Dialogue Against the Presumptuous Theses of Martin Luther) 中抨击路德为教皇辩护，他称路德是“一个铜脑铁鼻、人人避之唯恐不及之人”，并基于教皇永无过失的理由对路德的论据不屑一顾。路德拒绝错过每一次质疑，仅用了两天时间就制作了自己的小册子作为回应，以其人之道还治其身。“我曾鄙视过台切尔，现在我对此感到遗憾，”路德写道。“仅管他荒谬可笑，但是他比更加敏感。你从未引经据典。你毫无推理可言。”

Being able to follow and discuss such back-and-forth exchanges of views, in which each author quoted his opponent’s words in order to dispute them, gave people a thrilling and unprecedented sense of participation in a vast, distributed debate. Arguments in their own social circles about the merits of Luther’s views could be seen as part of a far wider discourse, both spoken and printed. Many pamphlets called upon the reader to discuss their contents with others and read them aloud to the illiterate. People read and discussed pamphlets at home with their families, in groups with their friends, and in inns and taverns. Luther’s pamphlets were read out at spinning bees in Saxony and in bakeries in Tyrol. In some cases entire guilds of weavers or leather-workers in particular towns declared themselves supporters of the Reformation, indicating that Luther’s ideas were being propagated in the workplace. One observer remarked in 1523 that better sermons could be heard in the inns of Ulm than in its churches, and in Basel in 1524 there were complaints about people preaching from books and pamphlets in the town’s taverns. Contributors to the debate ranged from the English king Henry VIII, whose treatise attacking Luther (co-written with Thomas More) earned him the title “Defender of the Faith” from the pope, to Hans Sachs, a shoemaker from Nuremberg who wrote a series of hugely popular songs in support of Luther.
这些观点你来我往，相互交锋，每个作者引用对手语句以便提出异议。人们能够追随讨论，在宏大而分散的辩论中获得了一种令人兴奋、前所未有的参与感。在各自的社交圈内关于路德观点是非曲直的争论可以视为一个范围更为庞大的辩论的组成部分，不管是口头交谈，还是印刷出版。许多小册子号召读者与他人讨论其中内容，并把这些内容大声朗读给目不识丁的人们听。或在家里与亲人，或在团体中与朋友，或在客栈酒馆里，人们阅读并讨论这些小册子。在萨克森的纺织厂里、在提洛尔 (Tyrol) 的面包房里，人们高声朗读路德的小册子。有时候，某些城镇的整个纺织工人或皮革工人行会宣称是宗教改革运动的支持者。这说明路德的思想宣传进了工作场所。一位观察家在 1523 年评论道，在乌尔姆 (Ulm) 客栈听到的布道可能比在乌尔姆教堂里听到的都要好；在 1524 年的巴塞尔就有人控告人们在城镇的酒馆里依书籍和小册子进行布道。辩论参与方从英国的国王亨利八世 (Henry VIII) 到纽伦堡的修鞋匠汉斯•萨克斯 (Hans Sachs)，不一而足。前者（与托马斯•莫尔 (Thomas More) 一道）著书攻击路德，从而赢得了教皇赐封的“信仰的守护者”的称号；后者撰写了一系列广受欢迎的诗歌，声援路德。

A multimedia campaign
多媒体运动

It was not just words that travelled along the social networks of the Reformation era, but music and images too. The news ballad, like the pamphlet, was a relatively new form of media. It set a poetic and often exaggerated description of contemporary events to a familiar tune so that it could be easily learned, sung and taught to others. News ballads were often “contrafacta” that deliberately mashed up a pious melody with secular or even profane lyrics. They were distributed in the form of printed lyric sheets, with a note to indicate which tune they should be sung to. Once learned they could spread even among the illiterate through the practice of communal singing.
在宗教改革时代，不仅是文字在社交网络上穿行，音乐与图像同样如此。与小册子一样，新闻歌谣也是一种相对新颖的媒体形式。它将诗意的、常常带有夸张色彩的时事描述嵌入到为人所熟知的曲调中，这样的曲子就会容易被人熟记、吟唱并教予他人。新闻歌谣通常是“换词歌曲”，有意将虔诚的旋律与世俗的、甚至亵渎的歌词糅合在一起。这些歌谣以打印歌词单的形式发行，配有曲调，以标示出它们应该合着哪个调子。一旦学会，这些歌谣甚至会通过集体吟唱的风俗传播到文盲中间。

Both reformers and Catholics used this new form to spread information and attack their enemies. “We are Starting to Sing a New Song”, Luther’s first venture into the news-ballad genre, told the story of two monks who had been executed in Brussels in 1523 after refusing to recant their Lutheran beliefs. Luther’s enemies denounced him as the Antichrist in song, while his supporters did the same for the pope and insulted Catholic theologians (“Goat, desist with your bleating”, one of them was admonished). Luther himself is thought to have been the author of “Now We Drive Out the Pope”, a parody of a folk song called “Now We Drive Out Winter”, whose tune it borrowed:
改革派与天主教派都采用这种新形式来传播信息、攻击敌人。《我们开始吟唱一首新歌》 (We are Starting to Sing a New Song) 是路德第一次尝试采用新闻歌谣体的作品。这首歌谣讲述了两位修道士在拒绝公开宣布放弃自己的路德派信仰之后于 1523 年在布鲁塞尔被处以死刑的故事。路德的敌人以歌曲形式谴责他是反基督者；而其支持者则以同样方式对待教皇并辱骂天主教神学家（其中的一位神学家被告诫道：“山羊，不要再咩咩叫了”）。据信，路德本人是《现在我们赶走教皇》 (Now We Drive Out the Pope) 的作者。这首歌谣诙谐地模仿了一首叫做《现在我们赶走冬天》 (Now We Drive Out Winter) 的歌曲，并借用了其曲调：

Now we drive out the pope
from Christ’s church and God’s house.
Therein he has reigned in a deadly fashion
and has seduced uncountably many souls.
Now move along, you damned son,
you Whore of Babylon. You are the abomination and the Antichrist,
full of lies, death and cunning.

现在我们赶走教皇
从上帝的居所和基督的教堂。
那里他的统治是垂死的风尚
引诱不计其数的心肠。
现在走开吧，你这匹该死的狼，
你这个巴比伦的女娼。你反对基督，难入天堂。
满是谎言、奸诈和死亡。

Woodcuts were another form of propaganda. The combination of bold graphics with a smattering of text, printed as a broadsheet, could convey messages to the illiterate or semi-literate and serve as a visual aid for preachers. Luther remarked that “without images we can neither think nor understand anything.” Some religious woodcuts were elaborate, with complex allusions and layers of meaning that would only have been apparent to the well-educated. “Passional Christi und Antichristi”, for example, was a series of images contrasting the piety of Christ with the decadence and corruption of the pope. Some were astonishingly crude and graphic, such as “The Origin of the Monks” (see picture), showing three devils excreting a pile of monks. The best of them were produced by Luther’s friend Lucas Cranach. Luther’s opponents responded with woodcuts of their own: “Luther’s Game of Heresy” (see beginning of this article) depicts him boiling up a stew with the help of three devils, producing fumes from the pot labelled falsehood, pride, envy, heresy and so forth.
木版画是另外一种宣传形式。醒目的图形结合少许文本，打印成宽幅报纸，能够将信息传递给文盲或半文盲，充当牧师的视觉辅助工具。路德曾说道，“没有图像，我们就无法思考也无从理解任何事物。”某些宗教木版画制作精美，带有复杂典故及多层含义，只有受过良好教育的人士才能领会。比如，《热情的基督徒与反基督徒》 (Passional Christi und Antichristi) 就是一系列对比基督徒的虔诚与教皇的堕落腐败的图像。一些图片则粗野低俗却细致入微，比如《修道士的起源》 (The Origin of the Monks) （见图）。图中，三个魔鬼将一堆修道士从体内排出。其中最为著名的由路德的朋友卢卡斯•克拉纳赫 (Lucas Cranach)制作。路德的反对者用他们自己的木版画做出回应。《路德离经背道的游戏》 (Luther’s Game of Heresy) （见文首）描绘了路德在三个恶魔的帮助下煮熟一锅炖菜，锅上冒着浓烟，贴着谎言、傲慢、嫉妒和异教等诸如此类的标签。

Amid the barrage of pamphlets, ballads and woodcuts, public opinion was clearly moving in Luther’s favour. “Idle chatter and inappropriate books” were corrupting the people, fretted one bishop. “Daily there is a veritable downpour of Lutheran tracts in German and Latin…nothing is sold here except the tracts of Luther,” lamented Aleander, Leo X’s envoy to Germany, in 1521. Most of the 60 or so clerics who rallied to the pope’s defence did so in academic and impenetrable Latin, the traditional language of theology, rather than in German. Where Luther’s works spread like wildfire, their pamphlets fizzled. Attempts at censorship failed, too. Printers in Leipzig were banned from publishing or selling anything by Luther or his allies, but material printed elsewhere still flowed into the city. The city council complained to the Duke of Saxony that printers faced losing “house, home, and all their livelihood” because “that which one would gladly sell, and for which there is demand, they are not allowed to have or sell.” What they had was lots of Catholic pamphlets, “but what they have in over-abundance is desired by no one and cannot even be given away.”
在小册子、歌谣以及木版画你来我往的攻击中，舆论鲜明地倒向路德一方。“懒散的闲聊者与不合时宜的书籍”正在腐蚀着民众，一位主教担忧道。“每天这里都下着名副其实的路德派德文及拉丁文宣传手册的倾盆大雨……除了路德的宣传册子，其他一概无售，”列奥十世派驻德国的特使亚历山大 (Aleander) 在 1521 年抱怨道。大约 60 名神职人员召集起来为教皇辩护。大多数神职人员采用的是学术性的、令人费解的传统神学语言，而非德语。路德的作品犹如野火燎原之势迅速蔓延，而他们的小册子则渐渐夭折。企图审查，但也以失败告终。莱比锡的出版商被禁止出版或销售路德或其盟友写作的任何作品，但是其他地方的印刷品还是涌入莱比锡城。莱比锡市政议会向萨克森公爵抱怨说，出版商面临着失去“房屋、家庭以及一切生计”的风险，因为他们不被允许拥有或销售一个出版商很乐意销售的、有市场需求的出版物。他们拥有的是大量的天主教小册子，“但是他们拥有的过量出版物无人问津，甚至都赠送不出去。”

Luther’s enemies likened the spread of his ideas to a sickness. The papal bull threatening Luther with excommunication in 1520 said its aim was “to cut off the advance of this plague and cancerous disease so it will not spread any further”. The Edict of Worms in 1521 warned that the spread of Luther’s message had to be prevented, otherwise “the whole German nation, and later all other nations, will be infected by this same disorder.” But it was too late—the infection had taken hold in Germany and beyond. To use the modern idiom, Luther’s message had gone viral.
路德的敌人把他思想的传播比作一场疾病。1520 年，威胁将路德逐出教会的教皇诏书称，其目的是“切断这场致癌疫病的发展，以阻止其进一步蔓延”。1521年，沃尔姆斯赦令 (Edict of Worms) 警告说，必须阻止路德信息的传播，否则“整个德国民族以及随后所有其他民族将被这场相同的紊乱所感染。”但这为时已晚——这场传染已在德国以及德国之外产生了影响。按现代习语的说法，路德的信息已经像病毒一样疯传了。

From Wittenberg to Facebook
从维腾堡到脸谱

In the early years of the Reformation expressing support for Luther’s views, through preaching, recommending a pamphlet or singing a news ballad directed at the pope, was dangerous. By stamping out isolated outbreaks of opposition swiftly, autocratic regimes discourage their opponents from speaking out and linking up. A collective-action problem thus arises when people are dissatisfied, but are unsure how widely their dissatisfaction is shared, as Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, has observed in connection with the Arab spring. The dictatorships in Egypt and Tunisia, she argues, survived for as long as they did because although many people deeply disliked those regimes, they could not be sure others felt the same way. Amid the outbreaks of unrest in early 2011, however, social-media websites enabled lots of people to signal their preferences en masse to their peers very quickly, in an “informational cascade” that created momentum for further action.
在宗教改革运动初期，通过布道、推荐小册子或是吟唱直接针对教皇的新闻歌谣来表达对路德观点的支持是危险之举。通过迅速镇压孤立的社会暴动，专制政权阻止了反对者的仗义执言与联手团结。这样一来，当人们心怀不满但又不确信不满之情有多么普遍时，一个集体行动的问题就跃然纸上。正如北卡莱罗纳大学的社会学家泽伊内普•图菲克希（Zeynep Tufekci）关于阿拉伯之春所做的评论一样。她认为，埃及与突尼斯的独裁统治挺了这么久的原因在于，虽然许多民众对这些政权深恶痛绝，但是他们无法确信其他人也有同样感触。然而，在 2011 年初爆发的社会动荡中，社交网站使得大批民众能够非常迅速地共同表达自己的偏好，以“信息瀑布”促成进一步行动的态势。

路德派教徒眼中修道士的起源

The same thing happened in the Reformation. The surge in the popularity of pamphlets in 1523-24, the vast majority of them in favour of reform, served as a collective signalling mechanism. As Andrew Pettegree, an expert on the Reformation at St Andrew’s University, puts it in “Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion”, “It was the superabundance, the cascade of titles, that created the impression of an overwhelming tide, an unstoppable movement of opinion…Pamphlets and their purchasers had together created the impression of irresistible force.” Although Luther had been declared a heretic in 1521, and owning or reading his works was banned by the church, the extent of local political and popular support for Luther meant he escaped execution and the Reformation became established in much of Germany.
同样的事情也发生在宗教改革运动中。1523-24 年小册子普及度的飙升以及大部分宣传都支持改革就相当于一种集体信号机制。诚如圣安德鲁斯大学 (St Andrew’s University) 的宗教改革运动专家安德鲁•佩蒂格里 (Andrew Pettegree) 在《宗教改革与教派》 (Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion) 中所写道的，“是大量的、如同瀑布般涌现的出版物创造出一种压倒之势的潮流印象、一股势不可挡的民意运动……小册子与其购买者合力创造出难以抗拒之力的印象。”仅管路德与 1521 年被宣布为异教徒，仅管教会禁止拥有或阅读他的作品，但是地方政治与民众的支持度意味着他得以逃过死刑，而宗教改革运动在德国的大部分地区开始确立起来。

Modern society tends to regard itself as somehow better than previous ones, and technological advance reinforces that sense of superiority. But history teaches us that there is nothing new under the sun. Robert Darnton, an historian at Harvard University, who has studied information-sharing networks in pre-revolutionary France, argues that “the marvels of communication technology in the present have produced a false consciousness about the past—even a sense that communication has no history, or had nothing of importance to consider before the days of television and the internet.” Social media are not unprecedented: rather, they are the continuation of a long tradition. Modern digital networks may be able to do it more quickly, but even 500 years ago the sharing of media could play a supporting role in precipitating a revolution. Today’s social-media systems do not just connect us to each other: they also link us to the past.
现代社会带有某种优越于以往社会的倾向，技术进步又强化了这种优越感。但历史教导我们，太阳底下没有新鲜事。哈佛大学 (Harvard University) 历史学家罗伯特•达尔顿 (Robert Darnton) 研究了大革命前的法国信息分享网络后认为，“现在的通讯技术奇迹产生了一种对于过去的错误意识——甚至是一种错误感觉，即通讯无历史，或通讯在电视与互联网时代以前无足轻重。”社交媒体并不是前无来者：相反，它们有着悠久的传统延续。现代数字网络可能使得通讯更加快捷，但即便在 500 年前，媒体分享都可能在促成社会革命方面也扮演了一个配角角色。今天的社交系统不仅将你我连接：它们也将你我同过去相连。

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