Tom Standage
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About Tom Standage
Tom Standage is deputy editor of The Economist, overseeing its strategy and output on digital platforms, including the web, apps, audio, video and social media. He joined The Economist in 1998 and previously served as Digital Editor, Business Affairs Editor, Business Editor, Technology Editor and Science Correspondent. He is a regular radio commentator and keynote speaker on technology trends, and takes a particular interest in the social and cultural impact of technology. Tom is also the author of six history books, including “Writing on the Wall: Social Media—The First 2,000 Years”; the New York Times bestsellers “A History of the World in Six Glasses” (2005) and “An Edible History of Humanity” (2009); and “The Victorian Internet” (1998), a history of the telegraph. His writing has appeared in other publications including the New York Times, the Guardian and Wired. He holds a degree in engineering and computer science from Oxford University, and is the least musical member of a musical family. He is married and lives in London with his wife and children.
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Blog postAnother interview. This one is with Lifehacker.com, as part of their series on “How I Work”, in which they ask people about their working routines and try to get them to reveal productivity tips. I was very happy to do this interview because I’ve long been interested in life hacking, but I’m quite sceptical about it; in my experience, reading life-hacking tips is what you do when you are trying to avoid doing any work. As I explain in the interview:
I have a connection with life-hacki7 years ago Read more -
Blog postEarlier this year I was interviewed by Joseph Lichterman of Nieman Lab about my approach to digital strategy at The Economist. The interview lasted a bit less than an hour, and I said essentially the same things to him that I say to everyone else when I’m asked about this. (Our strategy isn’t secret, in part because we think it would be difficult for anyone else to emulate, because it depends on historical factors that are difficult for other publications to copy.) The difference is7 years ago Read more
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Blog postTo my great surprise I won a prize at the British Media Awards:
The Pioneer of the Year Award is being given to Tom Standage in recognition of the role he has played in spearheading innovation and building new products at The Economist, expanding the brand while remaining true to its core values. Through developing products such as In Other Words and Economist Espresso, he has challenged the conventional relationship between editorial and commercial teams, and shown how powerfully edi7 years ago Read more -
Blog postOne of the things I have been grappling with lately is how to develop new digital products within a news organisation: something I’ve been doing for a while, most notably with Espresso last year. I’ve come to the conclusion that this is a particular problem in the news business because of the traditional church-state divide … Continue reading My thoughts on digital editorial product development7 years ago Read more
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Blog postThe other day I realised that I’m now more likely to express my thoughts publicly in the form of talks and interviews than articles or blog posts. (In long form, at least; short-form thoughts go on Twitter, obviously.) So I might as well post those talks and interviews on this blog. That way it will continue to serve in some way as my outboard brain. I think this approach is perhaps best described as “pseudo-blogging”. On with the pseudo-blog posts!
7 years ago Read more -
Blog postToday a review of “Writing on the Wall” appeared in the New York Times. Which is great, obviously. But almost as exciting (to me, at least) is that the NYT chose to illustrate the review with an image of a Roman wax tablet, taken from the book, and juxtaposed with an image of an iPad. Thus my “Roman iPad” joke, which always gets a laugh when I talk about the book, has reached its largest audience so far.
Yes, the Romans really did have their own version of the iPad. Instead of noteboo9 years ago Read more -
Blog post“Writing on the Wall: Social Media — The First 2,000 Years” was published on October 10th in Britain and Commonwealth countries, and on October 15th in the United States. (To buy the book, click the links on the right.) I’m on the road promoting it for two weeks, starting in Seattle and ending up in New York. I talked about the book at Town Hall Seattle and at Powell’s in Portland, and next week I’m speaking at Harvard (see above) at 7pm on October 21st and at Barnes & Noble Tribeca9 years ago Read more
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Blog postAs you can see, my “Share it like Cicero” tube map has expanded, with the addition of @robinsloan (who inspired me to cook up the scheme in the first place) and @magicandrew in the US; here’s a pic of the hand-over. Also, two copies of “Writing on the Wall” appeared in Canada, in the hands of @vivi0202 and @kirstinestewart. So far the most widely travelled copy is that of @kattekrab, who took it from Australia back to England and passed it to @pdjohnson. All this has required the creation of9 years ago Read more
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Blog postIn June I proposed an unusual way to distribute a box of galley copies of my forthcoming book, “Writing on the Wall”. The book is about ancient social media, so the idea was to mimic the Roman book-distribution system, which involved the passing of books along social networks. The Romans used scribes to copy books before giving them to their friends; I’ve agreed to send out signed replacement copies to participants in the scheme, to replace the ones they’re passing on. After my initial post 29 years ago Read more
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The video of my TEDxOxbridge talk on “lessons from ancient social media”, based on my forthcoming book “Writing on the Wall” is finally available! I’m quite pleased with it, even if they did cut out my bad joke at the beginning (“Good morning everyone — It’s great to be here in the historic city of, er, Oxbridge.”) Anyway, the talk gives a good flavour of the book, with three examples of ancient social media environments (Romans, Luther, coffeehouses) and three lessons from his9 years ago Read more
Titles By Tom Standage
“There aren't many books this entertaining that also provide a cogent crash course in ancient, classical and modern history.” -Los Angeles Times
Beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and Coca-Cola: In Tom Standage's deft, innovative account of world history, these six beverages turn out to be much more than just ways to quench thirst. They also represent six eras that span the course of civilization-from the adoption of agriculture, to the birth of cities, to the advent of globalization. A History of the World in 6 Glasses tells the story of humanity from the Stone Age to the twenty-first century through each epoch's signature refreshment. As Standage persuasively argues, each drink is in fact a kind of technology, advancing culture and catalyzing the intricate interplay of different societies. After reading this enlightening book, you may never look at your favorite drink in quite the same way again.
Throughout history, food has done more than simply provide sustenance. It has acted as a tool of social transformation, political organization, geopolitical competition, industrial development, military conflict and economic expansion. An Edible History of Humanity is an account of how food has helped to shape and transform societies around the world, from the emergence of farming in China by 7,500 BCE to today's use of sugar cane and corn to make ethanol.
Food has been a kind of technology, a tool that has changed the course of human progress. It helped to found, structure, and connect together civilizations worldwide, and to build empires and bring about a surge in economic development through industrialization. Food has been employed as a military and ideological weapon. And today, in the culmination of a process that has been going on for thousands of years, the foods we choose in the supermarket connect us to global debates about trade, development and the adoption of new technologies.
Drawing from many fields including genetics, archaeology, anthropology, ethno-botany and economics, the story of these food-driven transformations is a fully satisfying account of the whole of human history.
The Victorian Internet tells the colorful story of the telegraph's creation and remarkable impact, and of the visionaries, oddballs, and eccentrics who pioneered it, from the eighteenth-century French scientist Jean-Antoine Nollet to Samuel F. B. Morse and Thomas Edison. The electric telegraph nullified distance and shrank the world quicker and further than ever before or since, and its story mirrors and predicts that of the Internet in numerous ways.
Tom Standage's fleet-footed and surprising global histories have delighted readers and cemented his reputation as one of our leading interpreters of technologies past and present. Now, he returns with a provocative account of a sometimes-overlooked form of technology-personal transportation-and explores how it has shaped societies and cultures over millennia.
Beginning around 3,500 BCE with the wheel--a device that didn't catch on until a couple thousand years after its invention--Standage zips through the eras of horsepower, trains, and bicycles, revealing how each successive mode of transit embedded itself in the world we live in, from the geography of our cities to our experience of time to our notions of gender. Then, delving into the history of the automobile's development, Standage explores the social resistance to cars and the upheaval that their widespread adoption required. Cars changed how the world was administered, laid out, and policed, how it looked, sounded, and smelled--and not always in the ways we might have preferred.
Today--after the explosive growth of ride-sharing and years of breathless predictions about autonomous vehicles--the social transformations spurred by coronavirus and overshadowed by climate change create a unique opportunity to critically reexamine our relationship to the car. With A Brief History of Motion, Standage overturns myths, considers roads not taken, and invites us to look at our past with fresh eyes so we can create the future we want to see.
The more we ponder, the odder the world can seem.
How do footballers get their shirt numbers?
Why does having daughters make couples more likely to divorce?
How do you move a horse from one country to another?
What counts as a journey into space?
The keen minds at The Economist contemplate all these questions and more in their quest for the globe's most extraordinary quandaries and conundrums, with bizarre facts and headscratchers that show the world is even stranger than we might have thought. From plant-based milk and supermoons to the next Dalai Lama and what really happened at the storming of the Bastille, this collection of the oddest and most mindboggling explanations will amaze and delight in equal measure.
Social media is anything but a new phenomenon. From the papyrus letters that Cicero and other Roman statesmen used to exchange news, to the hand-printed tracts of the Reformation and the pamphlets that spread propaganda during the American and French revolutions, the ways people shared information with their peers in the past are echoed in the present.
Standage reminds us how historical social networks have much in common with modern social media. The Catholic Church's dilemmas in responding to Martin Luther's attacks are similar to those of today's large institutions in responding to criticism on the Internet, for example, and seventeenth-century complaints about the distractions of coffeehouses mirror modern concerns about social media. Invoking figures from Thomas Paine to Vinton Cerf, co-inventor of the Internet, Standage explores themes that have long been debated, from the tension between freedom of expression and censorship to social media's role in spurring innovation and fomenting revolution. Writing on the Wall draws on history to cast provocative new light on today's social media and encourages debate and discussion about how we'll communicate in the future.