There isn't central control over what is posted on Facebook and that's part of much unless you're in our problem. What happens with these networks is far more spontaneous all those two billion people are posting stuff and liking stuff. This is a very very important difference between our time and that time in our second network age if you'll forgive me calling it that the network heightens the inequalities that already exist in society.
Niall Ferguson is the preeminent historian of the ideas that define our time. He has challenged how we think about money, power, civilisation and empires. Now he wants to reimagine history itself. Networks, he explains, are the key to history. The greatest innovators have been ‘superhubs’ of connections. The most powerful states, empires and companies have been those with the most densely networked structures. And the most transformative ideas – from the printing presses that launched the Reformation to the Freemasonry that inspired the American Revolution – have gone viral precisely because of the networks within which they spread. Our host for this conversation is historian, author and broadcaster, Rana Mitter. The audio of this live Intelligence Squared event was recorded in London in 2017.
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