THERE IS A great historical irony at the heart of the current transformation of news. The industry is being reshaped by technology – but by undermining the mass media’s business models, that technology is in many ways returning the industry to the more vibrant, freewheeling and discursive ways of the preindustrial era.

Until the early 19th century there was no technology for disseminating news to large numbers of people in a short space of time. It travelled as people chatted in marketplaces and taverns or exchanged letters with their friends.

The invention of the steam press in the early 19th century, and the emergence of mass-market newspapers, marked a profound shift in news distribution. The new technologies of mass dissemination could reach large numbers of people with unprecedented speed and efficiency, but put control of the flow of information into the hands of a select few.

In the past decade the internet has disrupted this model and enabled the social aspect of media to reassert itself. In many ways news is going back to its pre industrial form, but supercharged by the internet. Camera-phones and social media such as blogs, Facebook and Twitter may seem entirely new, but they echo the ways in which people used to collect, share and exchange information in the past.

The Economist, July 9th 2011. Adaptado.

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Explicite a ironia histórica, provocada pelo advento da internet, no modo de distribuição atual das notícias.