A friend kindly sent me a text at 5am this morning, so I woke up to hear the US President Elect's speech on the radio, making a mix of old and new media (SMS and, well, DAB).
But up to 2am, and then from 5am, the new, social media had been buzzing. It was nerve-racking fun to sip a drink and catch up with friends en masse via IM, forums, and email in the US and across the UK as we saw pictures of people voting from NYTimes.com, debated the merits of CNN and MSNBC stream, and wondered about what it meant.
This morning, Professor Sue Thomas posted an update on Facebook that the social media – things such as Facebook, blogs and twitter – had transformed the Democrats' election machine, something the Republicans had been unable to do. It certainly helped to achieve the record amount of campaign dollars that Obama has raised.
The exhibition's interactive (which you can also do online, now) points to the challenge posed by new forms of communications technology in terms of citizenship and politics. But I also like an older – and very rare – printed document on show: the Dunlap printing of the Declaration of Independence. There are 25 known copies of this revolutionary broadside (it was 24 until a couple of years ago, when a stray copy turned up at a flea market).
It includes some of the most famous lines of any historical text: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among them are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness…” The language and sentiments are of course indebted to the Englishman John Locke, whose thoughts on government are on display in the same case.
The Declaration was drafted at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia by Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Roger Sherman and Robert R Livingston, with Jefferson providing most of the text. Late on 4 July, the revised text was approved, and the 'Representatives of the United States of America in General Congress Assembled' authorised copies to be printed and 'proclaimed in each of the United States & at the head of the army'.
John Dunlap, a young printer at nearby 48 High Street and Market Street, was charged with producing these copies. He ran off 200 copies that night (making the odd mistake in the text along the way), long before the final manuscript copy of the Declaration was formally signed. The copy on display at the Library was captured by British forces and sent back to London, where they assumed the government would be interested to read the news 'that the associated Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, free and independent States, and they are absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political Connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.'
I doubt they would be friends on Facebook.