IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2015 - 17

VIEWPOINT

Víctor Hugo
Masías

Paula Baldwin
Lind

Sigifredo
Laengle

Fernando A.
Crespo

Shakespeare, Social Media
and Social Networks
hakespeare has a lot
to say about Social
Media and Social
Networks. In a quick
review of the literature, we find Shakespeare's dramas
have a similar number of characters
to those found in natural social networks, which is something we do not
find in works by other playwrights. The
works of Shakespeare have also generated a growing topic of discussion
in the context of technology social
media - so much so that there is a
call from engineering researchers who
see the need to bring Shakespeare
to their classrooms. As Brent Strong
comments in his article Why Engineers Should Read Shakespeare:

Yale Center for British
art, Paul Mellon fund

S

humanities. But most of all,
they are between engineers
and those who surround them.
The question each of you must
answer is whether you want to
make the effort to build bridges of significance. That takes
effort. Perhaps your effort can
begin with Shakespeare [12].
In this context, we think that
if Shakespeare had the genius to
capture certain properties of the
human nature of social networks,
and at the same time, to continue
to generate cross-cutting debates
in modern-day social media and
in engineers' education, then it is
necessary show the points of contact of his works with our actual
present-day social networks.

My job as a professor,
increasingly, is to suggest that
engineers build bridges and
to demonstrate the building of
such bridges, literal as well as
figurative bridges. The bridges may be between engineering and business or between
engineering and industry.
They may even be between
engineering and the arts and

Social Media and
Shakespeare's Plays
Today, when speaking about social
networks, we immediately think of

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2015.2494240
Date of publication: 17 December 2015

december 2015

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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

sites such as Facebook, Twitter,
LinkedIn, Pinterest, Telegram, or
Wattpad, among social media tools. It
is interesting that the concept of social
networks came before the invention
of the Internet. Within this context,
we can find different metaphors for
social media in Shakespeare's plays
that may help build bridges between
science and the humanities. We will
mention only a few examples.
In his article "Could Shakespeare Have Tweeted Hamlet?,"
Joel B. Predd [10] compares the
number of letters a person can
tweet and those a character can
speak at a time, but he arrives at
a negative conclusion. According
to him, the limit of characters that
can be tweeted is 140, which would
be more than those included in
each line assigned to a character
in a Shakespearean play. Nevertheless, Predd does not consider
that Shakespeare wrote most of his
plays in blank verse with regular

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2015
