ABSTRACT
Technologies have often been employed to promote political messages directly to the public by circumventing the usual mass communication media elite. In 1517, only about 70 years after Johannes Gutenberg's invention of the commercial printing press, Martin Luther supposedly hammered printed flyers on the wooden doors of religious institutions. Viewed as an entertainment medium since its modern introduction within a Parisian theatre by Auguste and Louis Lumiere in 1895, motion pictures were not thought of as persuasive tools until years later. "Social" relates to an informal gathering of like-minded individuals who are part of a particular group with cultural participation that might include persons by class, education, gender, ethnicity, interest, race, politics, religion, and/or others. Social media staples such as texting to friends, sharing pithy observations, updating a status, uploading a picture, and so on is almost always noncontroversial and ethical.
