According to researchers from the British Library, Royal Holloway and Reading universities, our obsession with social networking is not new. The idea of creating networks of members and sharing information dates back to the Renaissance, when Italian scholars created their own nicknames, profiles, emblems and mottos to exchange information. The discovery was made while cataloguing medieval Italian writings dating back almost 500 years. Just as we create user names for our profiles on the social media and create circles of friends, these scholars created nicknames, shared and commented on topical ideas, the news of the day, and exchanged poems, plays and music. It may have taken a little longer for this to be shared without the internet, but through the creation of yearbooks and volumes of letters and speeches, they shared the information of the day. Interestingly, the nicknames chosen were often funny, such as Intronati (stunned or unable to think straight) and Gelati (frozen or inactive).
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