I argue that the printing press and the networked personal computer (henceforth NPC), while both key moments in the history of technology that have some resemblance, are radically different communication networks. I first briefly explain these technologies. I then consider two striking similarities. I lastly highlight four main differences.
In 1440, Johannes Gutenberg developed the printing press. Thereafter, the act of preservation was automated, allowing scribes to scrutinize the claims of texts instead of memorizing them by rote. The invention of the printing press, argues Elizabeth Eisenstein, resulted in “typographic fixity,” that is, texts changed less, thereby allowing scholars to scrutinize texts more.[1] In addition to scrutiny and verification, Eisenstein argues that the printing press resulted in greater creativity because texts could be cross-referenced and novel associations made.[2] As she writes, “the era of the commentator came to an end and the era of cross referencing between one book and another began.”[3] The printing press is significant because it shaped the Renaissance, thus driving the reformation and scientific revolution. As Francis Bacon noted, the printing press “changed the appearance and state of the whole world.”[4]
Jumping ahead roughly five centuries, humanity invented the first personal computer in ca. 1970, which became linked via the World Wide Web in 1990, thus resulting in the NPC. While young, when compared to the printing press, the NPC is as significant because of the massiveness of its effects. For example, many activities can now be conducted from anywhere with an internet connection, such as banking, shopping, researching, and even working. We can already see how the NPC and its mobile form, the smartphone, can be seen as contributing factors to, for instance, the collapse of trust in scientific expertise,[5] and a more polarized political domain from the algorithm-induced echo chamber.
The most salient feature they share is that they sparked communication revolutions by changing how people were informed and thus how people thought and thus culture as a whole. To illustrate, the mental formation of the reader is distinct from the surfer or scroller because the parts that come to fill one’s whole understanding are more or less coherent as these distinct mediums promote greater or lesser contextualized relevance, respectively.[6] When transformed minds are aggregated, social consequences like cultural transformation follow. By changing the structure of knowledge and mental formation, these technologies changed the structure of culture, which, as a result, changed the function of knowledge, too.[7] In the case of the printing press, the purpose shifted towards greater verification and creativity; in the case of the NPC, one could argue the purpose of “knowledge work” has shifted towards fame. That many adolescents now aspire to stardom instead of serving some greater good attests to this shift in ends.
The second reason that attests to the resemblance is the collapse of the authorities in their respective eras. In the case of the printing press, the church’s orthodoxy was the information authority, as the Inquisition shows, which Martin Luther’s heterodox accounts challenged via the proliferation of printed pamphlets.[8] And “scattered attacks on one authority by those who favored another,” writes Eisenstein, “provided ammunition for wholesale assault on all received opinion,”[9] which was later evident in Vesalius’ and Galileo’s challenge of ancient Aristotelianism. Contemporaneously, that scientific orthodoxy is now being questioned, which likely has many causes; however, one is likely how the NPC allows easy access to the personal views of celebrities, say in podcasts, which can be appealed to over scientific fact.[10] Therefore, these technologies clearly share characteristics.
Nevertheless, as the following differences will now show, they are radically different communication networks. Firstly, while print technology resulted in static “typographic fixity” that caused us, as Aleida Assman argues, to leave the village where oral culture prevailed,[11] the NPC is returning us to that village as Marshal McLuhan’s “global village”[12] phrase captures because “we can increasingly know things, do things, and interact with other humans anywhere in the world in ways that we could previously expect only in a small village”[13] namely facial and auditory interaction.
Secondly, class access is different. Books were primarily available to people in the educated classes. The printing press impacted the learned classes more than anyone else. And as Bacon remarked, “knowledge is power,” so book knowledge solidified power dynamics. In contrast, the NPC allows anyone with an internet connection to access vast amounts of content. The consequence is an erosion of the established informational power hierarchy, which the shaky state of the modern university demonstrates.
Thirdly, the sheer amount of information the NPC produces is many orders of magnitude greater than what the printing press produced. Anyone can now “create content” and reach a large global audience. Such is not the case for printed works because the publisher acts as an information regulator. While many reference the Tower of Babel parable upon new waves of media technology to argue that more information increases not clarity but confusion, James Gleick’s The Information shows the true difference of magnitude that warrants the NPC as “information over loader.”[14] Evidence for this is that a Google search often returns hundreds of millions, if not billions, of hits within seconds, which far exceeds the number of books in any library.
Lastly, there is a nodal difference, i.e., a one-to-many or many-to-many sender-receiver relation.[15] A printed book falls under the former class because a single source can reach a large audience. The NPC falls under the latter because through specific media channels, such as Facebook or forwarding an email, a single sender can reach many receivers, but those receivers themselves can then resend the original sender’s message to more people, as when someone shares a post from a friend who shared it from the original website such that the post “goes viral.”
In conclusion, while there are similarities between these two key technologies, the differences outnumber the shared characteristics such that they are radically different communication networks that ultimately inhibit us from speculating about future outcomes.
[1] Elizabeth Eisenstein, “Some Conjectures about the Impact of Printing on Western Society and Thought: A
Preliminary Report,” The Journal of Modern History 40, no. 1 (1968), 2.
[2] Ibid. 7.
[3] Ibid., 7.
[4] Francis Bacon, Novum Organon, Aphorism 129.
[5] Carl H. Builder, “Is it a transition or a revolution?” in Futures (March 1993), 159.
[6] Neil Postman, “Now … This,” in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Showbusiness, New York, NY: Penguin Group, 2005), 99-113.
[7] Eric J. Leed, “Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change and the
Structure of Communications Revolutions,” in American Journal of Sociology 88, no. 2 (1982), 420.
[8] Eisenstein, 35.
[9] Eisenstein 26.
[10] Andrew Jewett, “Introduction: Science as a Cultural Threat,” in Science under Fire, (Harvard University Press, 2000), 1-5.
[11] Aleida Assman, “The Printing Press and the Internet: From a Culture of Memory to a Culture of Attention,” in Globalization, Cultural Identities, and Media Representations ed. Natascha Gentz and Stefan Kramer, (State University of New York Press, 2006), 11-12.
[12] Marshal McLuhan, The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century, (Oxford University Press, 1992).
[13] Builder, 161.
[14] James Gleick, “After the Flood,” in The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, (Vintage: 2012), 373.
[15] James A. Dewar, “The Information Age and the Printing Press: Looking Backward to See Ahead,” RAND, 1998, https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P8014.html#fnb1.