Past, Present and Future.

I remember watching a documentary many years ago about the printing press, and after going through this weeks material I managed to find the answer to a few lingering questions that had escaped me until now (mostly because I completely forgot about it). 

"The arrival of the mechanical movable type printing introduced the era of mass communication, which altered the structure of society". (Printing Press, Wikipedia!) Finally, someone who agrees that Wikipedia is a reliable source. How can crowd sourced information be unreliable? Don't we ask the locals what to do and where to visit when we travel? Who would bother to update a Wikipedia page if they were not well versed in the subject, ignoring the pranksters of course. Back to the subject. What was perplexing was the fact that, in my mind, the mass production of texts (which I assumed were possessed by political and religious authorities) should have further influenced the population - propaganda comes to mind. Instead, it "altered the structure of society". What I failed to realize was that the wider distribution of reading materials resulted in a higher literacy rate, and this broke the monopoly of the elite. 

Another burning question was how this lead to revolutionary ideas, since people would be reading old texts because they themselves may still have been learning to read. A paragraph from Eisenstein (1979) sums this up. "During the first few centuries of printing, old texts were duplicated more rapidly than new ones. On this basis we were told that 'printing did not speed of the adoption of new theories'". She then answers the burning question that I had by suggesting that an increase in the output of old texts contributed to formulation of new theories. Now it makes sense, I would be more likely to think of something new if I had the material to learn a subject, e.g. a textbook, rather than not have anything at all. Without it I might not even come close or have a tiny inkling of a new idea.

Fast forward to the future, although still in the past, and we have the laser printer. This statement gave me one of those “ahhh” moments, as I've never thought about it in this way before, the laser printer created “the endeavor we call desktop publishing”. It “put the power of easy page makeup and rapid replication into the hands of anyone with a few thousand dollars for hardware and software”. Moving on to the present it no longer costs a few thousand dollars. I guess the concepts of ‘easy page makeup’ and putting it into ‘the hands of anyone’ have given rise to the forms of publishing we know today, blogs, vlogs, personal websites…. which are, I’m glad to say this or else I would be paying to post this blog entry, mostly free (assuming one needs a computer to survive hence already has one). 

Into the future again and having heard about 3D printers and just recently finding out about 4D printers (printception?), I’m excited to see what it holds for the act of publishing…