Main Content
Lesson 2: Origins of Mass Media
Printing and Unintended Consequences
Contrary to popular belief, the printing press was developed in China more than 400 years before Gutenberg's famous press in Germany. Why do we associate printing with Gutenberg and Germany instead? The main reason is the difference in language. The Chinese language consisted of thousands of complex symbols called ideograms. There were so many different symbols that arranging them in molds to print different books was impractical, even after the development of movable type. When Gutenberg developed his printing press in 1450, he relied on the Latin alphabet, which only had about two dozen different characters. This alphabet made it much easier to manage the fonts and rearrange letters to print new books. This comparison demonstrates how the same technology will develop differently under different cultural circumstances.
Printing also provides a good example of how new communication technologies have unintended consequences. Printing made books much cheaper to produce and therefore more affordable for consumers. As the cost of books declined, more people learned how to read. One of the first books to be printed was the Bible. Initially, printers and the Catholic Church thought that making more Bibles available would increase religious devotion and strengthen the power of the Church.
Ultimately, as more people owned and were able to read their own Bibles, they began to question the teachings of the Church. Whereas before people had to rely on priests to explain what the Bible meant, now people could read it on their own and develop their own interpretation. The printing press was also used to publish pamphlets that questioned the authority of the Church leaders. Eventually, the Reformation led to a major split in Christianity. While it was not the only factor, the development of the printing press played a large role in this split. This consequence was definitely not intended by Gutenberg when he printed his first Bible!
Video 2.1 provides some more insightful and thought-provoking ideas about the impact of printing:
SPEAKER: CLAY SHIRKY, PROFESSOR OF NEW MEDIA, NYU
[ON SCREEN TEXT: HOW HAS TECHNOLOGY CHANGED THE ROLE OF THE PUBLISHER?]
CLAY SHIRKY: When Gutenberg and his followers perfected movable type, you suddenly could produce much, much, much more material than ever before.
So they printed a lot of Bibles. And then all of a sudden Europe had all the Bibles it could use in any given year, something that had never happened before. And so they had this huge amount of excess capacity and no new material that needed to be printed. And the solution they hit on was quite world-changingly dramatic, which was they decided to start printing books that no one had ever read before. We have the word novel to describe novels because the word comes from a novelty itself, was new.
Almost any book you would want to print in 1400 was a book that had been venerated for 1,000 years. By 1500, you've got stuff that is literally hot off the presses. The down side of this is that if you're printing a book that no one has ever read before, maybe no one wants to read it, and there's no good way to know. But you've got to print all the copies in advance to sell them. And if you don't sell them, you're out all the money. And if you do that a couple of times in a row, you're out of business.
So all of a sudden the printer, whose main responsibility was operating this piece of equipment, became the publisher whose responsibility was to decide what should be printed on the printing press in the first place. That accident—through an enormous number of subsequent kinds of media, films, and magazines, books, and television, and radio—someone had to figure out how to manage the risk of "What should we broadcast today? What should we show in our movie theater? What should go in this month's magazine?" meant that that "publisher decides" model stayed true for 500 years.
It was a basic fact of the public media environment that you have to have someone willing to bear the risk. And the minute you had a medium where you don't have to spend a lot of money up front in order to have a public voice, a medium like we have today, that accident gets undone. Doesn't matter that half a millennium of cultural practice is built up around it.
I think that there's a kind of a glum realization that the accident of the economics of media made the publishers' control of what got said in public, that that accident is done now, and that the competitive landscape doesn't include silence on the part of amateurs.
[ON SCREEN: An image of Clay Shirky's article titled "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable," and a quote from the article that says:
The old difficulties and costs of printing forced everyone doing it into a similar set of organizational models: it was this similarity that made us regard Daily Racing Form and L'Osservatore Romano as being in the same business. That the relationship between advertisers, publishers, and journalists has been ratified by a century of cultural practice doesn't make is any less accidental.]
And it will never include silence on the part of amateurs again. And the technical change to do that was quite trivial. The cultural ramifications of that change, they were huge because the media landscape we had in the 20th century literally cannot stand the shock of inclusion we're currently living through where all of a sudden everybody's got a public voice. And we're seeing the social effects of that accident ending.
NARRATOR: Read and watch more from Clay Shirky at btnn.tv.