The above figure is from a blog post, What Did Gutenberg’s Printing Press Actually Change? In it, the author links to a paper, New Media and Competition: Printing and Europe’s Transformation after Gutenberg. What you see above is that 200 pages in 1450 went from “weeks of daily wages to much less than one day of daily wages.”
I believe that the printing press was probably a major instrument in the emergence of European modernity. First, with the rise of Protestantism, and later science. There have always been geniuses, but the “republic of letters” was enabled by the emergence of printing. The importance of proximity, which allowed for the flourishing in ancient Athens, declined, as intellectuals published widely circulated works.
This sort of thing has made me wonder about the rise of the internet. Would it enable a new intellectual flourishing? I’m old enough to remember reading the CIA Area Handbook of Ethiopia using Gopher. The rise of the blogosphere in the 2000s presaged the rise of a new class of intellectuals.
Or did it? Down much of that discussion has devolved to Twitter virality. Young people spend all day online reading great classics for free, but usually, they watch Logan Paul on YouTube or someone like that.
A generation ago a story like this would have made me wonder about the possibilities, The Hottest Phones for the Next Billion Users Aren’t Smartphones:
The hottest phones for the world’s next billion users aren’t made by smartphone leaders Samsung Electronics Co. or Apple Inc. In fact, they aren’t even smartphones.
Millions of first-time internet consumers from the Ivory Coast to India and Indonesia are connecting to the web on a new breed of device that only costs about $25. The gadgets look like the inexpensive Nokia Corp. phones that were big about two decades ago. But these hybrid phones, fueled by inexpensive mobile data, provide some basic apps and internet access in addition to calling and texting.
But now I think “more masturbation.” Over half the world’s population is now on the internet. But there isn’t more innovation or scholarly reflection commensurate with the growth in access and connectivity.
200 pages is, conveniently, probably the amount of pages your ordinary bookworm can properly “process” in a day of heavy reading. So it emerges that the economic barriers to information flow amongst the cognitive elites, at least in Europe, were conquered in the 16th century (note also that the wages of officials, merchants, skilled craftsmen – the sort of people who’d be reading in the first place – were higher than average). But printing didn’t do anything about physiological limits – neither will the Internet – so they will remain the key constraint.
Of course there are physiological constraints. But would the century of genius have happened in Europe if information could have been shared at internet speed? Perhaps info was shared just enough, but not at a rate that prevented independent pockets of intellectual inquiry and development. Today intellectual inquiry seems to be constrained by a worldwide focus on the same currents of thought. PhDs in China have told me they will only make incremental advances based on previous scholarship, as scholars everywhere do based on scholarship that is accessible worldwide. I don’t think that is just a constraint of East Asian collectivism or intellectual timidity, although those might be factors. And it is not groupthink either. It seems more like a drawback of a global internet community that fails to harness the potential of breakthrough intellects which could be fostered in smaller communities, maybe with a slower flow of information.
printing press -> reformation: was both a) intellectual flourishing/rupture with old dogma, and b) 130 years of war about new/old religious belief
internet -> reformation 2.0: will be both a) intellectual flourishing/rupture with old dogma, and b) decades of bickering/turmoil (hopefully not war) about modern faiths, which include not just true religions like christianity but also quasi-faiths like environmentalism, new age, hard core social justice
That is to say, any shift this large inevitably both good and bad. Anyone believing it was going to be purely one or the other is utopian or dystopian. Big change brings both good and evil.
“This sort of thing has made me wonder about the rise of the internet. Would it enable a new intellectual flourishing?”
The available evidence is that the effect is very much the other way. The internet is enabling new depths of inanity, vacuousness, and squalid meanness. I don’t know why.
My theory is that the artists and intellectuals of Europe were so complicit in the crimes and horrors of the first half of the 20th century, that their ability to produce art and philosophy was destroyed. Only in the seventh generation, When the chain of grandfathers is completely broken will anything new and beautiful emerge. Check back in the 22nd Century.
23rd century.
Gutenberg also made possible the cheap “penny dreadful” novel. Most communication has always been garbage. I’m pretty sure there are several hundred republics of letters with varying levels of connectivity on the net, and that one or two include this blog.
OTOH, Martin Gurri’s Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium is worth a read. The big intellectual crisis is not that we’re drowning in crap, although we are, but that so many perspectives are on offer that it’s increasingly difficult to reach a consensus on what should be done.
The battle for the mind of North America will be fought in the video arena — the videodrome. The television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye. Therefore the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore television is reality, and reality is less than television.
This was the classic quote of Prof. Brian O’Blivion from Cronenberg’s Videodrome. When I saw this movie in DVD some years ago as a teenager, I took the plot quasi-Maltusian and I didn’t buy it. In some ways, I didn’t want to believe it.
So, time went on, and every year I change my phone and see the world around me, those words proved very prophetic.
(Phonescreen instead of television)
Theodore Sturgeon said 90% of what is crap?
The internet allows anyone with the ability and inclination to become a scholar. There is no un-tapped reservoir of “genius” and there are few impediments to meritocracy. Maybe this is the way that it ends; it just shrivels up and dies.