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.