The Printing Press

The physical embodiment of words

Who controls the production and use of words? On what scale?

What purposes do they make words serve?

What social changes are facilitated? What tensions or contradictions are created?

What happens to earlier technologies for word production?

Before print: Scribal culture

Before print: Scribal culture

Limits of chirographic communication:Literacy still an elite privilege and toolOral communication dominated everyday lifeWriting remained subservient to oral communicationDual effects of writing as a technology: Expansion of diversity, debate Restriction to literate elites and used to reinforce existing power relations

Changes on the eve of the printing press

Europe, late 1300s: cheap paperinvention of spectacles slow spread of vernacular literacy

But remember, paper and printing were not European technologiesAround 200 B.C.: paper developed in China7th century: spread to Middle East12th century: first paper mill in Europe

The Print revolution

Gutenberg and the press

Print: social and political effects

Accessible publications new, text-based communities, movements (Protestant Reformation, liberal and Parliamentarian political movements)

Standardization of language new sense of national belonging

New patron: the printer as capitalist

Printing as prototype for industrial mass production for profit

Print: psychological and cultural effects

Print as completion of the chirographic revolution (Ong) Reified the word as object

Secularization, commodification, and the final dominance of sight over sound

Printed text as efficient, complete thought, vs. the ornateness and openness of writing

Emphasis on individual authorship, creativity, autonomy

But oral and chirographic culture did not disappear; literacy was slow in spreading (Eisenstein)

“Print” in the electronic age

Word-processing, desktop publishing, and the Internet bring complex, industrial processes of textual production (not just consumption) into the reach of the middle classes

Print in a new form: hypertext

As in the past, new electronic literacies will be diffused unevenly and manipulated for particular economic and political goals

Important factors in democratization: Connection to language and oral culture Role of public education Consumer production technology markets vs.

professional info & entertainment industry

Some questions

Is the computer today’s equivalent of the printing press

How is the control of printed words changing today?

Image credits

GutenbergMainz Gutenberg Museum (http://www.uni-mainz.de/UniInfo/Stadt/Museen/gutenberg.html)

Gutenberg pressLSC 311, “Information Literacy,” Susan E. Beck, instructor, New Mexico State University (http://lib.nmsu.edu/instruction/lsc311/beck/classnot.html)