It Changed Everything

Quote of the day:
“In Mainz, Germany, on this day in 1455 began the mass printing of the Gutenberg Bible, the first manuscript in Europe to be printed by movable type. About 180 copies were produced, the Bible contained more than 1,280 pages, and on each page the text was laid out in two 42-line columns. Up until that time, manuscripts were usually copied by scribes, and a handwritten Bible could take one scribe more than a year to prepare. Sometimes woodblock printing was used, but it was also an expensive and time-consuming process. The movable type printing press featured individual blocks with a single character that could be rearranged endlessly. Passages of text would be covered in ink and used to make repeated impressions on paper. The printing press that Johann Gutenberg built was based on the design of presses for wine and paper. It's estimated that more books were produced in the 50 years after the movable type printing press was built than in the 1,000 years before it. Gutenberg's invention is credited with making the Renaissance possible: it allowed classical Greek and Latin texts to be distributed widely. It also made books affordable to lower classes.”
--The Writer’s Almanac

A strong candidate for biggest understatement of all time is that the printing press changed everything.

Until then, writing and reading was mostly for ceremonial recording, recollecting and passing along tradition. These tasks were done by learned clerics. Essentially, almost no one on earth could read beyond a few symbols.

Before Gutenberg, we lived in stratified oral cultures in which information, knowledge and tradition were passed along in groups through speeches, recitations and storytelling.

With the printing press came the gradual shift to an individualistic culture, as ordinary people learned to read and began to learn about the world through internal one-on-one communication with authors and writers.

Simultaneously with the settlement of Jamestown came the King James bible in 1611. As the immigrant population in America grew over the next 200+ years, this book was a fixture in almost every American home.

Its ubiquity made it a sort of early American equivalent to TV.

Speaking of which, the next tectonic communications/culture shift occurred in the 20th century with the advent of broadcast radio and TV. Broadcast radio initially resembled pre-Gutenberg oral culture, except that listening was done primarily individually and within families. Also, there was no interaction.

TV added passivity to individualism as we began to fixate on flickering images transmitted to our homes. Our eyes and ears became fully engaged, if not always our minds.

Then, of course, in the 1990s there’s the spread of the internet....