The printing press took most people by surprise—it wasn’t a technology that everyone had been dreaming about for centuries, like flying machines—and its ramifications were dramatic.
An useful perspective on emerging technology, comparing our current computational moment with the arrival of the Gutenberg Printing Press. Today, we take the ability to share printed information for granted, but for the people who lived through its introduction, it was a revolution.
Institutions were upended, entire industries sprang up while roles that had been valued for centuries disappeared. The need to write out books from hand was largely replaced by mass-scale prints, a familiar pattern where the distinctness and craftsmanship of books dropped, converging towards more uniformity. This forced another tradeoff, where the skill required to produce written documents become a commodity, and thus people who sought to use it as a technology to communicate with the masses were unbound. Perhaps the most significant result of this was Martin Luther’s challenge to the Catholic Church, and the rise of the protestantism.
The cost of entry was low. More books were printed in the five decades after Gutenberg’s invention than had been produced by scribes during the previous 1,000 years. The printing press decentralized the role of gatekeeper.
Fascinating, also, to learn that Luther sold 300,000 copies of his printed works within 3 years, a milestone even semi-popular authors today would crave to reach.
The larger point is more pressing:
We no longer register the impact of the printing press because we have no easy way to retrieve the ambient sensation of “before,” just as we can’t retrieve, and can barely imagine, what life was like when only scattered licks of flame could pierce the darkness of night.
For all of the writing on what is coming at us, I’m increasingly thinking it is valuable to document what is happening today, so we may look back and realize how much truly has changed.