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

Limits of chirographic communication: Literacy still an elite privilege and tool Oral communication dominated everyday life Writing remained subservient to oral communication Dual 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 paper invention of spectacles  slow spread of vernacular literacy But remember, paper and printing were not European technologies Around 200 B.C.: paper developed in China 7th century: spread to Middle East 12th 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 Gutenberg Mainz Gutenberg Museum ( mainz.de/UniInfo/Stadt/Museen/gutenberg.html) Gutenberg press LSC 311, “Information Literacy,” Susan E. Beck, instructor, New Mexico State University ( ml)