I just finished "From Gutenberg to Google" by Tom Wheeler. I also read his "Mr. Lincoln's T-mails" and Elizabeth Eisenstein's "Divine Art, Infernal Machine". I have posted the hightlights I made in Gutenberg here:
I enjoyed the book more than I expected to. I have read some of Elizabeth Eisenstein's "Divine Art, Infernal Machine" but I feel I have grasped more about moving from writing by hand to printing from Wheeler's Gutenberg.
In today's world, how could print be exciting? It's so commonplace, so static. Both Eisenstein and Wheeler explain that the cost of a book when written by hand was high but much cheaper when printed. It seems natural to me to think of moveable type, but at first the notion was to make a block to print a whole page and then a new block for the next page. People are reported to be so astounded that a given page in one copy was identical to the same page in another copy, that they figured the producers of this stuff HAD to be in league with the devil. They weren't kidding! The printers were reported to the police for witchcraft and deviltry.
I learned that Martin Luther, much like Lincoln and the telegraph in Wheeler's other book, happened to post his complaints about indulgences at the time the printing press was available. I didn't know that earlier complaints had been made but without the printing press or the notion of using it, those earlier complaints had gone nowhere. With the press, all of Germany had good access to the Luther theses within 15 days of their creation. Those ideas and the speed of their spread resulted in 200 years of warfare, bloodshed and realignment of religious and polticial forces.
Wheeler does a lovely job of explaining that the telegraph and the train moving people and goods were literally unbelieveable. People worried about the physical effects on their bodies of transporting themselves at (wait for it) 25 miles an hour!!! At a time when most people MIGHT have heard of something called electricity, word spread that messages were being sent by lightening. It was said that messages and information could be sent across the US in less than a minute. Had to be bull!
Then, just as we were getting used to all this, along comes Marconi with his wireless, sending voice right through the air. The air! More deviltry! Where will it all end?
Wheeler explains that all of the networks that have grown up, have tended to be centralized, much like today's hub airplane paths. If we have a few central hangars where we can repair and shuffle passengers, we can cover vast areas with our services. But with the internet and with ubiquitous computers and smartphones, more and more of us can communicate quickly and cheaply with more and more of us. True, some of the communication may be porn or insults or hatred but much of it will not be. In the last week, as many people looked at this blog from outside the US as looked at the blog page from inside. I have no idea if they gained from looking at it or even read it or even can read English. But not for the first time, things are changing.
