Co-Evolution of Technology, Media and Collective Action

Print as a Revolutionary System

I think you can make a case that the Protestant reformation was, in a sense, the first virtual community. People were willing to go to war alongside people not from their village, who didn’t even speak their language, but who shared this idea of whichever Protestant sect they were involved in; an idea that was spread very rapidly by print.

Of course, the revolution in the United States of America, the French Revolution, and the revolution in England in which the monarchy was replaced by parliament as the main seat of power. These were all very much based on print literacy, and the whole theory of the public’s fear has to do with the idea that what we call public opinion arises from citizens and somehow influences the policy makers. That no longer could the king act on a whim. The king had to, in some sense, accept the consent of the government.

In the colonies, the revolution was organized by committees of correspondents who used handwritten documents that were passed around. When, after the revolution, the American colonists argued about the form of government to be taken, those arguments took place in the newspapers, in what we call the Federalist papers today.

In the summer of 1776, Thomas Paine’s book, Common Sense, for which he refused to accept royalties and died in poverty, in fact, that sold 300,000 copies that summer. It was the first really great best seller.

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What I am not saying here is that the printing press created science or the Protestant Reformation or democracy. Again, I am talking about this revolutionary system in which print lowered the threshold for print literacy and enabled a large population to learn, and that large, literate population began to do things that they weren’t able to do before.