Really, the next breakthrough was relatively recently in this story. The printing press cracked that control open. In scribal culture, the church and the prince, they chose who could read or write. Books were expensive; they were chained down. The reason you have this avatar standing up and talking at you, the reason our universities still have old guys standing up in front of students, really goes back to when books were chained to the podium. They were expensive and they were scarce, and so was literacy.
The printing press was very much like the internet revolution in terms of the explosion in usage and literacy. Within decades of the invention of the printing press the literate population of Europe expanded vastly from thousands, probably tens of thousands, to millions. Those people began to do things that they weren’t able to do before.
I think it is worth noting that the printing press as a technology had been invented in China and in Korea prior to this. Although, their alphabet was more difficult, I think some of the reasons why a literate population grew explosively in Europe, and did not in China, had to do with factors that were exogenous to the technology itself.
I am very much not a technology determinist. I think when you say technology you have to look at the social and historical and cultural conditions around the actual tool to look at how it is used. In Europe, there were many competing states. In China, there was one centralized state. In Europe, of course, there was the Protestant Reformation, which had a great deal to do with the individual ownership of bibles. Of course, Gutenburg was an entrepreneur and wanted to sell a lot of bibles.
Posted by NMC on January 14, 2008
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