Co-Evolution of Technology, Media and Collective Action

Collective Action and Science

When tens of millions of people cracked open this code for transmitting knowledge across time and space, they began to do things together that people had not been able to do before. They began to organize forms of collective action that, in essence, created the modern world that we live in today.

So if you think about science, about apprehending the universe in new ways that can be very useful if it has to do with building bridges or curing diseases or making warfare, humans had depended on geniuses for a very long time. They had to wait for an Aristotle or a Newton to come along to apprehend the universe in a new way and then explain it to the rest of us.

The real genius, I think, of Baconian, Cartesian, or Galilean science was that, besides the scientific method of performing experiments and observations and formulating theories, there was a social basis. If you had a sufficiently large population of sufficiently literate people then you could circulate the rules for science, and people could perform observations and experiments and report on what they discovered. They could publish and they could build each others knowledge. Science became a collective knowledge gathering enterprise.

If you think about Wikipedia today, people building on what others contribute, I think, in a similar way, and I don’t want to stretch the analogy too far, we saw science accelerate very rapidly because a literate population was able to gather and aggregate and argue about knowledge through print literacy.

Of course, the Protestant Reformation was all tied up with the changes that the printing press enabled. Luther nailed his famous 95 theses in handwriting to that cathedral door, but within a few years hundreds of thousands of printed broadsides in many languages began to circulate.