Starting this week we will be turning to looking at theorists who have attempted to understand the way technology (as in specific technical artifacts) change media representation. First up is Eisenstein and the printing press. I will talk about the whole book, but you should make sure that you read the first section and the final chapter as these are the most important. Leave your question below.
Note: In case you missed the update on the prior post here is the TED Talk which deals with Remediation and comics.
It was interesting for me to notice at the beginning of my reading that the author took a, if not positive, at least neutral standing point when she discussed about the advent of printing technology. Consider writing as a technology as we discussed in earlier classes, it was refreshing to see someone actually embraces the new technology instead of keeping compare it to the previous one and moan about the loss of the culture. However, the author, consciously done or not, demonstrated Plato’s belief that speaking is a superior communication tool to writing when she mentioned her quote being given the wrong antecedent in the Afterword chapter.
Whether printing should be considered an inferior manifestation to writing, I cannot decide. Although I think the printing revolution was probably the best thing that happened to the exchange of knowledge to human history, I do think the printed material somehow lost the authors’ personalities. I may have a very different way of learning compared to the others seeing that I am very visual when it comes to memorization. I normally see a specific color or pattern in my mind when I read or think of a person/ occasion. But it becomes more difficult for me to see that when I read a printed material because the personality of the author only shows through the content, but not the form of his hand writing or the format of the page. As if it is not enough of the author’s personality loss, there are the inputs of the graphic designer, the editor, maybe even the bookseller’s marketing person. The inputs may have helped selling the product, or even conveying the story in the book, but sometime it is confusing for a reader like me.
I also saw the concepts of business management and marketing close to today’s forming when the printing technology became the big hit. And it was kind of funny to see how different marketing was back in the day. Knowing the big fuzz about “scarcity equals to superiority” when printed products first came out, it was strange for me to see that merchants tried to sell their products cheaper because they were mass produced. I wonder if they took the strategy the electronics manufacturers take today — selling all their new products more expensively because they are the “newest and coolest” — would that have turned the whole atmosphere against printed materials around. The fact that consumers’ superstitions being the same over the years and the business people’s marketing approach changed was an extra bonus reading this book.
Before the invention of writing, I wonder if there was such a word as “literacy” If the writing created splited the society into the literates and illeterates.. perhaps with the invention of the printing press created a larger rift between the two groups.
Before there ever was a writing, the social hierarchy might have been as prominent as it is today. I only say that the invention of the printing press created a larger gap is because people who are literate, now became ever so knowledgeful of whatever they wanted to know about. Perhaps the invention of the printing press gave more meaning and signifance to someone who is considered “educated”.
On the job front, since printing press made it so much easier to make duplicate copies of the books, the masterful craftmenship of copiers probably became meaningless. Anyone with the right amount of training is able to copy any material sufficiently with the help of this new invention.
Elizabeth Eisenstein’s take on how the printing press changed society seems for the most part spot on. Her conclusions are well thought out and she does a great job of pointing out where the holes or areas that require more attention are in her writing. Best of all though, she appears to grasp the concept that with a new technology there are losses and gains that occur in a society when the technology is introduced.
The most apparent indication of this concept is seen when she cautions her reader about “assuming the spoken word was silenced by the printed word” (41). This seems to be in contrast to the authors of previous works (although most of those works dealt with the transition from oral to written) who bemoan the losses that occur during the transition while only giving mention to the benefits that are associated with it.
In fact, Eisenstein devotes a whole section of her book (The Expanding Republic of Letters) to discussing the changes the printing press had on social groups. Eisenstein states that, “Printed sermons and orations did not remove preachers from their pulpits or speakers from their podium” (93) and this remains true even today. During an age where we have surpassed the technology of the printing press with all manners of technology we still place value on the spoken word and still have preachers preaching sermons and orators giving speeches. The same statement can be said of books today which have been “outdated” by technology and yet still hold their place in society. It is hard to imagine the printed word silencing the spoken word (or even causing a neglect in hearing as McLuhan might point to) when one considers we don’t go around writing everything when we want to say something.
My only question is how the printing press changed the distribution of art such as music. There is mention that with the arrival of the printing press comes the ability to reproducing things with greater accuracy. Therefore, musical performances, rather social events, should be more available and bring people together in greater numbers than before, correct? Eisenstein doesn’t really address this issue, or for that matter what the printing press did to other forms of art save illustrations used in books.
The parallels between the age of the printing press and the current age of technology were a fascinating discovery for me. While the printing press was the first true opportunity to mass communicate from one to many, computers and the internet are the first time that humans can communicate from MANY to MANY. The age of technology is and will have as dramatic an influence on the transfer of technology and the printing press. The access to the internet is a great parallel to the rapid increase in access and use of the
printing press.
It seems ironic to me that the best comparison on the effects of the information age on society is the device that will, to a great extent, be most affected by the information age itself. The personal computer boom and the dramatic increase in access to networking and the internet as a whole is slowly morphing into an exact parallel of the broad distribution of presses and the ending of the age of the scribal culture. As Eisenstein point out the dramatic decrease in number of hours worked to create books, the same can be said of the decrease in time spent in the transfer of communication in the information age. This is a very strong argument in the printing press being a revolution, and not an evolution. The printing press affected the way content was created, and not just duplicated, just like the computer and the internet are today.
RE: Allen’s point regarding social hierarchy . . . I think there’s something to be said about widening the gap between literates and illiterates, however, the ability to spread literacy at a speed never even dreamed of cannot be overlooked. While the gap between the “educated” and “uneducated” may have increased, the NUMBER of educated people increased drastically, and thus there were fewer people staring at the gap.
Side note – hello from LA. It’s cold an rainy here. Yes, seriously.
In The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe by Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, the author clearly presents how Gutenberg’s printing press truly revolutionized the world. Today I think most people take inventions like the printing press for granted. Most people probably never take the time to think about printing and how the invention of the printing press has affected our lives. It never occurred to me that the content of books could have changed as people manually copied them over time. If someone copying a book felt certain parts of a book were inappropriate for whatever reason, they could have changed the text or deleted parts of the text altogether, thus altering the content of the book. The reading makes me realize how much work really went into making a book and how long it must have taken to add text and pictures by hand.
Once the printing press was invented, there was a rise in the sale of paper due to this invention but has the production and sale of paper seen its peek since the invention of the computer? Computers are eliminating the need for paper with emails, e-books and online news. It is interesting how one invention can impact the use of another invention and society in general. Last year the United States Post Office delivered approximately 9 billion less items than in the year before. The United States Post Office is now considering delivering mail five days a week instead of its current six days a week. Could this be a reduction in the number of letters sent due to the increased use of e-mails for letters and advertisements? It would be interesting to know how many people purchased e-books last year instead of paper books.
Elizabeth Einstein explores the history of the printing press and its effect on Modern culture. I got the impression she was not in the determinist view of technology like Bolter and Grusin. Einstein points out the challenges of the effects of the printing press on the early modern European cultures and history. Since, Elizabeth wrote her book before Bolter and Grusin who mention the printing press briefly in Remediation Understanding New Media. The cultural effect of computers seem to parallel the printing press. Developments and production of computer hard ware technology has reduced Moore’s law to months causing companies to stall the releases of new technologies. The computer has increasingly evolved to the mobile devices. Also, Elizabeth highlight the user of the printing press giving incite into how the technology was used. The cultural affect of computer and internet technologies have allowed easy access to personal and sensitive information to hackers and misuse. Also, computer technology has enables computer users easy access to information and knowledge. What is the definition of knowledge for the information age? The computer is an innovative technology effecting society in ways we can not perceive. Is the computer the printing press of the 21st century? Is it too early to see the cultural effect of computers? There are some signs in books like Information Anxiety I and II etc.
One interesting concept Eisenstein brings up is the distinction between the printed word vs. the printed image. When one thinks of the advent of printing, the printed word is privileged over the printed image. For example, the invention of the printing press is most often associated with movable type, the Gutenberg Bible, and what essentially prompted Martin Luther’s 95 Theses. In my opinion, the big innovation of early printing was the ability to reproduce illustrations. While manuscript can be easy replicated, illustrations deteriorate when they are copied for centuries. Not only did the printing press allow for the reproduction of ancient illustrations such as maps and diagrams, it led to the increasing significance of visual aides and nonphonetic communication. An example by Eisenstein is the printed picture book for children; by educating children through images, these books designated drawing as an “increasingly useful accomplishment” (43). A huge effect of the printing revolution was that it “increased the functions performed by images while reducing those performed by words” (42).
Last night I watched a show on the science channel; “What the Ancients Knew”; the episode was on “The Chinese.” According to the show it was the Chinese that developed the first movable type in 10AD. However, due to the many Chinese symbols for words it was hard to make many different symbols. In the western societies Gutenberg gets the most credit for inventing the printing press that invented a new form of communication across Europe. I found “The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe” By Elizabeth L. Eisenstein to be amazing. Originally, books were printed for university’s and priests, and the internet was originally developed for universities and government science projects. The ability to print images with text helped to spread books into the mainstream of European cultures just like the development of the computer image helped the Internet to become popular within western societies back in the early 1990’s. I believe that I either read or saw on a show that one reason that the computer image file develop was for people to send sexy pictures to each other. However, I am not sure about the early history of the printing press if similar sexy pictures were in books? The other interesting thing in her book was how similar the printing operation to today’s internet multimedia companies. There is a good example of remediation where we take an old form of a media, that is still very alive, and use the concepts to make a new form of media. Big multimedia development companies have certain people assigned for one task in developing a web site or in the making of a 3D game. The book describes how a printing workshop had certain people for key roles in making the books. I am wondering with the use of blogs and individuals can print anything and distribute on the internet, will there be a need for formal printing publisher or even a big multimedia web company?
Eisenstein is very insightful and thorough as she describes different aspects of the printing press and print culture. According to her, printing technology revolutionized communication by making transmission of information cheap, accessible, and fast. Print culture not only caused a communication revolution but subsequently resulted in further developments such as the explosion of knowledge, cross-cultural interchange of ideas, and new possibilities for social and intellectual collaboration which together lead to scientific advancements.
I found it interesting that Eisenstein marks printing culture (and not the scribble or writing cultures) the origin of “authorship.” She argues that prior to printing press, texts were copied in limited numbers, authors were mainly monastery scribes, and information was mainly collective. The fixity and dissemination of publications encouraged and introduced the idea of authorship, and afterward the “capitalist spirit” made authorship profitable. At times I wonder if she is critical and negative towards the new form of “authorship,” and if she uses the term to refer to individualism or desire for literally property rights and cultural/economical benefits, rather than to refer to an originator or a creator.
As printing press made textual and pictorial statements permanent and mass published, different readers were able to view an exact pictorial print simultaneously at multiple locations. Eisenstein identifies this phenomenon as “communication revolution” rather than “visual communication revolution.” I find the latter more appropriate as printing press was “far from reducing the importance of images” (p40), and it laid the foundation for graphic design: a combination of text and graphics that visually communicate a message. Unfortunately, Eisenstein discretely (and only on few occasions) talks about rapidly developing non-phonetic communication methods and the evolution of typography in the 15th century Europe, and primarily focuses on written and textual communication. Later, when she explains the authors’ rights in regards to patenting, “the right to publish,” and piracy (p94), I am not clear whether these rights applied solely to the authors and inventors or they applied to the visual artists as well.
In the Afterword, Eisenstein addresses a critic, Michael Warner, who accuses her of technological determinism. I thought her refutation deserved more development, since I kept noticing technological determinism as I was reading, just as I noticed it the first time I read her work. The quote she gives from Warner is very ambiguous, as she points out. To be specific, this passage is representative of her extreme tendencies: “The development of neutral pictorial and mathematical vocabularies made possible a large-scale pooling of talents for analyzing data and led to the eventful achievement of a consensus that cut across all the old frontiers” (301). But, even in this passage, the effects of print are said to determine the changes—not the printing press in and of itself. Ultimately, since she takes a self-declared revolutionary perspective on the communication shift, techno-determinism is perhaps inevitable. In a revolutionary context, it is tempting and perhaps right to trace origins in a way that would seem techno-deterministic. Perhaps the most convincing argument against an evolutionary perspective is her point that the advent of printing did not initiate a new wave of progress; rather, it entailed “continuous accumulation of fixed records” (97). Thus the shift from script to print is not a structured or premeditated process.
Ultimately, though, I would say that she is not deserving of the techno-determinist label that some critics have apparently granted her. She (for the most part) aptly balances gains and losses in her consideration of the printing press as _an_ (not _the_) agent of age in early modern Europe. Many times, she reminds the reader that “one must be wary of overestimating as well as underestimating the advantages of the new technology” (25). How applicable is this advice in our current cultural moment? She writes, “all revolutions have preconditions as well as precipitants” (339). This passage speaks to her attempt at both diachronic and synchronic analysis. In this way, Eisenstein can detail both the pace of the change as well as the far-reaching aspects of the change. “It was not a ‘slow revolution’ but a remarkably rapid one [and] it was also remarkably widespread” (318). She tries here to enforce her thesis that the printing press was not simply part of a causal nexus—it refigured the nexus itself (308).
I was overall very impressed with the way she handled the numerous paradoxes that arose throughout her examination. For example, the paradox of urban populations divided across realms yet linked through the new network of communication (107). I was also interested in her perspective on the supposedly closed and silent nature of printed products, which I believe Ong points out (books are closed, but oral dialogues are open). Eisenstein seems to reinvent that notion by saying about oral culture: “the notion of a closed sphere or single corpus, passed down from generation to generation, was replaced by the new idea of an open-ended investigatory process pressing against ever-advancing frontiers” (290). Also, drawing from the writings of Thomas Jefferson, Eisenstein makes a case for the revisionary nature of print, since copies of texts could appear in successive editions. This is certainly not the instantaneous update process of Wikipedia, but it does make me re-evaluate the book as a supposedly silent tomb of information.
Thought to share this with everyone (esp. related to Remediation):
Can ‘The Printed Blog’ Succeed with Blogs in Newspaper Form?
http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2009/02/can-the-printed-blog-succeed-with-blogs-in-newspaper-form040.html
On page 33, Elizabeth Eisenstein writes about how early publishers began to put their name prominently in the books they produced:
“As self-serving publicists, early printers issued book lists, circulars, and broadsides. They put their firm’s name, emblem, and shop address on the front page of their books. Indeed, their use of title pages entailed a significant reversal of scribal procedures; they put themselves first. Scribal colophons had come last.”
The eminence of the printer in each publication is a big difference from the scribal culture which came before. It may be said, in this case, that scribes tried their best to make themselves invisible, putting the only indicator at the very end. Each work was meant to be somehow self-existing. Immediacy was valued in this sense. In print culture, however, it seems there was a quick shift to just the opposite. The fact that a work was printed at a particular place was highlighted for the reader at the very beginning. Hypermediacy, at least in this sense, became more valued. The production of the piece was evident right from the beginning, much like “making of” special features on video today.
In this new state of hypermediacy, it becomes easy to see how a printer might begin to take ownership of the works they print. Perhaps this is where the concept of copyright came from? It is possible this was covered in one of the later chapters of the book–and it is understandable if it was not covered at all given the conceptual nature of the study–but it is certainly an interesting topic to consider. Given the nature of printed books being the first mass-distributed copied material, it seems obvious that this issue must have emerged to some extent. Reflections on the originations of copyright (and similar topics) may shed light on the validity of current matters on the subject.
Every generation absorbs the current worldview as the norm. This is because current teaching methods disassociate the students from a certain aspect of the past. That is, the aspect of technologies influences. On page 7 Eisenstein says “Schoolchildren who are asked to trace early overseas voyages on identical outline maps are likely to become absentminded about the fact that there were no uniform world maps in the era when the voyages were made.” School children are taught with importance being focused to the explorer, the discoverer, the inventor. The supports for these discoveries and inventions are not considered, and Einstein argues they are what matters. The printing press offers important supports for these endeavors. Being supported in this new fashion shifted the nature of the collective memory, as Einstein mentions on page 39.
Eisenstein also mentions an emphasis on images as well as text. This TED talk has a pretty good quick-history-of-images-in-relation-to-technology at different times: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXYckRgsdjI (skip to 10 mins in). Eisenstein says the book created images and text to be published far and wide. The TED talk mentions the way we relate to, and read images is affected by the context in which it’s housed. If it’s on a pillar you read it in a spiral pattern, if you read it on a wall you read it left to right, right to left, left to right. Since images were placed in books you read it in the same way you read text. This could affect the way we think about story structure. We have a linear story going from left to read, starting at point A and ending at B. We don’t see a movement away from this structure until after the enlightenment.
Being a black and white person….after our discussion in class tonight…..Johns vs. Eisenstien….on the subject of reliability of the printed word in books in regards to what seem to be the historian’s interpretation of the events and affects of the invention of the printing press: How can we rely on either author? I mean, when you have opposing view points, which one is correct? As it was brought up in class, the upper echelon had say over what would be included in books, and it was, it seemed, to always be in their favor. Maybe that’s a different discussion, but how am I to know what real knowledge is if it is dictated by historical interpretations and power?