Distribution Changes and the Revolution of the Printing Press

Ronald J. Deibert: “Print and the Medieval to Modern World Order Transformation: Distributional Changes”

I went to breakfast in North Park on Saturday morning, and as my daughter and I were headed home, we saw that a used bookstore on Adams Avenue was going out of business. Everything was 75 percent off—except for the books that were marked at 50 cents apiece or three for a dollar. We flipped a U-turn and went in. Thousands of books. Fabulous books. Familiar and unknown. About every topic imaginable. And I wished I could take boxes of them home with me. Except that I have more books than I have space and am starting to feel like I should get rid of some of them.

I don’t know why the store was closing. The owners seemed sad, and both my daughter and I felt awkward asking.

As we walked away, we wondered what the owners would do with the books after it closed. And we talked about the stacks of books at both our houses and the advent of new technologies like Kindle that eliminate the need to store books and use up valuable resources and how reading on a screen influences the way we think and respond to text.

We are book lovers, and yet we understand that we can’t keep or own every book we want to read. It is not economically or logistically feasible. Sometimes it just makes more sense to access written texts online.

The more we do, the more comfortable we are with the technology and the more likely we are to access texts online for something else.

Production and distribution of information is changing, and I am not always comfortable with the change.

I love bookstores and libraries. Books on shelves make me want to read. And I feel sorry for the bookstore owners who must reinvent their lives.

We’ve been reading about the technology of writing and how it has affected our thought processes, the ways it allows us to build on ideas progressively over time, the ways it changes memory, the ways it distances us from each other, and the ways it changes political power structures (Young and Sullivan, Ong, Havelock, Boroditsky, Lupton and Miller, Zimmer), but Ronald Deibert’s chapter takes us in a new direction.

Deibert argues that distributional changes, specifically the printing press, “undercut some social forces while they advance the interests of others” (67). His project is to examine the ways that that these “distributional changes associated with the development of printing played a part in the medieval-to-modern world order transformation in Europe” (67). He focuses on the ways that the printing press privileged the message of the Protestant Reformation, the advancement of scientific humanism, and the development of the modern political order, disadvantaging the Roman Catholic Church, absolute monarchy, and feudalism.

Luther and Calvin were not the first to disagree with the Church. Without the printing press, however, Deibert tells us “the Church had been relatively successful in squelching and containing heresies” (69). The printing press provided the opportunity “for one person to reach a mass audience . . . in an unprecedentedly short period of time” (70). Communities that were already weary of “deteriorating economic and social conditions” (70) were ready for change. Writers published in the vernacular, rather than Latin, the language of the Roman Catholic Church, making their messages easily understood by the common man. Those who could read, shared the message with those who could not. Mass production of the Bible, also published in the vernacular rather than Latin, also “helped to undermine the legitimacy of centralized knowledge reproduction” (72). The Church was no longer the sole spokesman for God. Indeed, the role of the clergy changed significantly with Protestantism because printing provided “a new channel of communication, linking Christians to their God” directly (74).

The Church forbade Catholic printers from entering into the new market for pamphlets and Bibles and put them at a serious economic disadvantage. They begged the church for permission, arguing that they would lose their houses and their livelihoods because they were only allowed to print Catholic literature, which they said “is desired by no one and cannot be given away” (74).

Similarly, the principles of scientific humanism began prior to the invention of the printing press. Deibert describes the development of universities in the Middle Ages, creating a market for books and a need for university manuscript copying centers, a slow, tedious, error-prone method of retaining knowledge. The printing press allowed for rapid delivery and the interchange of scientific ideas. Moreover, the volume of information led to “the desire to catalogue and organize every topic into a consistent order” (77), and the development of new concepts like page numbers, section breaks, or index cards.

Walter Ong argues that writing provides distance, separating “interpretation from data,” (“Writing is a Technology” 25) and “academic learning . . . from wisdom . . . making possible the conveyance of highly organized abstract thought structures . . .” (27). In this way, scientific humanism’s insistence on analytical, detached scientific observation was also favored by the move away from orality and privileged by the printing press.

It is easy for me to dismiss the incremental nature of these developments. When I’ve read about Guttenberg’s press in the past, I remember a date and move on.

However, it is important not to skim over the ways this technology radically changed the way information is communicated, stored, and perceived, the ways it turned the existing world order upside down.

The rise of new media, new ways of producing and distributing texts, new, more visual modes of communication, has the potential to do the same.

Renvois and L'Encyclopédie

Michael Zimmer: “Renvois of the past, present and future: hyperlinks and the structuring of knowledge from the Encyclopédie to Web 2.0”

The first think I did when I started to read Zimmer’s article was to look up renvois on dictionary.com. I was pretty sure our text had nothing to do with expelling diplomats from foreign countries, and the dictionary’s word was spelled without an “s.” I thought I remembered that renvoyer meant to send back, but it’s been twenty years since I studied French so I looked that up too.

Mostly my searches were a waste of time.

I remember reading about Diderot’s L’Encyclopédie in a French literature class I took in high school, but don’t remember reading anything about renvois. I knew that L’Encyclopédie was one of the first encyclopedias, and I wasn’t impressed. Every middle class family in the 1970s had at least one set of encyclopedias. We had four at our house, the regular encyclopedia and three specialized sets. I certainly didn’t regard them as “potential sites of power for the control of knowledge” (97).

As for renvois, if any book had talked about it, I wouldn’t have paid too much attention to that either. Cross-references make sense to me. You learn one thing, but you need to know another, and then another. So you look them up. In the beginning, I used the suggestions at the end of encyclopedia articles, but after a while I didn’t need them. I knew what additional information I would need to develop a deeper understanding of a topic.

In the old days, we pored through big green stacks of Readers Guides, looking for related magazine or journal articles, thumbed through card catalogs, looking up authors and topics, and then walked the aisles of the library, hoping the book was there and had been returned to its rightful place in the Dewey decimal system.

Findings things out is pretty easy now--if I come across an unfamiliar words or phrases, I can look them it up online. If I am curious about a source that was referenced in a book or journal, I can normally find it through a library database. Google is my friend. Sure, not every link is useful, but I can figure that out pretty quickly.

Cross referencing makes sense to me. Everything I learn demonstrates a previously unknown gap of understanding or knowledge so I look it up. The printed word doesn’t really “define and solidify the organization and presentation of knowledge,” as Eistenstein asserted; it merely leads us to recognize what J. David Bolter described as “associative relationships [that] define alternative organizations of knowledge” (96). If we are looking for them.

Not everybody does.

I know that.

But I sort of like being the one who can add needed information to a conversation.

And so I collect all kinds of us seemingly useless information about topics that interest me.

Zimmer’s history of encyclopedias, encyclopedic organization, and the development of renvois, and the role Diderot played in collecting “all the knowledge previously held by a privileged few into one public work accessible to all” might fall into this category except that it reminds me of the many ways that knowledge and the power it contains has been used to control men and women. By including the métiers, he elevated the status of workers across France.

Zimmer suggests that this inclusion led to the political changes that followed in that nation. He quotes Stockwell, who wrote, “By taking craftsmanship seriously for the first time, Diderot helped set in motion the downfall of the royal family and the rigid class system. Suddenly, in the pages of the Encyclopédie, every person became the equal of every other . . .” (103).

Moreover, the use of cross-references allowed him to insert information that had previously been withheld from the public, information that threatened intellectual and religious seats of authority. “For example, comments on injustice to the poor were hidden in articles on such mundane things as salt, while objectionable concepts such as ‘fornication’ were scattered among unrelated terminology in articles of theology” (103).

Zimmer asserts that L’ Encyclopédie was most subversive because its juxtaposition of opposing ideas or arguments, thus exposing “concealed relationships between controversial issues or hidden links between disparate pieces of knowledge” (103). Instead of being told what was true, readers were now required to create their own interpretations “of the differences or contradictions they might encounter” (104).

If only it were that easy.

We are currently living in a time of seemingly infinite sources of information available to us. We are saturated.

The juxtaposition of opposing ideas and arguments is everywhere.

And yet I’m not sure we care.

It’s almost like we only see what we already agree with.

Searching out knowledge and understanding takes time, and we’re not always diligent to examine all sides of an issue.

Embedded hyperlinks are designed to make it easy, to send us to related sources so that we don’t have to develop our own “associative relationships” (96).

Honestly, I rarely click on them. I find them manipulative.

Rather than assisting me in becoming an “active an integral” participant “in the production of knowledge” (Zimmer 97), I feel like they make me a passive follower of predetermined cues.

I don’t need or want an author or an editor to tell me where to look to find answers that may only communicate a single perspective.

Do Artifacts Have Politics?

Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.

The statement makes sense. The gun doesn’t shoot itself. It needs some force—almost always a human—to pull the trigger.

So . . . why does the person holding the gun decide to use it?

Is he or she angry? Jealous? Was a crime being committed? Were drugs involved? Is the person psychotic?

All those questions relate directly to the person holding the gun, but maybe there are other factors that play in the decision to use that gun.

Maybe there is something about the gun itself that plays a role in the decision. Maybe the technology inherent in the weapon is part of the question.

Maybe we should be asking other questions:

· What effect does holding a gun have on the person holding it?

· Does the lightness or heaviness of the metal play a role the use of the weapon?

· How does that sensation play a role in the way the person decides to use the technology?

· Does the lightness of the weapon or the ease of use play a role in the use of the weapon?

Landon Winner raises a similar question in “Do Artifacts have Politics?” originally published in Daedelus in 1980 and then reprinted in The Social Shaping of Technology. He states that there is “no more provocative claim than the notion that technical things have political qualities . . . can be judged . . . for the ways in which they can embody specific forms of power and authority” (28).

He acknowledges the most obvious objection to this claim, stating that what matters “is not technology itself, but the social or economic system in which it is embedded” (28). In other words, it isn’t the technology itself, but the “social circumstances” of the development and use of a particular technology. To put it simply, technology isn’t political; people are political.

The theory of technological politics draws attention to a variety of important studies including the momentum of large-scale sociotechnical l systems, the response of modern societies to technological demands, and the adaptation of human purposes to technology. Winner asserts that it “offers a novel framework of interpretation and explanation for some of the more puzzling patterns that have taken shape in and around the growth of modern material culture” (29).

The strength of this theory is that it takes the actual technical artifacts seriously. Instead of focusing entirely on the “interplay of social forces,” this theory suggests that we should study the “characteristics of technical objects and the meaning of those characteristics” (29).

Technologies have a way of defining the ways we build in the world. Sometimes the decisions to politicize technology can be made intentionally, as in the case of Robert Moses, who wanted to keep buses (and minorities) away from Jones Beach and therefore decided to keep the bridges built to specifications that would prohibit high profile vehicles from going toward the beach. Sometimes the decisions are unintentional. Regardless, those decisions may lead to long-term consequences. It’s not likely that the city of New York is going to replace those Moses’ bridges any time soon.

A more controversial theory would be the “belief that some technologies are by their very nature political in a specific way” (33). In this theory, it is believed that “the adoption of a given technical system unavoidably brings with it conditions for human relationships that have a distinctive political cast” (33). In other words, the social consequences are inherent in the technology, and the adoption of a certain technologies actually requires the “creation and maintenance of a particular set of social conditions as the operating environment of that system” (33).

Winner cites the example of nuclear power plants. Once we begin using them, we must also adopt what he calls a “techno-scientific-industrial-military elite” (33). If we don’t have those people in charge, we can’t have nuclear power. Use of solar power, according to Winner, is more democratic than the use of coal.

I like to think that people are political and technology is just a tool, but I am beginning to wonder.

Winner suggests that we should pay more close attention to the nature of technologies and the anticipated consequences of adopting certain technologies.

The invention of air conditioning meant that people moved to places like Phoenix, Las Vegas, or Palm Springs. It meant that skyscrapers could have comfortable environments. The widespread use of air conditioning has changed the landscape, the weather, and the animal population in those areas.

Should we have considered the sociotechnical aspects prior to adopting something like air conditioning, something that also has the potential to save lives?

Could we anticipate those changes? And if we did, would we do anything differently?

Our discussion focuses on technology related to rhetoric and literacy.

What sociotechnical consequences are inherent in the use of computers?

Writing is a tool—a tool that changes every culture that adopts it as a primary form of communication. Writing changes the way we think. It changes the way we interact with the world. It allows us to turn inward and reflect.

And what about computers? They have already changed our methods of research, data collection, and communication.

The momentum is building. There really is no turning back.

I don’t know that any of us want to.

But it should make us think.

Ong: Writing is a Technology

Some years ago, I started praying on a regular basis, but it seemed like the words in mind disappeared as soon as I thought them. I couldn’t anchor my thoughts or my prayers in any significant way, and so I began writing down my prayers. I’m pretty sure God doesn’t care if I speak my prayers aloud, whisper them in my thoughts, or write them down, but to me it seemed like the written prayers were weightier, almost tangible.

I’m surprised I didn’t think of this sooner. Writing has always had a profound effect on the way I view the world.

In fact, writing isn’t something I choose to do as much as it’s something I must do.

Every morning I make lists of things that I want to accomplish. I walk around the house with a pen in my hand just in case I need to write something down. I obsessively take notes in meetings, in class, during conversations, while on the phone. I may never refer to the lists, the random thoughts, or the notes, but the process of writing situates the words in my mind, helps me remember my thoughts, and helps me organize random, abstract thoughts into cohesive, progressive, productive ideas.

I need to write in order to think the thoughts that I think.

Not only that, but I need to read what other people have written to develop those thoughts and to expand my understanding of various concepts.

I can’t be me without writing, and I know that intuitively, but it’s not something I think about much. It’s just who I am.

On some level, I think everyone should be able to write.

Ong says that writing is imperious; it sets itself up as the standard to which all should attain. It takes itself as “normative for human experience and thought” (19).

He argues that even if we believe writing is essential in our society, even if we believe it offers power to the writer and that it would be good if literacy were available to all, we should endeavor to understand “what natural human processes are before writing takes possession of consciousness” (19). We should become aware of what writing does to our mind, to our thought processes, what advantages it has, and what disadvantages.

Writing, as normative as it has become, is technology, whether it is written by hand or typed onto a screen. It is a tool humans have created. It is artificial. This isn’t a bad thing. Ong says that to “say writing is artificial is not to condemn it but to praise it” (23). Indeed, writing “is essential for the realization of fuller, interior, human potential,” and it is an exterior aid to “interior transformations of consciousness” (23). When I write down my thoughts, my thoughts speak to me. I speak to them. I add to them. I can develop new ways of doing things that matter to me. I can help other people. Ong cautions that these “transformations of consciousness can be uplifting, but they can also be alienating” (23). Writing “distances” our thoughts from their natural spoken habitat so that we can view them from another perspective, raising our consciousness, giving us the potential for a “fuller human life” (23).

I don’t tend to think about the distance created when I put my thoughts onto a paper, but it’s true. Writing gives me the ability to say something and look at something from another angle. It gives me the ability to walk away and return to ideas later, to alter them, to extend them, to reorganize them in a more effective way.

The distance can be powerful.

Write Write?

Why Write? A Reconsideration

Young and Sullivan assert that certain types of thinking are impossible without writing. Honestly, their conclusions seem obvious. Their studies are interesting, but not earth shattering.

I can’t imagine a world without writing.
• I journal daily, and the process helps me sort out my thoughts, my emotions, my fears.
• I write down things I want to remember—quotes from books, songs I want to buy, writers I want to read, things I need to do.
• Taking notes helps me focus when I am listening to conversations or lectures. I don’t usually refer to the notes, but I remember things when I write them down.
• Writing in the margins of books and articles helps me find things I need to refer to later.
• I ask questions, make comments, and give myself instructions.
Really?
What proof?
I don’t think so.
What about xyz?
Check such and such a writer and see what he has to say.

I need writing to be me.

Not everyone would agree with Young and Sullivan.
Not everyone is compelled to write.

I find it ironic that Plato questions the value of recording thoughts in some kind of semi-permanent form His mentor, Socrates, wrote nothing, and if it weren’t for Plato, we probably wouldn’t even know Socrates’ name. Without writing, Plato himself would probably be anonymous. Instead, his questions, his theories, and his arguments are still with us.

But writing as a form of producing rhetoric was a new technology in Plato’s time, and there’s always a group of people resistant to new technologies—and change in general. Change brings about the unknown, and the unknown is . . . well, it’s unknown.

I wonder: Have we lost anything with the development of writing? Did this “invention . . . produce forgetfulness . . .”? Do we “seem to know many things” although we are actually “ignorant and hard to get along with . . .”?

A few hundred years later, Cicero asserted that is was the pen (writing) that was the best teacher for the art of speaking.

It would seem that Plato was wrong—or perhaps the way we learn has changed, and the new ways are not better or worse, but just different.
Young and Sullivan wrote this article in 1984, during a time when most of us were not using computers. I was still in college, producing all my papers on typewriters and longhand. I did all my research in libraries and took notes on paper. The world has changed in ways I don’t think they could ever have imagined, and I wonder what changes in our learning patterns have taken place over the last 25 years.

This, of course, isn’t the point of their article, but because they include certain predictions, it is worth asking: What has changed? What is changing? How have social networks, online journals, blogs, and other forms of writing affected the way we think? Do we think differently when we see the words come on a screen instead of on a sheet of paper?

I think we do, but does it matter? If so, how?

Technology and Me

When I was in eighth grade, I took AP Algebra. I'm not sure why they put me in the class because I didn't really understand anything about math, but I was a good student, and they funneled all the good students into AP classes.

Our teacher, a former military man, kept a giant computer in his office. It was 1973, and the computer was big and gray and took up about two-thirds of the small space. In the remaining third, there was a desk with a tiny monitor, and all the boys in our class would gather around the monitor and do computer things. I really don't have any idea what kinds of computer things. I'm short, could never make my way to the front of the crowd, and finally gave up trying to get into the room. Besides, I didn't really care.

I much preferred to think about words and putting them together and telling stories.

I never imagined that computers and words would be so closely linked together.

Machines of any kind tend to make me a little nervous.

I finished my BA using an electronic typewriter. I would type a draft, mark it up, type it again, mark it up. As many times as I needed.

We bought our first computer in 1994. It ran on Windows and had 4 mg of RAM. It didn't do much, but my kids seemed to have fun. They played games. Learned to chat with people. It was frustrating though because it didn't have enough memory to do much of anything and so we upgraded after a year.

The next computer changed my life.

I began working in medical transcription using a DOS version of Word Perfect. I learned to create macros and files.

I paid my bills.

I got an email account.

I booked vacations online.

I learned to create spreadsheets.
I could do research without leaving my desk.

And I started writing again.

I think differently because of my computer.

And it's not just me.

The world is different because of the options we have available to us.

I can't keep up.

My eighth grade fear of technology comes back every time I have to learn a new program.

My kids, who grew up with computers, seem to know and understand everything intuitively.

There is a new technological culture, and my kids are a part of it. I am not.

I need to immerse myself in this culture, as if I were immersing myself in a foreign culture, and I need to learn to move and operate in this culture.

If I'm going to teach, I need to understand how students think and how they learn.

I'm here because I'm not in eighth grade anymore. I have faced fears and overcome them. I don't know what a drupal or a Moodle are, but I can learn.