I asked a member of my staff, Matthew Schwartz, to write a blog post on the anniversary of the printing of the first Gutenberg Bible, and to offer his perspectives on it. His thoughts are below.
The words you are reading right now did not exist just a few moments ago. The time from their inception as a few electrical signals in my brain to their current reality as words on your computer, possibly hundreds or thousands of miles away, can be measured in mere hours (and that’s only because it took a while to get this blog entry posted).
When a technology becomes ingrained, we tend to take it for granted. The Internet stopped being miraculous to most people several years ago – and reproduced digital text was likely the first Internet technology to lose its luster. But the shine can be restored if we take a step back, look around, and just think about what is going on here. For the first time in the existence of our species, anyone is able to instantly publish his thoughts, and have those thoughts instantly accessible everywhere in the world.
This is incredible. It’s even more incredible when one realizes that, for almost the entirety of human history, the ability to publish at all was limited to a very select few.
September 30 was the 559th anniversary of the publication of the Gutenberg Bible, which makes this a good time to reflect on where we once were, and how far we’ve come.
Imagine for a moment it is the year 1011 and I want to publish a blog post. My options are limited. First, the word “blog” wasn’t coined until the late 1990s, and in any case Internet connections were awfully spotty a thousand years ago, what with the Danes capturing Canterbury and shutting down the Internet. But let’s say I want to write something – perhaps a diatribe against the Danish imprisonment of our beloved Archbishop – and disseminate it to as many people as I can. Well, unless I’ve got unlimited power and resources, this will be extremely difficult. Even supposing I know how to read and write (a privilege limited to precious few, usually clergy), and even supposing I can get my hands on some ink and parchment, I really have no way to get the message out. It’s not like I can gallop to His Royal Kinko’s and ask them to make a thousand copies.
A thousand years ago, the act of publishing consisted of manually copying something, word-for-word, onto a new piece of parchment. Basically only the monarchy (with their scribes) and the Church (with their monks) were able to marshal the resources and manpower to accomplish such a gargantuan task. By the time Gutenberg came along, printing techniques had advanced to the point where manual copying was no longer necessary; the traditional method was to make a wood carving of each proposed page, lather the carving with ink, and then make a rubbing. This was still burdensomely expensive and time-consuming, and only the most popular texts were carved into wooden plates. Large books took years of effort, it was hard to store the plates for later reprinting, and it was nearly impossible to correct mistakes without recarving the entire plate.
Gutenberg’s innovation was movable type. A goldsmith, Gutenberg was familiar with the use of different metals and alloys in creating molds. Over the course of 15 years, he developed a hand mold that allowed printers to quickly typeset letters on a page. A repurposed wine press, once used to squeeze the juice from grapes, now pressed ink-covered letters onto parchment.
Gutenberg had created the first assembly-line for books. Before his creation, a scribe could hand-copy a few pages per day, or by using ink blocks a few dozen. The Gutenberg press allowed an individual to produce at first hundreds, and ultimately thousands of pages per day.
The ability to publish – once limited to kings and popes – was now available to anyone who could pay for a print run. And books were no longer rare commodities for the very powerful. Within a few decades, hundreds of print houses were operating all over Europe, each using Gutenberg’s invention. By 1500, Western Europe printing presses had produced more than twenty million copies of books – about 30,000 different titles. Over the next century that number increased tenfold. Later, when the Industrial Revolution brought steam-powered presses and publishing houses moved to rolled paper, mass production of printed works flourished. For the first time in human history, ideas were able to be dispersed on a wide scale, and one can make a strong argument that without the printing press – which allowed quick dissemination of new advances in knowledge – the Scientific Revolution might not have happened.
And yet. The printing press was one of the most important inventions of mankind – and that makes it very easy to romanticize it. As much as it revolutionized knowledge, it was still fairly difficult for the average citizen to gain access. Book publishing houses could run the work of their favored authors, and of course newspaper publishers became perhaps the most prolific users of the press – the entire newspaper industry was nicknamed after the device! But other than the occasional letter-to-the-editor, most average citizens lacked access to the press.
And that’s the way it stood for nearly five hundred years.
Until, sometime in the middle of the 20th century, some computer scientists in the Department of Defense were trying to figure out a way to send information from one computer to another. Out of that initial testing – mankind’s first foray into digital communication – grew ARPANET, a whole host of Internet protocols, and ultimately the World Wide Web as we know it.
I want to reiterate that the ability of an average person to instantly publish on a global scale is very recent, going back no further than two decades. Even with the dawn of personal computers in the late 1970s, a computer-owner with a printer could self-publish no more easily than someone with a typewriter and access to a mimeograph machine. Only once all computers were connected to a worldwide network did the ability to digitally publish come into being.
Human beings have existed in our present state of cognitive development for the past 50,000 years.
The printing press was invented 500 years ago – just the most recent 1% of human history – and, with only a small percentage of our species having access to publishing, it still jump started modern society, the rapid spread of ideas, the Scientific Revolution, and the world as we know it.
The World Wide Web was invented just twenty years ago, and already it connects over two billion people – almost a third of the world population. And the pace of data creation on the Internet is incredible: According to a recent study, in any 48-hour period in 2010, more data was created than had been created by all of humanity in the past 30,000 years. And by the year 2020, that same amount of data will be created in a single hour.
It is too early to tell what the fruit of this globally-connected mind will be, but we are already seeing some early results. The pace of innovation has skyrocketed. Social networks are serving as catalysts for democratic uprisings around the globe, as formerly disconnected societies see what is possible. Developing nations are now getting connected via mobile networks at a rapid pace, bringing the previously disconnected masses into the digital age. Some believe that within a few years, anyone who wants to anywhere in the world will be able to connect to the Internet.
The world isn’t just getting connected; it’s getting connected at ever-faster speeds. Not only can billions now send text – a major innovation – they can also send pictures, movies and graphics in mind-blowing variety. Advanced high-speed networks have laid the groundwork not only for a revolution in thought but also a revolution in creativity.
And while manipulating text and pictures is an amazing feat, a further revolution is building as machine-to-machine connections grow. Estimates of how many automated devices will be connected to the Internet in the future tend to dwarf the number of mobile phones and home computers. These devices will monitor and help manage everything from home energy use to medical conditions. And now with the cloud, we are seeing the huge computing power that is available via the Internet put to use in genetic analysis. The cloud would not exist if not for the ability to link thousands of computers that can interact and interpret data en masse.
Gutenberg created the first real means of producing texts on a wide scale. But he never created a distribution mechanism to make information real to the world. That only happened with the construction of every advancing landline and mobile network. Connecting people and devices is key to making information really relevant. There’s no way to know exactly what future communications technology will bring, but it will certainly be every bit as world-altering as Gutenberg’s original invention.
---
Matthew S. Schwartz, a graduate of Georgetown Law, is a Verizon Internet and Technology Policy Fellow.