Print and Modern Thought

The scientific revolution that would later challenge the entrenched "truths" espoused by the Church was also largely a consequence of print technology. The scientific principle of repeatability—the impartial verification of experimental results—grew out of the rapid and broad dissemination of scientific insights and discoveries that print allowed. The production of scientific knowledge accelerated markedly. The easy exchange of ideas gave rise to a scientific community that functioned without geographical constraints. This made it possible to systematize methodologies and to add sophistication to the development of rational thought. As readily available books helped expand the collective body of knowledge, indexes and cross-referencing emerged as ways of managing volumes of information and of making creative associations between seemingly unrelated ideas.

Innovations in the accessibility of knowledge and the structure of human thought that attended the rise of print in Europe also influenced art, literature, philosophy and politics. The explosive innovation that characterized the Renaissance was amplified, if not in part generated by, the printing press. The rigidly fixed class structure which determined one's status from birth based on family property ownership began to yield to the rise of an intellectual middle class. The possibility of changing one's status infused the less privileged with ambition and a hunger for education.

Print technology facilitated a communications revolution that reached deep into human modes of thought and social interaction. Print, along with spoken language, writing and electronic media, is thought of as one of the markers of key historical shifts in communication that have attended social and intellectual transformation. Oral culture is passed from one generation to the next through the full sensory and emotional atmosphere of interpersonal interaction. Writing facilitates interpretation and reflection since memorization is no longer required for the communication and processing of ideas. Recorded history could persist and be added to through the centuries. Written manuscripts sparked a variation on the oral tradition of communal story-telling—it became common for one person to read out loud to the group.

Print, on the other hand, encouraged the pursuit of personal privacy. Less expensive and more portable books lent themselves to solitary and silent reading. This orientation to privacy was part of an emphasis on individual rights and freedoms that print helped to develop. Print injected Western culture with the principles of standardization, verifiability and communication that comes from one source and is disseminated to many geographically dispersed receivers. As illustrated by dramatic reform in religious thought and scientific inquiry, print innovations helped bring about sharp challenges to institutional control. Print facilitated a focus on fixed, verifiable truth, and on the human ability and right to choose one's own intellectual and religious path.

—from “Printing: History and Development”, Jones Telecommunications and Multimedia Encyclopedia. Retrieved January 4, 2002, from http://www.digitalcentury.com/encyclo/update/print.html#thought.

Writing is critical not simply because it preserves speech over time and space, but because it transforms speech, by abstracting its components, by assisting backward scanning, so that communication by eye creates a different cognitive potentiality for human beings than communication by word of mouth.

—from Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind, 1977: 128.

In the context of both intellectual and practical developments, it is important to stress that a significant attribute of writing is the ability to communicate not only with others but with oneself. A permanent record enables one to reread as well as record one's own thoughts and jottings. In this way one can review and reorganize one's own work, reclassify what one has already classified, rearrange words, sentences and paragraphs in a variety of ways.

—from Jack Goody, The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society, 1986: 83.

The introduction of voting as the dominant mode of succession to new political office ... boosted the role of the mass media; the control of these channels of communication, first in the written form of the press, then in the spoken and visual shape of radio and television, became a main focus in the struggle for political and economic power. Whereas in the mid nineteenth century a revolt often included the seizure of the seat of government, the routine of mid-twentieth-century Africa centred upon the capture of the media buildings -- the radio station, the television studio and the newspaper office. In the latter quarter of this century another shift has occurred; the struggle is likely to involve the armoury and the barracks, with the media playing a secondary role ... legitimacy lies hidden in the barrel of a gun and implementation of a political programme depends on the increasing participation of police and army. The legal system ... has suffered deeply ... Military and peoples' tribunals have tended to replace the judicial forms of earlier regimes. … Writing is clearly not essential to the development of democratic assemblies on a small scale, but the idea of a representative assembly or of secret voting exert some pressure towards the use of the new form of communication. Like the power of the gun, writing can be a democratic force, especially for a community of greater scale than cam be managed in face-to-face relationships. … [Writing] had no immediate consequences for democratic government ... its egalitarian implications were strictly limited, since literacy creates another axis of differentiation involving the access to, and the creation of, texts ... For processes of informed consultation to operate in larger units, at least before the radio, the widespread use of the written word as a method of indirect communication is a virtual necessity, and that means not only alphabetic writing but printing as well. …The development of the ballot in nineteenth-century Europe spread together with the schooling of the populace. Both were linked to the circulation of information by means of mass-produced newspapers, review and books. However, writing gets used not only to promote government and participation in government but to attack the existing regime ... Scepticism, criticism and disbelief are not, of course, absent from oral societies but their expression tends to get rubbed out at each generation, even where it does become explicit. There is no accumulation of non-conforming ideas … Writing affects the means by which control of the polity is carried out through the secret, written ballot which is deliberately opposed to the open gesture of the raised hand or the verbal exclamation as a truly democratic technique, reflecting the real opinion of the individual members of society, expressed without fear or favour, privately rather than publicly.

—from Jack Goody, The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society, 1986: 117-125

It is perhaps impossible to devise a test in writing or even an oral test shaped in a literate setting that would assess accurately the native intellectual abilities of persons from a highly oral culture. …Persons who have interiorized writing not only write but also speak literately, which is to say that they organize, to varying degrees, even their oral expression in thought patterns and verbal patterns that they would not know of unless they could write. … we must [not] imagine that orally based thought is 'prelogical' or 'illogical' in any simplistic sense — such as, for example, in the sense that oral folk do not understand causal relationships. They know very well that if you push hard on a mobile object, that push causes it to move. What is true is that they cannot organize elaborate concatenations of causes in the analytic kind of linear sequences which can only be set up with the help of texts. The lengthy sequences they produce, such as genealogies, are not analytic but aggregative.

—from Ong, Walter J., Orality and Literacy: the technologizing of the word, 1982: 55-57.

From the invention of the alphabet there has been a continuous drive in the Western world toward the separation of the senses, of functions, of operations, of states emotional and political, as well as of tasks. ... Any people that ceases to be nomadic and pursues sedentary modes of work is ready to invent writing. No merely nomadic people ever had writing any more than they ever developed architecture or "enclosed space". For writing is a visual enclosure of non-visual spaces and senses. It is, therefore, an abstraction of the visual from the ordinary sense interplay. And whereas speech is an outering (utterance) of all our senses at once, writing abstracts from speech. … The invention of the alphabet, like the invention of the wheel, was the translation or reduction of a complex, organic interplay of senses into a single space. The phonetic alphabet reduced the use of all the senses at once, which is oral speech, to a merely visual code. ... The unique character of our alphabet [is] that it dissociates or abstracts, not only sight and sound, but separates all meaning from the sound of the letters, save so far as the meaningless letters relate to the meaningless sounds. So long as any other meaning is vested in sight or sound, the divorce between the visual and the other senses remains incomplete, as is the case in all forms of writing save the phonetic alphabet.

—from, Marshall McLuhan The Gutenberg Galaxy: the making of typographic man, 1962: 43-47.