Six Information Revolutions

From A History of Mass Communication: Six Information Revolutions by Irving E. Fang

Six Information Revolutions

1. Writing Revolution - 8th century B.C. Greece - convergence of the phonetic alphabet

from the east and the papyrus, an import from Egypt to the south

- writing is used to store knowledge - “the human mind would no longer be

constrained by the limits of memory.”

Six Information Revolutions

2. Printing Revolution - second half of the 15th century Europe - convergence of paper from China

(originally from Arab and Moorish cultures) and a printing system by German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg

- “With printing, information spread through many layers of society.”

Six Information Revolutions

3. Mass Media Revolution - middle of 19th century Europe and US - convergence of advances in paper

production and printing press methods

- newspapers and magazines reached the common man

- “For the masses, literacy came within reach.”

Six Information Revolutions

4. Entertainment Revolution - end of 19th century in Europe and

America - stored sound, affordable cameras and

motion photography - “Like the pots and oans coming off the

assembly lines of the Industrial Revolution, entertainment could now be infinetely replicated and canned.”

Six Information Revolutions

5. Creation of the Communication Toolshed Home

- middle of 20th century - telephone, broadcasting, recording,

improvements in print, cheap universal mail services

- “…the media of communication have become inseparable from our lives.”

Six Information Revolutions

6. The Information Highway - at present - convergence of computer,

broadcasting, satellite and visual technologies

- “Communication is shaking off transportation for work, study and play.”

The Printing Press and a Changing World

From communication.ucsd.edu

“The history of the book presents us with a complete, observable communications revolution… By following the developments in manuscript and print book production, tied to the changes in the technologies used to produce those texts, we can also chart the various changes in social organization, politics and economics from the feudalism of the 7th century, through to the advent and advance of early capitalism in the 15th century.”

Four Important Periods in the History of Printing

I. 7th to 13th Century: The age of religious "manuscript" book production. Books in this period are entirely constructed by hand, and are largely religious texts whose creation is meant as an act of worship.

- 12th-3th century: rise of the merchant class, rising interest in the outside world

- Universities were created in Europe - “These were major sites for the

institution of a new relationship to books, to learning, and to the Word of God.”

- “Learning in Europe had been dominated by the Roman Catholic Church. With the advent of the secular university, students were no longer studying for the clergy.” (since merchants have different interests from priests)

- these new centers of learning created demands for books

- books were locked away in monasteries - Two new kinds of institutions grew up around

the universities: stationers and book copiers. These folks provided paper and libraries of text books that had been carefully studied and compared to other books for accuracy. They made these books available for copying by students. When a student needed a text for a class, he would go down to the stationers and copy them - by hand. Or he could pay a book copier to copy the book for him.

- there were a lot of inaccuracies and mistakes in the copies

Changing images…leaning to realismImages of their own social world

Hours of Catherine Cleves 1140

Holoy Family with Jesus in a walker

New kind of realism in religious pictures

Tacuinum Sanitatis

10th century

How-to books

Books were secular…

Chirurgi Magna 1363

First book on surgery

Canterbury Tales 1387

Four Important Periods in the History of Printing

II. 13th to 15th Century: The secularization of book production. Books are beginning to be produced that do not serve as objects of worship, but that try to explain something about the observable world. The difficulty with the spread of such knowledge is that production is still taking place via pre-print - manuscript - methods.

1452 – the Gutenberg Printing Press - technologies of paper, oil-based ink

and the wine-press to print books - “One thing to remember is that

Gutenberg gets credit for an invention that is thought to have been developed simultaneously in Holland and in Prague.”

- “Gutenberg's contribution to printing was the development of a a punch and mold system which allowed the mass production of the movable type used to reproduce a page of text. These letters would be put together in a type tray which was then used to print a page of text. If a letter broke down, it could be replaced. When the printing of the copies of one page was finished, the type could be reused for the next page or the next book.”

- The printed book quickly becomes a regular object in the world. By 1501 there were 1000 printing shops in Europe, which had produced 35,000 titles and 20 million copies.