Implications of Gutenburg's Invention

Johannes Gutenburg is famous to history for the invention of the printing press, a development that made the large-scale production of books far easier and less expensive than it had ever been before. It has been argued that this invention led to what may be called an Age of Print, an age dominated not only by the printed book itself, but by a style of thought shaped by the linear, sequential, analytical process of reading.

Consider a hypothetical case in which what Gutenburg invented was not the printing press, but the television set. How might the world that followed have been different? We must first acknowledge that this assumption requires as precondition an entirely different development of technology in the late medieval and Renaissance eras. Television cannot exist in isolation; it requires electronic technology, which in turn requires a sufficient industrial base to provide electrical power supply, and to produce the precision components needed in electronic engineering.

In such a world, for example, Columbus' ships would surely have been driven by power, not sail, and they would have navigated by radar, a technology closely akin to television. For the unfortunate Aztecs and Incas the result might have been little different; they were hopelessly outmatched by the Spanish intruders as it was. But the Europe of 1492 was also threatened by Ottoman Turkey, and had the Europeans possessed advanced technology, the Turks would have had to either adopt that techn

Related Essays

Implications of Digital Government The following literature review will present the political implications of digital government. An introduction to digital government .... (585 2 )

Implications of the New Economy .... businesses, as well. This research considers the New Economy and its economic implications on both global and domestic levels. For some .... (2668 11 )

Depression in Children & Implications for Therapists This research reviews the literature on depression in children and discusses theories, assessment tools, treatment and implications for therapists. .... (3980 16 )

Economic Reform & Implications in China This research examines economic reform and the implications of that reform in the PRC. Relevant background information on the PRC .... (2654 11 )

Political Implications of Digital Government POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF DIGITAL GOVERNMENT The purpose of this paper is to examine the current literature on digital government and to assess the political .... (5654 23 )

Implications of Changes in the Soviet Union This research examines the economic, social, and political changes which occurred in the Soviet Union, with a view towards discerning the implications for the .... (2205 9 )

ng. The appeal of television evangelists, we may suggest, is primarily to those who already subscribe to their particular style of religion; television evangelism is a tool of mobilization, not one of conversion. Let us now turn back to the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. We mentioned earlier that the Reformation was closely linked to the development of the printing press; it is time now to inquire why. The reason, in a nutshell, is that the printing press made it possible to enormously expand dissemination of the Bible. The Bible was the first book Gutenburg printed, and in the generation that followed, editions of the Bible, both the Latin Vulgate that was the authorized Church version and translations into vernacular languages, poured off presses across Europe. The effect of this dramatically increased availability of the Bible was to make its authority in matters of religion accessible to large numbers of people--and therefore to undermine the authority of the Catholic Church. Until the advent of the printing press, Bibles were relatively rare and costly, and were moreover available for the most part only in Latin, readable only by the educated. Biblically-based challenges to the authority and doctrin

Category: Science - I