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 technology themselves or fall by the wayside. Let us assume that they did the former, so that the essential political world of the time would be roughly as it actually was. We may then concentrate upon the specific impact of television as opposed to print technology.
Let us now consider, as a single example of the potential impact of a Gutenburgian television technology upon the Protestant Reformation. This example is useful in two respects: First, the Refo...