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From the Printing Press to the Web: How Technology Transforms Society
From: Columbia University
| By:
Robbie McClintock |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Electronic communication has engaged and enveloped people worldwide at an astounding rate. In our fast-paced and ever-changing environment, few users have taken the time to stop and consider the technological precursors to the Internet. But an increasing number of scholars have begun to look to history in order to understand the impact of e-communication. Robbie McClintock, director of the Institute for Learning Technologies at Columbia University, sees similarities with another technological antecedent, one that is several centuries older. |
Robbie McClintock: There are all kinds of parallels that I think are worth exploring, between our current situation and the first 100 or 200 years of interactions between print media and cultural and political issues in European history. I think that digital communications, particularly the World Wide Web and the Internet, are very similar to an extension of printed books and libraries. The historical analog that's most interesting is the introduction of print in Western culture, where one got a very rapid expansion in the number of people who could say something serious to a very broad audience. And the empowering of serious inquiry by print, I think, will have its analog in the empowering of science scholarship, in the exchange of ideas in our culture. |
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When print was introduced in Western culture, there was a period of time where many people were preoccupied by finding one or another resource in their culture that they wanted to amplify by putting into print. So the classical heritage, what we call the Renaissance, was in some ways gathering together the texts of the ancient world and printing them. A lot of early science was enabled by print communication. Information about different kinds of phenomena and different economic opportunities, was exchanged. And I think one sees a similarity with the Web: "Oh boy, let's put this into the Internet and let's put it up on the Web." And a lot of people are just doing that. So that you find people scanning rare books or out-of-print books, their genealogies, things they find in their attic. And governments and universities are putting up huge data sets of all sorts of intellectual and academic resources. And this, in many ways, opens up a field of inquiry and a field of interactions that in the past has been somewhat closed. |
It seems entirely possible to me that major forms of power that we have taken for granted as being unquestionable forms will be seriously de-emphasized, in the same way that religion's cohesion and hold on the functioning of the European culture in the Middle Ages was, in many ways, broken by the injection of a book-based exchange of ideas in relation to a prior architecturally based exchange of ideas. The medieval cathedral was the bible of medieval Catholicism, which people read in stone and which was a very different kind of enforcement and communication around it. And reading the Bible in private would be thinking about the meanings of different parables by oneself, or in small groups, or under the guidance of a well-educated pastor or minister. Now the imperatives for the church, the imperatives for communities, the imperatives for individuals began to change very significantly. I think that at some level we're going to experience cultural shifts of similar magnitude in the next 25 to 50 years. |
My own interest is in the effects of all of this on elementary and secondary education. And the intellectual resources of the school traditionally have been rather limited, and people rightly worry about the quality of the libraries that are in schools. The interesting thing is that a school that has a good technical infrastructure now suddenly has an almost infinite library. The challenge is to know what to do with it, to have ways to enable children to make good use of a range of resources that only a very select few children had anything similar to 25 years ago. |
Fathom: How is the Internet a democratizing force?
McClintock: The printing press in Western culture has been part of the general democratization and opening up of political and public life to larger and larger sectors of the population. And at the same time I think it's the limits of print as a communication medium that are currently central to pervasive social barriers, that the poor in modern industrial societies are in seriously disadvantaged situations because they are not as effectively empowered to make use of the highly literate resources of power that twenty-first century life involves. |
When speaking of the Web, of the political effects of the technology, it's very important to distinguish between the process by which a technology is introduced into a culture and the long term effects of that technology on interpersonal and social relationships. The introduction is almost always an elitist process where the rich and powerful get something first and then it filters to a wider and wider sector of the population. However, once in the possession of a wide sector of the population, it may be a technology that has great equalizing effects on the power that different individuals possess. For instance, if one thinks about the automobile, clearly the wealthier got cars first, but as a fully developed transportation system it's relatively democratic in its effects, because anyone with a car can go basically anywhere they want to. |
I think that one sees something very similar with digital technologies. They are the creation of great centers of power, military and corporate. They spread into the culture via the upper middle class and on down through the population. But once you have control of the technology, particularly in its networked form, many individuals have command of a great deal of cultural resources and economic resources that in the past were open only to a few. |
An interesting area in which such democratization is apparent in is the stock market, where Net-based day trading and things like that enable all kinds of people to do very sophisticated trading on the market, which only a few very wealthy individuals could have done a few years ago. Clearly this democratization is apparent in access to high quality scholarly and scientific information, although it's not taken its full course yet. And currently the ordinary person, the child in middle school or secondary school, can have access to databases that offer climate study or environmental study or the study of genetics, or chemistry, or scholarship on the ancients, for that matter, which only the very few had a few years ago. Now we have a tremendous pedagogical challenge to help the average kid in middle school do something with all of this stuff. But that I think is a good kind of challenge to have. |
Fathom: What aspects of the current culture will the Internet de-emphasize?
McClintock: There'll be some very significant political shifts. We have all grown up taking the nation-state as the locus of sovereignty and the locus of our really meaningful politics. So we worry about the presidency and Congress more than we worry about who is head of the United Nations or who is prime minister in Great Britain and the like. A nation-state in a world that is in a way decentralized by interactive network multimedia, I think, becomes a plausible point for speculation. |
Another speculation would be that the permanence of economic issues in our lives may be significantly diminished relative to cultural issues. What is it that people will value to use their resources for 50 years from now? It seems if the availability of ideas and the opportunity to communicate about the personal significance of ideas for people will increase markedly, engaging in those forms of activity will become of preeminent importance for more and more people. Whereas the acquiring of goods and using those as a way of differentiating yourself from other people may diminish in turn, along with the materialism of late twentieth century industrial cultures. |
A third speculation might be to simply reverse that and say that the effects on the attention span of people of all these interactive media are effects that are entirely breaking down our ability to pay attention to serious ideas. The effect of that might make people more and more obsessed with stardom and trivialities and entertainments that pass from the moment to the moment. |
I think all of these are possible developments and it's important that we pay attention to some of these long-term effects, because they can make the difference between either a very diminished humanity or a very expanded humanity for our children. |
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