The Gutenberg press is a machine that changed everything in a sense of history and we are still seeing the affects of what it means culturally today. To understand how the press still affects us today, we have to glance into why it became such an important part of our history. The press allowed an opening of knowledge to the common person. An information highway that gave people the power of reading at a cheap cost. With the invention of the press, the tool of reading became a usable resource in everyday life. Like anything new, it took years for the tool to reach the masses, but it happened. You no longer had to be part of the clergy or the crown to have what was basically the starting point of educating the masses.
Now lets go back to what I mean by power of reading, or the power of the press. Think about not being able to read through a day in your adult life. Could you make it? I’m sure we all could, but would you rather use a hammer to put a nail through something, or a rock, what about a drill? The invention of the press allowed the masses a means of circulating thoughts and ideas that were individualized and could now be read by more than one class of society. A tool that when thought about, caused revolutions, educated millions, and changed medieval society into the begging’s of what we have today. With the invention of the Gutenberg press, later and later models kept coming out, each with an advantage over the last. The evolution of the press kept on changing, trying to keep up with the population. Eventually this evolution gave us the means in history to start printed book libraries, schools for the common societal classes, and the ability of expanding knowledge in our culture. These are only a few examples of hundreds that the press allowed to become conceptualized through the years.
In today’s United States culture, owning and reading printed materials are considered a basic essential tool of life, one that is granted to anyone that is willing to be educated. Now I know that is a huge generalization, and there are Americans that are illiterate, but I am talking about the majority of the population in the United States. Anyways, how does the invention of the press still affect our culture? Well, we have to think about it on a timeline. As I already mentioned, the evolution of the press started becoming larger and larger. Culture shifted again with the invention of the computer into the Internet, which became popular. The masses wanted more, and like printed books, the Internet was profitable in the eyes of entrepreneurs. Information is at our fingertips, through our computers, and now our phones.
The comparison I’m trying to make is that printed materials were in fact the Internet for society in the past. But unlike handwritten books, which died out with the invention of the press, printed material is still used in everyday life. We have not reach a point in our society where all printed materials are thoughts from the past. They still have meaning, can carry an abundance of information, and many people still prefer reading printed material. All this information that we are now able to gain and read from multiple mediums are all connected to the invention of the Gutenberg press. Without it, where would we be as a society now? It is impossible to answer that question, but possible to think about what it could be, for better or worse.
Good post here, Colin. I like your notes about the power of reading and the power of the press. Yes, as you say, getting educated is imperative in democratic ideals and in shifting cultures. It's interesting that life would be so different without typography. Arguably, would we have democracy without Gutenberg? Would we have the Internet? Perhaps someone else would have invented what was needed for the trajectory, but it speaks to the importance of typography, certainly.
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