Siva Vaidhyanathan - The Impact of Print on Knowledge and Culture

Interview with Siva Vaidhyanathan
The printing press was a remarkable democratising technology. The printing press allowed for immediate unregulated distribution of some fairly influental documents.
You could actually think of Luther's work as being the original subject of peer-to-peer distribution.
Luther's theeses were not meant for European-wide distribution, not even German distribution.
They were meant for his parish and group of clergy and yet immediately people made unauthorized copies and distributed them around Europe.
So that stands as sort of the first example of the dynamic effects of disruptive communicative technologies.
Within a short period of time both the church and the nation states that were emerging in Europe gained control over printing to a large degree.
Licensing presses, making sure that distribution was highly regulated and controlled, and once again capturing the most important parts of information flow.
Of course they didn't do a perfect job, which is why historical change continued through the next few centuries.
So it wasn't and instantaneous revolution, but one that was certainly influential enough to leave its mark on the world.
Several things happened after the printing press showed its powerful influence.
First the catholic church certainly did its best to undermine many of Luther's claims and Calvin's claims.
And did its best to enforce its control over the states over which it was heavily influential, but also do its best to clean up certain practices, like indulgences and so forth.
But more importantly all of the emerging nation states of Europe  made it very clear that they would control  information flows to the best of their ability.
They started processes such as licensing  printing presses and licensing printers, giving specific grants  to specific printers for specific books, which is the sort of early predecessor to copyright.
And by doing this they made sure that the books that flowed throughout society  were authorized - were the authorized editions - but also were within the control of the state, within control of the king, or the prince.
And that had a tremendous effect on limiting political change or putting the breaks on political change for a number of centuries.
It didn't stop the ideas from flowing and the principles of open communication remained as an ideal right through the enlightenment through the revolutions of the 18th century as well.
The printing press certainly had the effect of disengaging communication from a specific time and place.
Deterritorializing it, taking a message out of its particular cultural context, its liveness, and distributing it widely in a way that would render it as pure information.
This had a tremendous effect on how people thought of themselves,  how people thought of the human project.
It gave people the opportunity to actually think of themselves as members of larger community than the local.
They could think of themselves as french, or german, or european, or as a citizen of the world, right up through the notion that you could actually have  empathy for someone suffering in China.
And it was really only through the printing press that we could imagine ourselves in contact with people so far away.
I'm actually fond of a phrase that comes out of a Disney corporate culture called 'imagineering.' Certain inventions, many inventions in fact, alter our imagination. They are not just examples of engineering, they're examples of imagineering. So when you have something like the printing press in your town, and it's having an affect on daily life, it opens up a series of possibilities that were not imaginable just the day before.
The rise of network communication, the installation of TCIP/IP, the notion that through this small box you can be in real-time contact with a friend in Djakarta no matter where you live, a friend in Vancouver, a friend in Santiago.
That's actually a pretty profound change in consciousness.
It's not a change that has touched billions of people around the world, but it certainly has touched hundreds of thousands of people around the world.
And certainly altered our expectations. We expect different things out of our daily lifes,  expect different things out of our commercial relationships, our cultural relationships.
If we are members of diasporic communities we expect to be able to stay in touch with the cultural changes, the film and music of our origin If we are members of a political community we expect to be able to forge alliances with people in Australia and South Africa, as well as Canada, the United States or England.
And that's a remarkable change.
It opens up so many possibilities, it doesn't determine any particular possibility.
So it's a mistake to say that because of network communication, things will be a certain way.
Just as it was a mistake to suggest that the reformation, the enlightenment and the subsequent revolutions in Europe necessarily followed from the printing press.
The printing press was a condition of that,  but it wasn't the sole determination, determinant of that.
Technologies work in a way that often create unintended consequences in history.
Technologies work in a way most importantly to open up possibilities that were not imaginable before. That can be profound.
But sometimes it only gets rendered in science-fiction and it doesn't happen in the real world.