Mass Reproduction & Technological Advances

How have advances in print; the Gutenberg moveable type printing press, linotype, etc., and technology; computers, the Internet, Twitter, etc., assisted in dissemination; to spread (something, especially information) widely, and thus caused a downfall in general society?

Firstly, structural differentiation, the move in society from simple to complex, “creates problems of communication and control” while “mass media and other means of communication emerged in part to help resolve some of these problems.”

The Gutenberg press is an excellent example of a moment in history of structural differentiation. Its invention allowed for books to be printed at a rate never before seen in history and marked a new age of information. As stated in Mr. Abel’s book, The Gutenberg Revolution, the invention of the moveable type printing press “completely and radically restructured the trade in intellectual products and thereby, even more radically, enlisted a vastly increased number of minds recruited too the challenge of formulating more and better solutions to the ever-constant problems arising in human society.” To follow that quote up with another by philosopher and social critic Walter Benjamin, "mass reproduction contributed to human emancipation by promoting new modes of critical perception.”

These advancements should have just led to improvements and the spread of factual knowledge, growing until the day technology stepped up to the plate with computers and the Internet. The spread of ideas should have been flowing rapidly, instead the advancement came too fast and society does not know how to navigate them properly.

With all this in mind, if mass media and dissemination is meant to solve the problems of communication and control, then when did we as a society move into a world where misinformation spreads rampant? When did the technological advances move past being a helpful solution to making our lives more difficult?

This question of why the rapid spread of information is no longer emancipating the population should be of great concern in our society. Especially in light of situations like the video captured of the MAGA (Make America Great Again) and other protesters in Washington DC on January 18th, 2019. The limited information available about the situation spread too quickly, assumptions and interpretation were made without all of the facts, and many people stuck their foot in their mouth by spreading untruths and accusations before they could assess the situation further.

As we have advanced through history these technological advances have occurred closer together and society has not had the time to adjust to use these technological advancements, like Twitter, more judiciously or within more stringent regulations to prevent the spread of misinformation. So print is not entirely to blame for the downfall in this situation. The printing press had its rise and fall in society and now has regulations to balance what is printed/published. “This sudden acceleration in the generation and exchange of ideas and some of the many consequences flowing therefrom… and characterizes the invention of printing simply as a historical change agent, not as a technological invention that radically transformed the evolution of the culture.” Without the adequate amount of time for society to adjust to the new technology and all that entails, is the power of newfound technology abused and how to we find guidelines to adjust without apparent set back?

Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said that,

It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to recognize that the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur:—like unto an arrow in the hand of a child. The art of free society consists first in the maintenance of the symbolic code; and secondly in fearlessness of revision, to secure that the code serves those purposes which satisfy an enlightened reason. Those societies which cannot combine reverence to their symbols with freedom of revision, must ultimately decay either from anarchy, or from the slow atrophy of a life stifled by useless shadows.

Perhaps the only solution is some kind of crash so technology can be reborn to a wiser world. Society after Gutenberg’s movable type printing press was invented broke down. Most people in power at the time kept knowledge like power to keep down the citizens in ignorance, but with the printing press it was much more difficult for elites to control the production and distribution of knowledge. Then Martin Luther used that new technology to print up his manifesto and post it for everyone to see and thus created a schism in the church and led to new religions and interpretations of the Bible.

Without sufficient time in the present day to process these rapidly occurring advances in how we create and share information, our society is skipping over the reset that occurs in the face of massive information and technological change. “Not only is Internet use a new and rapidly changing social phenomenon, but the technology underlying the Internet itself is changing at the speed off Moore’s Law (Gordon More, the co-founder of Intel, predicted that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits would double every year). We do not know how to process the information as required by the advances. In other words, we are reading a book in which we do not understand the slang. Leading to things like ‘fake news” that we see running rampant. People are accustomed to being able to trust any news groups, but are now learning that false information is being spread on mass and now distrust most if not all news. The solution would be some kind of societal breakdown, as suggested by Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead that leads to regulations being put into place to prevent such a situation occurring again.

This concern of how technological advances are damaging society and individuals was described in a very interesting chainsaw and chisel analogy by The New Yorker writer Tim Wu,

Imagine that two people are carving a six-foot slab of wood at the same time. One is using a hand-chisel, the other, a chainsaw. If you are interested in the future of that slab, whom would you watch?…This chainsaw/chisel logic has led some to suggest that technological evolution is more important to humanity’s near future than biological evolution; nowadays, it is not the biological chisel but the technological chainsaw that is most quickly redefining what it means to be human. The devices we use change the way we live much faster than any contest among genes. We’re the block of wood, even if,…sometimes we don’t even fully notice that we’re changing.

As stated by Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, “The ‘electronic age’ encompasses too many changes affecting communications (from radio and telephone to photocopying and computers) for any simple comparisons with the fifteenth-century to be drawn.” We need to consider how print relates to electronic media like Twitter. The regulations in place to ensure published books are reputable and do not contain spelling or grammatical errors help society in curbing slander. “It is clear [to] see print and electronic media as interacting with one another, with print maintaining its function as a reactive agent.” Perhaps Twitter should take a leaf from the publishing companies books and set up regulations to limit the amount of falsities circulating.

The more recent and rapid advances in how print is produced and distributed has been detrimental to society and have changed how society gathers information. Now with the internet and information has become more malleable and can be all over the world in a second. The kind of power is terrifying, because one sees more and more people using it to mislead, creating ‘fake news,’ and fill the void with trivial fluff, making the world shallow and careless with ideas and opinions. This in combination spreads false information and people without the tact to censor themselves to suit a situation. The world becoming less educated and more crude. With all of this in mind, one cannot say that Walter Benjamin was right in his idea of the reproduction of information emancipated the masses with knowledge. At this rate unbridled technology is watering down the information to nothing. Dismaying to say the least.

Bibliography
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Byron Cooper, Stephen. “The Relationship Between the Printing Press & the Internet.” Chron. https://smallbusiness.chron.com/relationship-between-printing-press-internet-26566.html
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Rosenberg, Eli. “How anonymous tweets helped ignite a national controversy over MAGA-hat teens.” Washington Post, January 22, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/01/23/how-anonymous-tweets-helped-ignite-national-controversy-over-maga-hat-teens/?utm_term=.51c739040828
Whitehead, Alfred North. “Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect.” University of Virginia Press, 1927.
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