A Matter of Fact: Printing Transforms Knowledge
- Episode aired Apr 9, 1985
The introduction of practical mass printing ends Europe's predominate reliance on memory and its related concepts of reality and authority.The introduction of practical mass printing ends Europe's predominate reliance on memory and its related concepts of reality and authority.The introduction of practical mass printing ends Europe's predominate reliance on memory and its related concepts of reality and authority.
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Self - Host: One picture worth a thousand words? Well, the new illustrations did get rid of a lot of verbal diarrhea. Style in general became less purple, more down to earth, exact, informative. That's why poetry became poetic, and prose took over the facts because you didn't need rhyme to remember anymore. You didn't need to remember. If you read the latest, most definitive book on something, well you were up to speed with the best in the field.
Anyway, Luther begins the Reformation, which is followed by the counter-Reformation. The revolt against the Roman church spreads like wildfire, helped enormously by the fact that the Bible no longer needs to be laboriously hand printed but can be ground out like hamburgers or Wittenbergers, if you will. The Bibles, pamphlets, and propaganda leaflets can now be printed not only in Latin but in the parole. Everybody can now read the Bible for himself, with no need of middlemen like priests to translate it for him. And where does that get us? Quakers, the Society of Friends, a denomination so radical that it doesn't believe in church leaders at all -- or in war either. Actually, Burke doesn't make some of those points: the connection between the vulgarization of theology and the decline of church elders, for instance, but I think it's significant.
So books abounded but they were all piled up and specialized and it wasn't until cross-indexing came along that societies were able to organize logically the facts that were available. But look where THAT got us! The computer. Burke ends his presentation with a kind of monitum. Nowadays facts that are available at the speed of light on the internet quickly turn into "facts." It doesn't take long for memes to mingle fact with rumor. There is the danger that the moment you know something it becomes obsolete.
Truer now than ever before -- and Burke was writing this in 1985, a quarter of a century ago. Can we believe something we read on a blog? Even if it were true yesterday, is it still true now? Was it ever true? We seem almost back to opinions again.
The episode is no better or worse than others in the series. They're all consistently splendid, but the subject this one deals with is exceptionally important because it's so hard to guess what the next chapter is going to be.
- rmax304823
- Oct 25, 2012