Making Sense of the Printing Press Stuff...

...before I immerse myself in the discussion postings on e-class. Here we go!

• Try to keep in mind and understand sequence of events that take place from which the Print Revolution emerges.
• Connect Winston's model to the development of the printing press.
• Consider disruptions and consequences of the revolution.

Mumford, L. (Chapter 12, p. 91 - 95)

The article seems to want to position the machine as a central role in between the ever smaller human presence at the beginning of the revolution process (the printing press) as man creates the tools and the human consumption of what the machine makes at the end of the line (the printed word). The idea that the initial ideation step (in Winston's terms) begins as very close to the human presence as possible (for example, the fact that initial printing stamps would copy the written hands of manuscripts, until they further processed ahead and became less personal and more standardized, seems to apply the iterations of prototypes that Winston supports in his model.

Another point that brings Mumford to the Winstonian way of processing the communication progress cycle is the fact that social factors had to be in place for the invention to take place and to prosper until final products would take over the new communication method. Mumford states:

" But before the method was applied to books a new social medium was necessary: a community that had abandoned slavery and was ready; indeed eager, to equalize cultural advantages once reserved for a ruling cast; so that the rise for free cities, of urban democracy, of an increasingly literate group of citizens gave an incentive to a method for manifolding and cheapening the process of producing books." (p.92)

Another interesting idea that I discovered lingering in my mind was the idea of noise, and how the perfecting process of the printing press seems to have emulated, at least at the beginning, the desire to lower the noise level in the text by standardizing the characters and coming up with rules that would clear the way to the true voice of the author, free from the distraction of the personality expressed in the handwriting of the manuscript writers. And how, by eliminating the noise and amplifying the scope of production literacy becomes a more democratic mean of communicating, lowering barriers of distance in space and time.