The Information - James Gleick [192]
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(And Such Like)
Sorry for all the ups and downs of the web site in recent days. The way I understand it, freakish accumulations of ice weigh down the branches of the Internet and trucks carrying packets of information skid all over the place.
—Andrew Tobias (2007)♦
AS THE PRINTING PRESS, the telegraph, the typewriter, the telephone, the radio, the computer, and the Internet prospered, each in its turn, people said, as if for the first time, that a burden had been placed on human communication: new complexity, new detachment, and a frightening new excess. In 1962 the president of the American Historical Association, Carl Bridenbaugh, warned his colleagues that human existence was undergoing a “Great Mutation”—so sudden and so radical “that we are now suffering something like historical amnesia.”♦ He lamented the decline of reading; the distancing from nature (which he blamed in part on “ugly yellow Kodak boxes” and “the transistor radio everywhere”); and the loss of shared culture. Most of all, for the preservers and recorders of the past, he worried about the new tools and techniques available to scholars: “that Bitch-goddess, Quantification”; “the data processing machines”; as well as “those frightening projected scanning devices, which we are told will read documents and books for us.” More was not better, he declared:
Notwithstanding the incessant chatter about communication that we hear daily, it has not improved; actually it has become more difficult.♦
These remarks became well known in several iterations: first, the oral address, heard by about a thousand people in the ballroom of Conrad Hilton’s hotel in Chicago on the last Saturday evening on 1962;♦ next, the printed version in the society’s journal in 1963; and then, a generation later, an online version, with its far greater reach and perhaps greater durability as well.
Elizabeth Eisenstein encountered the printed version in 1963, when she was teaching history as a part-time adjunct lecturer at American University in Washington (the best job she could get, as a woman with a Harvard Ph.D.). Later she identified that moment as the starting point of fifteen years of research that culminated in her landmark of scholarship, two volumes titled The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Before Eisenstein’s work appeared in 1979, no one had attempted a comprehensive study of printing as the communications revolution essential to the transition from medieval times to modernity. Textbooks, as she noted, tended to slot the printing press somewhere between the Black Death and the discovery of America.♦ She placed Gutenberg’s invention at center stage: the shift from script to print; the rise of printing shops in the cities of fifteenth-century Europe; the transformation in “data collection, storage and retrieval systems and communications networks.”♦ She emphasized modestly that she would treat printing only as an agent of change, but she left readers convinced of its indispensable part in the transformations of early modern Europe: the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and the birth of science. It was “a decisive point of no return in human history.”♦ It shaped the modern mind.
It shaped the minds of historians, too; she was interested in the unconscious mental habits of her profession. As she embarked on her project, she began to believe that scholars were too often blinded to the effects of the very medium in which they swam. She gave credit to Marshall McLuhan,