Social Research, Fall 1997 v64 n3 p1049(18)
From the printed word to the moving image.
(Technology and the Rest of Culture) Elizabeth L. Eisenstein.
Abstract:
The creation of new forms of media, such as the Web, will not supplant
print as a means of
transferring information. For five centuries, the printed word has survived
the invention of new technologies that
supposedly threatened its existence. With each new invention, society believed
new forms of communication
would supercede print. Print remains a valuable source of information even
though it is no longer the only one.
Full
Text: COPYRIGHT 1997 New School for Social Research I was asked to discuss
how the changes
wrought by the advent of printing might be related to the likely consequences
of current innovations in
communications technology. As is so often the ,case, no sooner had I accepted
the invitation than I began to
have second thoughts. First of all, I was uneasy about the title that I'd
been assigned. "From the printed word to
the moving image" seems to imply that the one thing was superseded by the
other--an issue to be discussed later
on. Second, I am poorly equipped to deal with recent communications technology.
When it comes to playing
with computers, my grandchildren are more expert than am I. Third and finally,
I have always tried to steer clear
of speculating about the possible consequences of current developments.
As is true of most historians, I am
skeptical about efforts to divine the future and feel sufficiently challenged
by the problematic task of
understanding the past.
On
the other hand, I do think historians have an obligation to place current
concerns in some sort of
perspective. When I saw the conference announcement that recent developments
have left us "in a world
dramatically different from the one inhabited by previous generations,"
I couldn't help thinking that this very
conviction serves to link our own generation with many that have gone before.
To go back no further than the
1830s, Alfred de Musset described how his generation experienced the aftermath
of the French Revolution and
the Napoleonic wars: "behind them, a past forever destroyed . . . before
them . . . the first gleams of the future;
and between these two worlds . . . a sea filled with flotsam and jetsam
. . . the present, in a word" (Musset,
n.d., p.5). Later on, Henry Adams wrote about being abruptly cut off from
the experience of his ancestors by
the Boston and Albany Railroad, the first Cunard steamer, and the stringing
of telegraph wires (Adams, 1918,
p. 496). Still later, Samuel Eliot Morison said the same thing about the
internal combustion engine, nuclear
fission, and Dr. Freud (Morison, 1964, p. 24).
Is
the idea that a new age has dawned with the advent of new media also embedded
in our past? To place
current speculations in perspective, I've been surveying reactions to previous
changes affecting media, with a
focus on developments in England and France.
Many
predictions were made after the beginning of the past century, which saw
paper-making industrialized and
wooden hand presses replaced by steam-powered iron machines. Even while
printing industries were flourishing
and output was rising to meet increasing demand, nineteenth-century observers
began to speculate that the end
of the book was on hand. According to Thomas Carlyle, the replacement of
book by newspaper had already
begun in the age of the hand press, with the sharp rise in the number of
newspapers being distributed in the
streets of revolutionary Paris (Carlyle, 1837, pp. 21-25). Carlyle's description
of revolutionary journalism was
taken over by Louis Blanc, whose history of the French Revolution was written
after the author's career as a
journalist-turned-deputy had come to an end. In a much-cited chapter on
the emergence of journalism as a new
power in human affairs, Blanc paraphrased Carlyle. Books were suited to
quieter times, he wrote, but we are
now in an era when today devours yesterday and must be devoured by tomorrow.
And then comes the
celebrated formula: the age of books is closed; the age of the journal
is at hand (Blanc, 1852, p. 122). In
mid-century also, John Stuart Mill expressed concern that most people were
no longer taking their opinions
from churchmen or statesmen. Nor, he wrote, were they being guided by books.
Their thinking was being done
for them by men much like themselves through newspapers (Mill, 1947[1859],
p. 66). After the century's close,
Oswald Spengler summed up the gloomy prognosis: just as the age of the
sermon had given way to the age of
the book, he wrote, so too the age of the book had given way to that of
the newspaper (Spengler, 1928, p.
463).
Taking
advantage of hindsight, we may now agree that nineteenth-century observers
were right to assign special
significance to the emergence of a periodical press. It restructured the
way readers experienced the flow of time
and altered the way they learned about affairs of state (Retat, 1985).
It created a forum outside parliaments and
assembly halls that allowed ordinary readers and letter-writers to participate
in debates. It provided ambitious
journalists, from Marat to Mussolini, with pathways to political power
(Eisenstein, 1991). It gave a tremendous
boost to commercial advertising. It served to knit together the inhabitants
of large cities for whom the daily
newspaper would become a kind of surrogate community.
Moreover,
although early gazettes and newsletters had resembled books, the later
dailies developed a
distinctive size and format so that they had to be placed in a separate
category by archivists and librarians. The
front-page layout of the modern newspaper was unlike any earlier printed
product. The patchwork of unrelated
items containing the first paragraphs of chopped-up stories each to be
continued in some other place (section B
or C or D) disproved in spectacular fashion the often cited McLuhanite
notion that print encouraged linear
sequential modes of thought. As McLuhan himself observed, "the modern newspaper
presents a mosaic of
unrelated scraps in a field unified only by a dateline" (McLuhan, 1964,
p. 219). Twentieth-century painters
experimenting with collage techniques may well have been influenced by
the front-page layout. Daily exposure
to newsprint has probably accustomed successive generations to the disjunctions
and discontinuities that seem
to characterize much modern art and modern fiction.
But
although observers were right to sense that journalism had significant
transformative effects, they were
wrong in assuming that the advent of the newspaper "had completely expelled
the book from the mental life of
the people" (Spengler, 1928, p. 461). As it turned out, book and newspaper
were interdependent, their fates
closely intertwined. Book sales came to hinge on newspaper advertisements
and on reviews in the periodical
press. Press laws usually encompassed both forms of printed output. To
be sure, publishers were less likely to
be prosecuted for costly volumes aimed at elites than for cheap papers
that presumably stirred up the rabble.
Yet efforts to control all printed output characterized authoritarian regimes
in the past and still mark totalitarian
regimes in the present century. Nineteenth-century liberals objected to
the Index of Prohibited Books as well as
to censorship of periodicals and newspapers. (A difficult book, not a readable
pamphlet, has led to the recent
death sentence imposed upon Salman Rushdie.)
Coexistence
and interdependence were especially apparent during the age of Mill and
Carlyle. For the
nineteenth-century novel was often conveyed in serial form by newspapers;
its chapter endings were artfully
composed to keep readers in suspense until the next installment arrived.
The soap opera of today and the serial
novel (roman-fleuve) of yesterday had much in common. It is true that until
the advent of the radio, there was
nothing quite like that interruption of narratives by commercials that
gave the "soaps" their name. Nevertheless,
as early as the 1830s, fiction writers were complaining about the intrusion
into literature of vulgar commodities
for sale. In his 1834 preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin, Theophile Gautier
expressed savage indignation at
the idea of seeing his work advertised together with such items as elastic
corsets, crinoline collars,
patent-nipple-nursing bottles, and remedies for toothaches (p. 39).
Gautier's
other complaints also strike a familiar note. The public's appetite for
scandal was being so whetted by
news reports of sensational trials, he wrote, that "the reader could only
be caught by a hook baited with a small
corpse beginning to turn blue. Men are not as unlike fishes as some people
seem to think" (p. 15). As is true of
television producers today, many writers expressed disgust at the vulgar
sensationalism of others, but few could
afford to abandon the hope of creating a sensation themselves.
Novelists
were not alone in expressing concern about the effects of sensational journalism.
Doctors became
alarmed over the deterioration of the nation's mental health. A physician
named Isaac Ray published a book
entitled Mental Hygiene in 1863 in which he noted, among other worries,
the adverse effects of crime reporting
on the national psyche: "The details of a disgusting criminal trial, exposing
the darkest aspects of our nature, find
an audience that no court-room less than a hemisphere could hold" (Ray,
p. 237).
On
such issues, nineteenth-century opinions and present-day attitudes do not
seem to be far apart. Although
different mass media are being targeted, the complaints are much the same--which
is not to say that they were
or are invalid. The ubiquity of sex and violence; intrusive commercials
and sycophancy to mass taste seem to
present a steady-state crisis that is no less trouble-some for being so
persistent. The "tawdry novels which flare
in the bookshelves of . . . railroad stations" offended Matthew Arnold
more than a century ago (Altick, 1963, p.
310). Similar material seems no less offensive when displayed on the shelves
of the airport shops of today--if,
indeed there are any books placed there at all.
Still,
the newspapers that are piled up in airport shops probably do not seem
as threatening to book lovers at
present as they did to those in the past. Disdainful remarks about sound
bites often go together with respectful
comments about print journalism. In view of the defects of newscasts, book
and newspaper are now often
coupled in nostalgic reminiscences of that golden age when print culture
reigned supreme. However, librarians
and archivists are less likely to be nostalgic. They still have good cause
to worry about the relentless pressure
exerted by the ever-increasing output of printed materials on available
shelf space.
The
advent of the electronic church shows how the sermon, once thought to be
outmoded, was capable of
being resuscitated. The paperback revolution of the 1960s came as even
more of a surprise. In the present
decade, chain stores opened by Barnes and Noble and by Borders compete
with Amazon, which claims to be
the world's largest bookstore and is located on the World Wide Web. Most
recently, Oprah Winfrey's
television book club showed how the use of a new medium may dramatically
increase markets for an old one.
The death of the novel also seems somewhat less likely at present than
in previous years. There is even renewed
demand for nineteenth-century novels by such authors as Jane Austen; George
Eliot, and Victor Hugo, thanks
to recent filmed, televised, and staged versions of their works.
These
examples may suffice to indicate that the last two centuries have witnessed
not a succession of
deaths--not the death of the sermon, the book, the novel--but, rather,
a sequence of premature obituaries.
In
his introduction to an essay collection entitled The Future of the Book
(1996), Geoffrey Nunberg takes note
of this phenomenon which he describes as the doctrine of supersession.
This doctrine, he notes, underlies
expectations (false ones it seems at the moment) that photography would
put an end to painting, movies would
kill the theater, television would kill movies. To be sure (Nunberg does
not point this out but it is worth noting),
the doctrine is not always at odds with reality. The age of the hand-copied
book, like that of the horse and
buggy, did come to an end. Yet, hand-copied books were still being produced
in Western Europe more than a
century after Gutenberg. At this point it should be noted that I'm offering
a Eurocentric view throughout this
discussion. There are many non-Western regions that still offer employment
to scribes. Even in the West, as
Curt Buhler noted many years ago, the scribe long outlived the manuscript
book and was not superseded until
the advent of the typewriter (Buhler, 1960, p. 26). One thinks of all those
clerks plying quill pens in
nineteenth-century law offices. And although the manual typewriter may
now be on the verge of obsolescence,
its keyboard, transferred to the word processor, has received another lease
on life.
The
advent of printing is seen to outmode not the manuscript book but the Gothic
cathedral in the most
celebrated case cited by Nunberg to illustrate the supersession doctrine.
It comes from the chapter in Victor
Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris where the archdeacon first points to the great
cathedral and then stretches out his
right hand toward a fifteenth-century printed book and announces "Ceci
tuera cela;" This (the printed book) will
kill that (the cathedral, which had served for centuries as an encyclopedia
in stone). Nunberg does not pause
over the ironic implications of Hugo's making this pronouncement while
living, as he did, in the midst of a Gothic
revival. Nor does he comment on the building of Gothic cathedrals in the
present century--witness the Cathedral
of St. John the Divine in New York and the National Cathedral, which my
children watched being completed
near our home in Washington, D.C. Nevertheless, he argues persuasively
about the fallacy of assuming that new
artifacts and styles must always supersede old ones.
Of
course there are significant differences between medieval cathedral building
and Gothic revival architecture
just as there are between the experience of nineteenth-century readers
of Hugo's original novel and that of
recent viewers of Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame. To complicate matters
(and these issues are remarkably
complex), one must also allow for the difference between the way Hugo's
novel would have been received in a
French-language version as against a translated one; by a nineteenth-century
reader as against a
twentieth-century one. And then as bibliographers remind us, one must also
allow for the way the presentation
of the same text varies from one edition to another.
For
printed editions do supersede each other. David Hume thought the fact that
he was able continually to
improve and correct his work in successive editions was the chief advantage
conferred on an author by the
invention of printing (Cochrane, 1964, p. 19n). Although defective early
editions might be superseded by
improved later ones, early editions, however defective, might also be regarded
as becoming ever more valuable
to rare book collectors. (Indeed, defects may even enhance the value of
a printed product as in the case of a
mistake in printing a stamp.) It is characteristic of our culture that
markets for antiques flourish alongside
demand for the latest designs. Even the horse and buggy has reemerged as
a fashionable acquisition along with
the antique car. Very soon, it will be the turn of the manual typewriter
(but perhaps not of the mimeographing
machine?).
The
doctrine of supersession is much too coarse-grained to make room for such
complications. Indeed, it
makes no more allowance for revivals than it does for survivals. It thus
encourages us to overlook what I think
is most characteristic of our own era--namely the coexistence of a vast
variety of diverse styles and artifacts
reflecting different spirits of different times. Even the New York skyline
tells the same story. Skyscrapers are
certainly modern structures; yet, as others have noted, their tops bear
a marked resemblance to chateaux,
temples, and mausoleums. What applies to the ever-more-eclectic melange
of styles and artifacts also pertains
to media. That is to say, we confront an ever-more-complex mixture of diverse
media: painting, woodblock,
engraving, lithograph, photograph, drama, film, television, radio, video
tape, walkman, phone, fax, word
processor, copying machine, computer, and so on and so forth--none of which
has been superseded, all of
which confront us in a bewildering profusion at the present time.
The
title assigned to this article, "From the Printed Word to the Moving Image,"
makes me uneasy because it
seems to deny coexistence and implies the supersession of printed word
by moving image. That the printed
word is, or is about to be, superseded by something else seems most unlikely
to me at present-especially when
I am preparing a copy of this very article to appear in print.
Mention
of preparing a copy reminds me that the photocopier has been undeservedly
neglected in recent
accounts. Perhaps some of you recall the television commercial for Xerox,
with a monkish scribe taking a text
into a monastery, reemerging with a stack of copies and proclaiming "it's
a miracle" ? (This reminded me of an
anecdote about Gutenberg's partner, Johann Fust, arriving in fifteenth-century
Paris with a wagon load of
Bibles, which the doctors of the Sorbonne then examined. Finding that each
copy was exactly like every other
one, they set upon Fust and accused him of black magic. The anecdote gains
added resonance from the
frequent misspelling of Fust's name as Faust and the resultant confusion
between the legendary magician and
Gutenberg's partner.) The Xerox commercial has lost ground. Newer miracles
are now being hyped.
Nevertheless, the copier is still indispensable to all of us who frequent
archives and rare book libraries. It has
dramatically changed my own working habits. I used to make sure before
setting off for a library that I had pen
and paper on hand to take notes and copy citations. The era of the hand-copied
book had ended long ago, but
the hand-copying of passages from printed books was still going strong.
I recently learned that DeWitt Wallace
spent hours in the New York Public Library transcribing printed passages
by hand for early editions of the
Readers Digest. Probably he developed writer's cramp as I used to do. Now,
of course, I worry more about
carpal tunnel syndrome. In any case, I've now abandoned pen and paper but
must check to be sure I have
enough coins on hand to put in the library copier. Researchers have ceased
to serve as their own scribes even
while they line up to endow printed pages, placed face down in a machine,
with a longer lease on life.
Much
as medieval universities were surrounded by stationers who farmed out pieces
of texts to lay copyists for
reproduction, so too late-twentieth-century universities are now surrounded
by shops containing copying
machines. When I was a faculty member at Michigan, it was common practice
to take sections of books to the
shop to be duplicated and then have the selections bound together, thus
producing special anthologies of
readings for certain courses. Medieval florilegia, common in the thirteenth
century, thus reemerged in the
late-twentieth century as "course packs." The publishing revolution that
was set in motion by the copier has
recently been arrested by lawsuits brought by publishing firms objecting
to infringements on copyright and
setting limits on fair use. Whatever the outcome of pending cases, the
continuing struggle indicates that vital
interests are still believed to be at stake in the printed word.
Of
course, litigation over course packs represents only the tip of the iceberg
when it comes to the destabilizing
effect of very recent technologies on structures designed in an age of
print to safeguard intellectual property
rights. I have no idea how the control of texts by authors (and/or publishers)
can be maintained in view of the
floodgates that stand wide open to all the information, news, and views
that are carried on the Web. Nor do I
feel competent to speculate about the effects of electronic mail, the Internet,
and other forms of paperless
publishing on scientific research. What will happen to peer review and
priority claims? I look forward to hearing
from other speakers about ways of safeguarding the reward structure that
has encouraged scientific innovation
until now. I must confess to becoming less and less certain about the desirability
of an entirely unregulated flow
of information in view of those special Web sites that enable conspiratorial
theorists to share their paranoid
fantasies. After hearing a few snatches of hysterical commentary by people
who shall remain nameless, I've even
begun to question the desirability of uncensored talk radio.
Mention
of talk radio brings up yet another problem about going from printed word
to moving image. The
spoken word is left out of consideration. I've already alluded to the revitalization
of the sermon in this century. In
view of the excitement generated earlier in this century about movie actors
being enabled to speak, perhaps the
talking image deserves attention along with the moving one. (There is also
the singing star in the musical film, but
I am arbitrarily setting aside all references to music and to the recording
industry throughout this article). To turn
back to the issue of the spoken word: although printing is silent and radio
broadcasts are not, the two still have
some significant features in common. In 1946, after speaking on the BBC
to some twenty million people,
Harold Nicolson wrote in his diary that he had no real feel for his audience.
"To whom am I talking?" he asked.
Although an audience of readers had been replaced by one of listeners,
the sense of distance between author
and invisible public remained.
Before
printing, powerful lungs had been required by orators and preachers who
hoped to gain a popular
following. After printing, a new rather paradoxical figure emerged: the
silent demagogue or the mute orator. The
latter phrase was actually used to describe an influential deputy to the
French Constituent Assembly in 1789.
The deputy had issued an incendiary journal called the Sentinel of the
People on the eve of the Revolution, but
he was said to whisper like a woman when called on for a speech (Eisenstein,
1989, p. 193). Many of those
who became prominent on the eighteenth-century political scene were notably
deficient in traditional oratorical
skills. In England in the 1760s, John Wilkes was an indifferent public
speaker, and when he had to respond
extemporaneously he fumbled his words. Tom Paine never swayed a colonial
legislature with a single
memorable speech. Paine's friend Brissot had a sonorous voice, but he disliked
public speaking, was untrained
in oratory, and timid before crowds. Camille Desmoulins stammered when
he spoke. It was solely the power of
their pens that gave such men a metaphorical "voice" in public affairs
(Eisenstein, 1991, p. 152).
With
the advent of radio and the electronic amplifier, the phenomenon media
analysts call "reoralization" was
greatly reinforced. Powerful lungs are still not needed (except perhaps
by coaches engaged in quarrels with
umpires and teachers or parents subduing noisy children), but certainly
the human voice has regained lost
ground. Groups gathered around radios or television sets also suggest that
some of the isolating effects of
individual absorption in reading materials may be mitigated. But it would
be a mistake to carry this thought too
far. Individual absorption in cyberspace and virtual reality is just beginning
to pose new problems. A
seventeenth-century writer expressed regret at the loss of conviviality
in coffee houses where, he wrote,
everyone now sat in "sullen silence" reading newspapers (Brewer, 1976,
p. 148). One is reminded of the many
fellow travellers now seen on planes or trains with earphones clamped on
their heads. At least one could catch
the attention of the "sullen" silent reader by making a noise, whereas
nothing seems to disturb the listener
wearing earphones. (Although I had planned to stay clear of the recording
industry, it is too omnipresent to
avoid completely: the introduction of tapes and cassettes does require
more attention when considering the fate
of the printed word. Perhaps another article should be entitled: "From
Printed Word to Talking Book.")
But
there is also the printed image to be reckoned with. After all, it is only
a short step from fixed image to
moving one. As a youngster I played with little books where images were
arranged in sequence so that if I
flipped the pages rapidly I had the illusion of watching something move.
(I recently saw my six-year-old
grandson playing with a similar little book he called a "flipper.") Such
little books were not irrelevant to the
development of animated cartoons and to the early movie industry. If we
take the moving image to allude to
movie and television screens then, as already noted, the newer medium not
only coexists with the older one, but
actually helps to boost sales of the latter. In the case of Jane Austen
and company, we go from printed word to
moving image and then, in reverse motion, back to increased sales of printed
word.
In
such disparate fields as bird watching and art history, the printed image
was and still is of enormous
consequence. As recently as October 1996, a Metropolitan Museum of Art
ceremony marked the publication
of a thirty-four-volume Dictionary of Art, containing fifteen thousand
images and twenty-eight million words.
"Only in the age of the jet plane, the photograph, the fax and the computer
has a work like this been possible,"
wrote the reviewer in The Washington Post (October 16, 1996, p. B8). No
mention of printed words or
images. Yet this dictionary probably owes more to cumulative results obtained
by the old media than it does to
jet, fax, or computer. It represents the culmination of a tradition that
originated with Vasari's sixteenth-century
illustrated collective biography of artists--a tradition that also encompassed
Diderot's eighteenth-century
Encyclopedie, which was subtitled A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences and
which contained seventeen
folio-sized volumes of text and eleven volumes of plates--eleven folio-sized
volumes, that is, devoted exclusively
to pictures.
It
is too often forgotten that images replicated on wood and metal were introduced
at more or less the same
time as Gutenberg's invention. As William Ivins insisted, "the exactly
repeatable pictorial statement" was at least
as significant an innovation as was letterpress printing (Ivies, 1958,
p. 2). On this point we ought to follow
George Sarton's advice and think of a double invention: typography for
the text and engraving for the images
(Sarton, 1957, pp. 116-19). Otherwise we are likely to reinforce the mistaken
notion that printing entailed a
one-way movement from image to word.
To
be sure, there was such a movement, in Protestant regions at least. As
is implied in Victor Hugo's account,
Bible stories presented by stone portals and stained glass went out of
favor even while Bible stories conveyed
by printed chapter and verse were being translated into vernaculars and
published far and wide. Some
iconoclastic Puritans insisted on lay Bible reading while smashing graven
images.
But
although newly printed Bibles and austere white-washed churches did replace
sculptured stone portals and
stained glass in some regions, in others, religious imagery was exploited
by all available means. Especially in
Catholic regions, Baroque illustrations of angels, saints, and martyrs
were multiplied in diverse media and
circulated among the faithful as they still are being circulated even now.
Nor did Puritans object to the use of
printed images for didactic purposes. Indeed, picture books for children
came into vogue under Protestant
auspices.
Moreover,
use of the printed image was by no means confined to religious, moralistic,
and didactic purposes.
Pornography found a large audience in sixteenth-century Europe with the
publication of Aretino's verses
accompanied by those graphic presentations of copulation known as "Aretino's
postures." The same era saw
frequent resort to political propaganda by means of printed imagery as
is shown most vividly by Lutheran
caricatures and cartoons. The French Revolution produced prints of peasants
with pikes and the storming of the
Bastille that still resonate in the modern American imagination (witness
Pat Buchanan's campaign oratory).
Image-driven foreign policy did not originate with television pictures
of starving African children; there were
newspaper wars before there were television wars. Cartoons of Belgian babies
being bayonetted by brutal
Germans played a part in winning support for American entry into World
War I. Later, the discrediting of
anti-German propaganda during World War I would encourage an unjustified
skepticism about atrocities being
committed in World War II.
To
the historian of early modern science, probably the most important aspect
of the double invention is that it
led to a greater reliance on image and symbol and less reliance on words.
Once it became possible to duplicate
precisely rendered drawings of natural phenomena together with exactly
repeatable diagrams, graphs,
equations, and the like, scientific communications became less dependent
on ambiguous texts whether in Greek,
Arabic, Latin, or the vernaculars. Identical maps, charts, and log tables
fixed on printed pages made it possible
for observers located in different regions to coordinate their findings
and to trace the paths taken by moving
objects such as planets and comets with unprecedented precision.
The
remarkable advances that were made after the discrediting of the ancient
authorities, such as Galen on
anatomy or Ptolemy on astronomy, help to account for the widespread acceptance
of the doctrine of
supersession. I'm going to sidestep current debates among historians of
science about paradigm switches and
simply note that to almost all nineteenth-century observers, it seemed
obvious that the ancients had been
surpassed in science and technology.
Among
many Victorians, the doctrine of supersession (together with its counterpart,
the idea of progress) was
so widely accepted and fully orchestrated that it was applied to all phenomena--not
just to Ptolemy and Galen
or dinosaurs and dodos but to the entire course of human history and to
all cultural artifacts. "In every
department of life--in its business and in its pleasures, in its beliefs
and in its theories, in its material
developments and in its spiritual convictions--we thank God that we are
not like our fathers. And while we
admit their merits, making allowance for their disadvantages, we do not
blind ourselves in mistaken modesty to
our own immeasurable superiority" (Froude, cited by Hartwell, 1960, p.
416). I often wonder what such
commentators would have made of the counter-cultural trends at work today
when the march of medicine is
being countered by a vogue for homeopathy and acupuncture or when reports
of a moon landing are coupled
with astrologers casting horoscopes in daily papers. Even now, quite a
few of my contemporaries are taken
aback by the resurgence of literal fundamentalism and the advocacy of "creationism"
more than fifty years after
the Scopes Trial in Tennessee.
Such
phenomena might seem less surprising if we were not so entranced by the
advent of all the new
communications technologies that we failed to consider the preservative
powers of print. Recently, The Sunday
Telegraph (July 23, 1995, p. 5) announced that the Church of England was
launching itself into cyberspace to
enable churchmen to surf a World Wide Web of biblical information. This
announcement came to mind when I
saw the conference brochure refer to a trend toward globalization and assert
that "the world was more
homogeneous." The existence of a Web that is world-wide certainly seems
to support this assertion. Its usage to
spread information about the Bible, however, gives rise to other thoughts.
Not only is the world still divided by
adherence to different faiths, but within Latin Christendom itself Bible
printing undermined the use of a single
religious tongue. The Gutenberg Bible, of course, was in Latin, but the
Lutheran Bible was not. Vernacular
Bibles produced by Luther's followers balkanized the common Latin culture
of the Western Church. New
editions of modernized versions have scarcely helped to put Humpty Dumpty
back together again. "English was
good enough for God; it should be good enough for Texas" remarked a Texan
opponent of bilingual education.
Efforts to bring the Gospel to everyman are still being undertaken on a
global scale and the Bible continues to
be translated into hundreds of new tongues. Even now, new literary languages
are being created and then fixed
in print by missionary societies. The tower of Babel is growing ever higher
alongside the expanding Web.
After
this final example, let me offer a brief conclusion. Print culture no longer
monopolizes modern
communications and now shares the stage with a bewildering variety of new
media. Nevertheless, the printed
word has not been superseded. To understand the chaotic state of contemporary
culture, we have to take into
account the unsettling effects of new communications technologies. But
this should not distract us from also
acknowledging the continuing, ever-cumulative effects of a double invention
that is now five hundred years old.
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