From Ink to Click

Imaging a world without books, without newspapers, without any basic form of mass media. A world where subversive, new ideas are spread by clandestine individuals ever fearful of the dominant and controlling influence of state and church. Where word of mouth was the main medium to transmit ideas, and that any digression from the authorised ideas were deemed heretical and a special police force existed precisely to hunt down any ideas that challenged that of the central power of state and church. Imagine a world where ideas were prevented from spreading in order to maintain the existing hierarchies of a few powerful individuals and families.

This apparent alien world was the world of 15^th Century Europe just prior to the invention of the printing press by Johannes Guttenberg.

This single technical development laid the foundation for mass media and in Europe heralded the sweeping away of 1500 years of church hegemony as Europeans for the first time had access to the Christian bible and could read the teachings of Christ for themselves. The printing press produced an explosion of ideas that fuelled the renaissance as classical Greek, Roman and Arabic texts were distributed and read by a mass audience. This spawned a vast array of technical and scientific developments that catapulted Europe from the medieval into the modern world.

Now, in the early 21^st century, many would argue the world wide web may reveal itself to be a seismic event no less significant than the labours of Johannes Guttenberg labouring in his workshop by candlelight back in the 15^th Century.

The connections made through the early developments of social media may well foretell a change of the most radical form. A change in how we work, trade, play, communicate and think. A change that might transform our thinking from the national to the global and carries the potential to democratise ideas at least as powerfully as the Guttenberg press? 

I would be really interested in your thoughts on this topic.