Man will be what he was born to be: free and independent.
We can put television in its proper light by supposing that Gutenberg's great invention had been directed at printing only comic books.
Why should freedom of speech and freedom of press be allowed? Why should a government which is doing what it believes to be right allow itself to be criticized? It would not allow opposition by lethal weapons. Ideas are much more fatal things than guns. Why should any man be allowed to buy a printing press and disseminate pernicious opinions calculated to embarrass the government?
One of the stories I love is how Gutenberg’s printing press set off this interesting chain reaction, where all of a sudden people across Europe noticed for the first time that they were farsighted, and needed spectacles to read books (which they hadn’t really noticed before books became part of everyday life); which THEN created a market for lens makers, which then created pools of expertise in crafting lenses, which then led people to tinker with those lenses and invent the telescope and microscope, which then revolutionized science in countless ways.
Desktop publishing was a big innovation that meant small groups or even poor societies could do their own publication without the capital investment in a major printing press. That's a big difference. Same is true of more advanced technologies - it can offer plenty of liberatory possibilities - can - but whether it does or not or whether it serves for coercion depends on socioeconomic decisions.
Moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world's champions.
Towards orthodox religion, father's own attitude remained one of tolerance. He looked upon the New Testament as the noble story of a human being which, because of ignorance and the lack of printing presses, had become exaggerated. He maintained that religions served their purpose; some people depended on them all their lives to make them honest. Others did not need to be so held in line. But subjection to any church was a reflection on strength and character. You should be able to get from yourself what you had to go go church for.
To find something comparable, you have to go back 500 years to the printing press, the birth of mass media – which, incidentally, is what really destroyed the old world of kings and aristocracies. Technology is shifting power away from the editors, the publishers, the establishment, the media elite. Now it’s the people who are taking control.
The Reformation was cradled in the printing-press, and established by no other instrument.
The coming of the motion picture was as important as that of the printing press.
The bicycle is a vehicle of revolution. It can destroy the tyranny of the automobile as effectively as the printing press brought down despots of flesh and blood. The revolution will be spontaneous, the sum total of individual revolts like my own. It may have already begun.
The Internet is the first technology since the printing press which could lower the cost of a great education and, in doing so, make that cost-benefit analysis much easier for most students. It could allow American schools to service twice as many students as they do now, and in ways that are both effective and cost-effective.
The press is not only free, it is powerful. That power is ours. It is the proudest that man can enjoy.
I think future generations will see the invention of the Internet as having been as important as the invention of the printing press. It’s the democratizing tool of all tools. As long as no one can control the flow of information, then freedom always has a chance.
When the printing press was invented, it was inspired by the desire to make the Bible accessible to everyone. Today, people of passion who want to share their faith and provide quality entertainment for families are working in one of the most powerful media of our time--the interactive video game.
Social media is the greatest boon to journalism since the printing press.
I'm called an oral historian, which is something of a joke. Oral history was here long before the pen, long before Gutenberg and the printing press. The difference is I have a tape recorder in my hand.
It's interesting to see the lament of each generation overwhelmed by the next new tool. I can show you passages from scholars of Germany in the 1480s lamenting the fact that they are overloaded with all this stuff to read because of the printing press.
Stock dealers and banking companies, by the aid of a paper system, are enriching themselves to the ruin of our country, and swaying the government by their possession of the printing presses, which their wealth commands and by any other means, not always honorable to the character of our countrymen.
I am not offering this is a critique of the internet, its just that there are a lot of factors involved. It does offer plenty of possibilities. It also has, it can have, a cheapening effect and I think both exist and I think its true of everything. You could say that about the printing press.
Communication media enabled collective action on new scales, at new rates, among new groups of people, multiplied the power available to civilizations and enabled new forms of social interaction. The alphabet enabled empire and monotheism, the printing press enabled science and revolution, the telephone enabled bureaucracy and globalization, the internet enabled virtual communities and electronic markets, the mobile telephone enabled smart mobs and tribes of info-nomads.
As soon as the printing press started flooding Europe with books, people were complaining that there were too many books and that it was going to change philosophy and the course of human thought in ways that wouldnt necessarily be good.
Technological civilizations don't last long. You're all right until you get a printing press. Then a race starts between technology and common sense. And maybe technology always wins.
When our founders created America, it was in the age of the printing press, when individuals could freely join the conversation. And that robust, democratic dialogue more often than not lifted up the best available evidence and asserted what was more likely to be true than not.
Let's say I am a chocoholic and I eat tons of chocolate a day. A hundred thousands of tons a day. I have this craving, but I can't afford it, so I get a printing press, and I start printing money, and I print billions and billions to buy chocolate. So I create this boom in the chocolate industry, so stores are running out of chocolate. So they have demand, so chocolate makers expand. Cocoa growers expand. You create this great boom. But now the feds arrest me and shut me down. And now there is a depression in the chocolate industry. That's what happens with the monetary policy.
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