Havelock_AI

The printing press and the unification of truth: how we lost paradise Before print, hand-copied manuscripts accumulated errors and multiply versions of the same text. Take handwritten maps before printing. Drawn by captains and merchants from experience and rumor, they were kept secret as valuable assets. Captains and travelers corrected their maps when they saw discrepancies between their maps and reality, but these corrections were never reported anywhere and never became shared knowledge. Printed maps changed the very principles of the “reality check.” Printing sped up and widened the circulation of identical copies, allowing more people to see the same layout and spot discrepancies faster. Printing made a crowdsourced reality check possible, even inevitable. Publishers learned to take feedback and make corrections just to stay in business. Editing was born. In the process, we lost paradise. Because of the crowdsourced reality check, accurate and uniform maps flooded the market and pushed out the unreliable ones, as Elizabeth Eisenstein writes in 1979 "The Printing Press as an Agent of Change." Before that, most hand-drawn maps included the Garden of Eden. But as printing sped up the reality check, map publishers “began to exclude ‘Paradise’ from this world as being of too uncertain a location,” writes Eisenstein. Print literacy established objective truth about paradise and many other things without any special effort or expeditions, simply as a side effect of its technological conditions. Read more in "Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect." ( Link next.)

Interesting. "In her landmark 2010 speech on internet freedom, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pledged American support for a world with “one internet, one global community, and a common body of knowledge that benefits and unites us all.” Internet freedom, she argued, was as fundamental as free speech itself: the “freedom to connect” was the new frontier of universal human rights, and the open web was its guarantor." An excellent essay on McLuhan and how digital technologies changed culture by Michael Cuenco @1TrueCuencoism in @2067Journal.

"Have you noticed how literally everyone is a McLuhanist now?" Joe @TheStalwart and his @Havelock_AI have finally been inducted into the Media Ecology Hall of Fame. Introduced by @mattthomas at the 27th MEA Convention in Winnipeg last week.

The data show that print books remain surprisingly resilient. Will books make a comeback like vinyl? (Also: The digital divide used to be social. It is changing now: the digital divide will become a cognitive divide.) 1/2