{"id":1,"date":"2024-06-16T19:39:00","date_gmt":"2024-06-16T18:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/192.168.0.10:8086\/?p=1"},"modified":"2026-05-31T14:54:40","modified_gmt":"2026-05-31T13:54:40","slug":"gutenberg-as-historical-mirror","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sanjibmitra.ie\/blog\/2024\/06\/16\/gutenberg-as-historical-mirror\/","title":{"rendered":"We&#8217;ve been here before and it didn&#8217;t go smoothly"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"753\" src=\"https:\/\/sanjibmitra.ie\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/YW023786V_small-1024x753.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-257\" srcset=\"https:\/\/sanjibmitra.ie\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/YW023786V_small-1024x753.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/sanjibmitra.ie\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/YW023786V_small-300x221.jpg 300w, https:\/\/sanjibmitra.ie\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/YW023786V_small-768x565.jpg 768w, https:\/\/sanjibmitra.ie\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/YW023786V_small.jpg 1374w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The printing press is a great historical mirror for what&#8217;s happening now, and the story is more unsettling than most people realise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Within decades of Gutenberg\u2019s 1440s printing press, the Christian Church panicked. Its anxiety wasn\u2019t triggered by rising literacy, but by a sudden loss of narrative control as it watched itself rapidly slip into irrelevance; an Index of Forbidden Books surfaced soon after, which incidentally was the subject was the basis of Umberto Eco&#8217;s epic novel <em>In the Name of The Rose<\/em>. Because ideas could now spread faster without institutional backing, science and religion were suddenly at war, eventually leading up to the Reformation and Scientific Revolution. The printing press didn&#8217;t cause those things directly, but it made them possible and then inevitable<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Then came misinformation, exploding onto the medieval mind like a rumour that had learned to replicate itself; the first mass-printed content wasn&#8217;t enlightenment philosophy, it was pamphlets, propaganda, and quack medicine &#8211; printed accounts of two-headed calves, wolf-children, unicorn horn powder, and celestial omens, sold as news. All sounding eerily familiar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The\u00a0<em>Narratio<\/em> is one such prominent antisemitic myth; these were printed accounts of Jews poisoning wells that spread across German towns in the 1490s-1520s, leading to expulsions and massacres. Same story, reprinted and slightly localised for each new town, engineered to provoke a specific community into violence. And we all know what that led to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Medieval reading was mostly oral and communal before mass printing, but now it transformed into something silent and personal &#8211; a new cognitive mode seems to have been born. Its important to note that this print culture built on a linear narrative and the sequential ordering of content, something that generations since have become accustomed to and relied upon. It did also create half a century of chaos, prejudice, suspicion and doubt before the benefits compounded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The printing press is a great historical mirror for what&#8217;s happening now, and the story is more unsettling than most people realise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":257,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5,6,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history","category-philosophy","category-technology","category-think"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sanjibmitra.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sanjibmitra.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sanjibmitra.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sanjibmitra.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sanjibmitra.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/sanjibmitra.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":302,"href":"https:\/\/sanjibmitra.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions\/302"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sanjibmitra.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sanjibmitra.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sanjibmitra.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sanjibmitra.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}