Intriguing, Chris. I hope you don't mind my pointing out that the industrial revolution is generally considered to be underway by 1778, the steam engine having been invented in the early 1700s. And factors like the printing press (c. 1450) and postal services (some time in the 1600s) have a lot to do with establishing the information age.
All very good points! I have previously considered that postal services really are the start of the transition towards the internet, as they facilitated 'the republic of letters'.
The printing press can't be underestimated. We tend to take printed, mass-produced books for granted, but it really was a massive revolution, certainly as impactful as the wheel.
I agree, but I also concur with Illich that the transition from an unformatted page to a page with sentences and paragraphs was as great a transition, and one that was required for the printing press to have the impact that it did. Otherwise, we would still have to read aloud all the phonemes on the page, a process that demands much more of our attention and prevents, as just one example, the form of reading the newspaper and internet thrives upon, where we scan for interesting titles and thus 'seek' something within a text.
I touched upon this before (largely in passing) in "Facing Books":
Intriguing, Chris. I hope you don't mind my pointing out that the industrial revolution is generally considered to be underway by 1778, the steam engine having been invented in the early 1700s. And factors like the printing press (c. 1450) and postal services (some time in the 1600s) have a lot to do with establishing the information age.
All very good points! I have previously considered that postal services really are the start of the transition towards the internet, as they facilitated 'the republic of letters'.
The printing press can't be underestimated. We tend to take printed, mass-produced books for granted, but it really was a massive revolution, certainly as impactful as the wheel.
I agree, but I also concur with Illich that the transition from an unformatted page to a page with sentences and paragraphs was as great a transition, and one that was required for the printing press to have the impact that it did. Otherwise, we would still have to read aloud all the phonemes on the page, a process that demands much more of our attention and prevents, as just one example, the form of reading the newspaper and internet thrives upon, where we scan for interesting titles and thus 'seek' something within a text.
I touched upon this before (largely in passing) in "Facing Books":
https://strangerworlds.substack.com/p/facing-books