
19th Century Moral Panic Over Paper Technology (2017) - monort
https://slate.com/technology/2017/08/the-19th-century-moral-panic-over-paper-technology.html
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pmoriarty
This reminds me of the destkop publishing revolution that started in the
1980's. Some dire predictions about the devaluation and trashification of
printed material, from books to newsletters, and of the printing industry, now
that anyone could relatively cheaply and easily print what they needed on
their personal printer using the newfangled personal computer instead of
having to take their work to a professional printer to have it printed for
prices that were unaffordable for most individuals.

Now no one thinks much about them anymore, but personal printers were once new
and considered to be a radical disruptive technology.

~~~
HarryHirsch
The predictions were 100 % correct. The rules and good practices of typography
for the presentation for the presentation of written materials had been
refined by scribes and printers over 3000 years. Generally, they would be
followed, because the barrier to entry would be high, equipment would be
expensive to buy and it would take long to learn its proper use. Consequently
printed material would be expensive, and the buyer would expect decent
presentation for their money.

Suddenly, Desktop Publishing as it was called, shows up, and people produce
printed materials that looks as if someone hadn't even spent 2 weeks of
learning the most basic conventions.

~~~
c3534l
Most of those rules were driven by anything but practical concerns. Typography
in Europe was dominated by "picket fence" black-letter scripts which
emphasized the vertical strokes to the near exclusion of everything else,
rendering the script difficult to read even for that subset of the population
which read professionally. Newspapers until very recently were horrendous
evenly-spaced columns of monotonous walls of text with barely any more
formatting than punctuation. Until the modern era, graphic design and to some
extent design in general focused on adding more and more minute details, as if
the purpose of design was to demonstrate you cared by how much time it must
have have taken to produce the thing by hand. The more details, regardless of
their function, the more effort it must have taken and thus the more
professional it must be. If you ever have the chance to take a history of
graphic design course, you'll see it's basically culture driving it with
little understanding or theory. It's not really a refinement created through
3000 years of scientific inquiry and we can place our trust in the traditions
of skilled artisans who built this system for us. There really isn't a system
until maybe around the turn of the century. It's basically just random
bullshit and we're only just starting to figure things out more formally.

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cm2187
Interesting. Intuitively I would expect one of the effects of the
internet/computers/smartphones would be to further reduce illiteracy, since it
is mostly text based, and it is more engaging to teenagers than books were.

That seems to be the case. Found some chart for France of illiteracy by birth
year [1] [2]. There might be other factors but I kind of doubt that schools
have improved much for generations born in the early 80s vs late 80s, while
illiteracy dropped by about a third to half.

[1]
[https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/graphique/1281410/graph...](https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/graphique/1281410/graphique1.jpg)

[2]
[https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/1281410](https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/1281410)

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Gunstig2Snath
I sometimes work with old newspapers in bound volumes. It is immediately
obvious when a newspaper switched to wood pulp, typically in the 1870s. The
earlier editions are beautiful, the pages supple and in nearly as good
condition as they were new. Then as soon as the switch occurs the pages are
yellow and brittle. The challenge is to turn the page without it crumbling.

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dredmorbius
The notion that media change society has been most compellingly been explored
in Elizabeth Eisenstein's _The Printing Press as an Agent of Change_ (1979),
itself strongly inspired by Marshall McLuhan's _The Gutenberg Galaxy_.

[https://www.worldcat.org/title/printing-press-as-an-agent-
of...](https://www.worldcat.org/title/printing-press-as-an-agent-of-change-
communications-and-cultural-transformations-in-early-modern-europe-volumes-i-
and-ii/oclc/838139921)

The impact really cannot be overstated, though it's often more subtle (though
deeper) than portrayed.

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sasasassy
And yet now every media outlet and pundit blames everything on the
proliferation of fake news made possible because of easy access to sharing
ideas. History does repeat itself.

~~~
TomMckenny
Confusing the tool for the effect.

Advertisements and propaganda actually work that's why so much is spent on
them. You can often exactly measure the effect. But blaming radio, TV,
magazines, billboards, comic books or the social web is incorrect: it's not
the medium it's the message that has an effect.

And the message needs to be a certain form. Generic pulp novels and shooter
games clearly do not cause violence where other forms of messaging do. Witch
burning, lynchings and demagogues clearly come from some style of message that
can drive masses of people simultaneously.

~~~
kruczek
> it's not the medium it's the message that has an effect.

Exactly.

Thousands of years ago Socrates was complaining about the invention of writing
which would "create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will
not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and
not remember of themselves".

Hundreds of years ago due to the invention of printing press "there was
growing concern (...) that these cheap, plentiful books were seducing children
into a life of crime and violence".

And today people worry about TV, video games, etc. - while at the same time
holding books as the holy grail of knowledge.

All these are merely mediums for transfer of ideas. Blame the message, not the
messenger.

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Aegaeus10111
This is really interesting. Decentralizing information and knowledge has been
a good thing for a long time :-)

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jeandejean
And now I eventually understand what "pulp fiction" means. Great article
indeed.

