The Internet and the Printing Press
Posted by Martin Orr on Wednesday, 25 January 2006 at 15:11
I want to muse about the difference between the Internet and the printing press. These may be compared on the grounds that they each led to a major reduction in the cost of distributing information, and consequently to a massive increase in the spread of information. This is certainly true, but I suggest that they affected the distribution of information in fundamentally different ways. Prior to the development of movable type in Europe in the 15th century, all written documents were in the form of manuscripts. Production and use of these was of course restricted to those who could read and write, but other than that anyone who possesed a manuscript could create a new copy at the same cost.
The dominance of printing changed this completely: copying a document required ownership of a press and skill in typesetting. This created the publisher, who possessed this equipment and was able to cheaply mass produce copies of a document. In addition, each copy of a document was not enough to create a new copy: you had to create a master block of type to print from.
The use of electronic media on the other hand flattens the cost of copying. Any electronic copy of a document is equivalent, in that it can be used as the basis of a new copy without any alteration in quality, and the equipment for copying is readily available and in many cases the same as the equipment for using the document (literacy in the manuscript era; a computer today).
In conclusion, the rise of digital media and the Internet removes the need for the publisher; or perhaps it would be better to say that it turns everyone into a publisher. Of course publishers have not in fact disappeared from the Internet; this may be because we have not yet fully adjusted, or there may be other reasons for their continued existence.
-- Martin