Print and society

If the technology existed across the Asian continent long before it did in Europe, why didn't printing become widespread there before it did in Europe? Essentially because of different social conditions. In the case of China, printing was under the strict control of its rulers, who limited the number of print copies and restricted their dissemination to an elite. Furthermore, unlike Europe, where printing was immediately realized as a profit-producing industry, China did not have a capitalist economy. In the Muslim world, printing encountered powerful social resistance.Footnote ⁹ The reasons were partly religious, partly economic, and partly technical. With regard to religion, only the handwritten word was considered sacred. As Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, the European ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, wrote from Istanbul in 1560: “the scriptures, their holy letters, once printed would cease to be scriptures” (Káldy-Nagy, Reference Káldy-Nagy and Káldy-Nagy1974, p. 203). Furthermore, the practice of cleaning typesettings with hog-bristle brushes made it all the more inconceivable to print the name of Allah in type (ibid., p. 203).Footnote ¹⁰ Another reason was economic: printing would have supposedly put thousands of manuscript copyists out of work.Footnote ¹¹ A third reason for the late adoption of printing had to do with the complexity of typesetting Arabic script. Because Arabic is a cursive script, letters are connected to one another and have different forms when they are in initial, medial, final, and free-standing positions. This means that a complete Arabic font, including vowel marks, can run to over 600 glyphs (Bloom, Reference Bloom2001, p. 218). Typographically, then, Arabic presented unique difficulties – and required greater typesetting skill – than languages that could be printed in uniform, discrete characters like English or Chinese. Ironically, the movable type printing press became widely used in the Islamic world only after the French occupation of Egypt in 1798.Footnote ¹²

Clearly, the mere existence of the technology of movable type was not sufficient for its extensive use; the right social ecology was needed as well. The comparatively rapid success of printing in Europe depended in particular on three key factors. One was a good supply of readers to make the mass production of books be economically feasible. Related to this were the entrepreneurial ambitions of printers, who were motivated by the commercial potential of publishing texts. The third necessary ingredient was an abundant supply of a durable yet inexpensive material on which to print.

Concerning readers, a “vigorous literate culture” (Clanchy, Reference Clanchy1979, p. 8) had been developing in Europe since the late twelfth century, when the growth of universities created an unprecedented demand for written texts, commentaries, and reference works. In cities such as Paris, Bologna, and Oxford, lay scribes worked in guilds to hand copy academic texts long before the arrival of print (Steinberg, Reference Steinberg1974). By the late fifteenth century, a growing population (and growing numbers of readers) combined with an economy on the ascent translated into a viable market for booksellers. The printing press may have amplified the demand for books, but it did not create it in the first place. Like cuneiform writing in Mesopotamia, the print ‘revolution’ co-evolved with, but did not cause, increased societal complexity.

Within the first fifty years following Gutenberg's invention, hundreds of printing presses were established in cities throughout Europe, and Febvre and Martin (Reference Febvre, Martin and Gerard1976) estimate that some twenty million books were printed (p. 248). Compared to the limited capacity of scribal guilds, this was clearly a huge expansion in the scale of production. Printers sought the most lucrative markets – university towns and commercial centers – and developed standardized procedures to maximize speed and productivity.

The third requirement, the plentiful availability of inexpensive material on which to print, was satisfied by paper. Introduced into southern Europe from the Muslim world in the eleventh century, paper was strong, smooth, flexible, and could be produced in uniform formats. Because it was made from recycled linen rags, paper was much cheaper than parchment, and could be produced in virtually unlimited quantities. If early printers had only had parchment to print on, their books would have been almost as expensive as handwritten manuscripts, and printing would not likely have taken hold to the extent that it did.

Although printing presses and books proliferated rapidly in Europe in the first fifty years after Gutenberg printed his first Bible, they did not immediately change the existing power dynamics of literacy. Three-quarters of the books published were in Latin and most readers were clerics or academics, so print began as a product of – and for – a very circumscribed segment of society. Although the printing press was initially welcomed by the Church because it increased dissemination of Bibles and other religious materials, it soon became apparent that the new print era also heralded unwelcome changes. The Church's tight control over the production of books was threatened, as was the Church's very language (since the Bible could now be published in vernacular languages as well as Latin). Mass dissemination of print also threatened communal recitation of prayers by making it possible for individuals to read and contemplate scripture privately. Circulation of the printed writings of Martin Luther, Jean Calvin, and other Protestant reformers so enraged France's King François I that he issued a series of restrictive laws, culminating in a 1535 decree outlawing all printing (by punishment of hanging) and ordering the closure of all book shops.Footnote ¹³

Nor did the printing press immediately usher in more widespread literacy. Non-literate aristocrats could hire readers and scribes for their literacy needs. Peasants, on the other hand, had little need of or access to writing. It was among the emerging middle classes that literacy held the greatest promise, for in a culture that was increasingly in demand of written records, the ability to write assured a livelihood. But this demand for written documents preceded the printing press, and for many lay scribes, print was more of a threat than a boon. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, literacy rates in Europe remained low, especially in rural areas, and it wasn't until the late eighteenth century – more than three hundred years after Gutenberg's invention – that literacy rates came to approach even 50 percent among men in France and 60 percent among men in England.Footnote ¹⁴

Scholarly practices remained largely unchanged following the arrival of the printing press. Given the still relatively high cost of books, scholars continued to copy texts by hand, including texts that had been produced on a printing press.Footnote ¹⁵ Even in the early eighteenth century, access to university libraries was often limited to professors, and teaching practices typically followed the medieval tradition of reading aloud from authoritative texts and commenting upon them (Melton, Reference Melton2001, p. 90).

If print did not suddenly transform an oral society into a literate one, it was nevertheless appropriated in interesting ways into oral culture. Historian Natalie Zemon Davis writes that printing in sixteenth-century France (like the Internet today) established “new networks of communication…new options for the people…new means of controlling the people” (1975, p. 190). She explains how in village veillées in which books were read aloud, ‘reading aloud’ meant translating texts into the local dialect so the villagers could understand. In the case of long works, it also meant editing while reading. Reading was therefore far from a simple vocalization of print – it was a wholesale recreation and performance of texts. Non-literate peasants on the listening end were not passive recipients of information, Davis tells us, but participated in their own way in the new world of printing – not by reading and writing, but by actively interpreting and using the information that was read to them. Orality and literacy therefore suffused and transformed one another.

Similarly, Harold Love points out that even in late sixteenth and early seventeenth century England many key cultural texts were oral, and texts that were written were often intended for oral performance (2002, pp. 100–101). Because people's actual experience of texts often involved a mixture of speech, print, and handwriting, there was no clear-cut transition from ‘oral’ to ‘literate’ cultures, and practices in early modern Britain were better characterized as “intricate negotiations between the media” (ibid., p. 102). In the next chapter we will see that the same holds true today, and that “negotiations between the media” aptly characterizes twenty-first-century literacies as well.

Finally, a common assertion is that the printing press was the key factor in disseminating Luther's and other Protestant reformers’ ideas during the Reformation in Germany. It is undeniable that print played a significant role, but given the low literacy rates in sixteenth-century Germany, Scribner and Dixon (Reference Scribner and Dixon2003) estimate that only 2.3 percent of the German population could have encountered Luther's ideas via print. They argue that most information was passed by word of mouth through personal contacts, and that the real role of print was to inform ‘opinion leaders’ – literate and influential people – who disseminated the new ideas through oral communication, with sermons being the most powerful communication platform (p. 20). What print did, then, was to accelerate and broaden dissemination of information to such opinion leaders, creating more networks and spheres of influence through which new ideas could be spread.Footnote ¹⁶

Print and language

Probably the most significant way in which the printing press influenced language was to introduce an ethos of uniformity and standardization. This happened at two levels: at the visual surface of the printed text and more broadly in the standardization of language use and in the determination of what counted as a language. Although manuscripts had been written in standard hands, variability from one scribe to the next was inevitable, and of course any individual scribe's handwriting could vary slightly from one writing session to the next, depending on posture, fatigue, ambient temperature, and so on. As manuscripts were transformed into printed texts, such individual variability was lost, as the same letter forms were used consistently within and across texts produced by a given printer. As Amalia Gnanadesikan puts it, printing shifted the process from creating letters to selecting letters (Reference Gnanadesikan2009, p. 252). This shift was later extended by the typewriter and the computer, which allowed texts to be composed from the outset by means of selecting letters.

On a broader level, the printing press provided the impetus for European vernaculars (which had been mostly spoken) to be written, codified, and thereby legitimized as languages. Prior to the arrival of print in Europe, a diglossic linguistic configuration existed whereby the language of the Church, authority, and literacy was Latin, and the language of daily life in society was the regional vernacular. Although in the early years of printing most texts were published in Latin, by the sixteenth century printers produced increasing numbers of vernacular texts, motivated by the prospect of broadening their market base. The wide circulation of such texts helped consolidate and establish the literary languages of Europe and ultimately contributed to the decline of Latin.

Of course, there were many regional vernaculars. Those chosen for print (i.e., those most closely associated with power) became standard languages, whereas those that remained unprinted took on the status of provincial dialects. Early grammars for the most prestigious vernaculars were developed during the sixteenth century (Nebrija's 1493 Grammatica Castellana being a notably early contribution). These grammars provided a basis for filtering out many of the regionalisms that had marked earlier vernacular publications.

Print also gradually introduced new formatting, spelling, and punctuation conventions. Although many of the earliest printed books followed manuscript tradition in terms of layout and punctuation, new practices came to be established. For example, whereas rubrication (literally ‘red-inking’) had been used to show divisions in a text, printers found this too costly and made use of different fonts for headings, initial words, and main text. Quotations, which in manuscripts had been underlined in red ink, came to be indicated by quotation marks. On the other hand, paragraphs, which had been explicitly marked with symbols (such as the pilcrow, ¶), came to be marked by white space (indentation of the first line, or most recently, a preceding blank line in ‘block’ paragraphing) (Baron, Reference Baron2000, p. 169).

Before print, spelling was highly variable, and abbreviations were commonly used. Producing a manuscript book was expensive, not only in terms of labor, but also in terms of materials (a Bible written on parchment required the skins of hundreds of sheep). Because of this expense, scribes saved space wherever possible and developed elaborate abbreviation schemes (Cappelli's Lexicon Abbreviaturarum lists some 13,000 Latin abbreviations).Footnote ¹⁷ Printed books, which at first attempted to reproduce manuscripts as closely as possible, preserved abbreviations along with handwriting style, ligatures, illuminations, and layout conventions. Similarly, in both manuscript and early print books, word spellings were adjusted by adding or subtracting letters to fine-tune the length of each line of text so that a flush right margin could be maintained. Once printed, spellings took on a certain authority, and some of the ‘anomalous’ modified spellings became standard when dictionaries were made. Other techniques scribes and printers used to make text fit were adding or deleting whole words, increasing or decreasing space between words or between letters, substituting words for phrases, or vice versa (N. S. Baron, Reference Baron2000).

Abbreviations gradually came to be less used in printed books because printers did not want to risk losing readers who might not understand what they meant. Moreover, as they shifted from expensive parchment to comparatively cheap paper, printers were less compelled to maximize the efficiency of the texts they printed by using abbreviations.

The history of these early printing practices reminds us that spelling is not ‘natural’ and is often shaped by the technological medium in which it is used. Moreover, the control and standardization of spelling (as well as grammar) is also a matter of social forces whereby the power elite set standards, and ordinary people's access and adherence to those standards largely determines their social mobility.

It is clear that the printing press both reflected and shaped the cultural evolution of Europe. However, as mentioned earlier, print was not a catalyst for social change in Central and East Asia. We will now return to this story to see how another technological innovation – paper – was.

Paper

The invention of paper is commonly attributed to Tsai Lun, a eunuch at the court of the Han emperor Wu Di in China in 105 ce, although archeological findings from the Xuanquanzhi ruins of Tunhuang in China's northwest Gansu province place the invention of paper some two hundred years earlier (Yi & Lu, Reference Yi, Lu, Allen, Zuzao, Xiaolan and Bos2010). Made from rags, hemp, or tree bark dissolved in water and then sieved through woven cloth stretched over a bamboo frame, paper was from the beginning made of waste products and therefore relatively cheap to produce.Footnote ¹⁸ It was also very light in weight. These were substantial advantages over competing writing materials such as bamboo, which was heavy, and silk, which was expensive. Over time, production techniques were perfected and paper was made in various qualities for different purposes. One key use of paper was for printing, which evolved from the ancient use of carved stone or bronze seals to make impressions on clay or silk, and from the practice of making rubbings from stone and bronze reliefs (Bloom, Reference Bloom2001, p. 36).

Papermaking spread to Korea, where the product was refined to new levels of quality, and subsequently to Japan in the early seventh century. Paper was introduced to Central Asia in the eighth century, allegedly by Chinese prisoners taken captive by Arabs during the Battle of Talas, although archeological evidence from Samarkand suggests that paper may have existed there centuries earlier (ibid., pp. 43–45). In any event, with the unification of West Asia under Islam, the practice of papermaking migrated westward to Baghdad, Mecca, Egypt, Morocco, and finally to Spain. According to Bloom (ibid.), Spanish Christians began to use paper well before the year 1000, and their use of paper grew as they came to dominate greater areas of the Iberian peninsula. However, it was only after the arrival of the printing press in the fifteenth century that paper gradually came to replace parchment as the preferred medium for recording European thought.

In Islamic civilization, it was paper, not printing, that made possible huge advances in learning and new ways of thinking between the eighth and the sixteenth centuries. Paper was originally produced as an adjunct to papyrus and parchment to serve the administrative needs of the huge bureaucracy that developed during the Caliphates and the Ottoman Empire.Footnote ¹⁹ But its light weight, availability, and relatively low cost made it a catalyst for social, intellectual, and artistic innovation. The Hindu numeral system had spread through the Islamic world by the ninth century, and by the tenth century, the mathematician Abu al-Hasan Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Uqlidisi adapted the Hindu system to the affordances of paper and ink, developing the notion of positional decimal fractions and showing how to perform calculations without deletions (ibid.). Scholars collected and codified the oral traditions of Muhammad on paper, Greek bookrolls were translated into Arabic and written on paper, and new forms of literature, such as cookbooks and The Thousand and One Nights were copied on paper and sold (ibid., p. 12).

Paper provided a convenient means for textualizing not only language, but also artistic designs, architectural plans, genealogy charts, and battle plans, which could be composed in one place and put to use in another (ibid., pp. 215–16). This ability to separate things from their original context of conception and to recontextualize them in new settings, in new mediums, for new purposes, allowed ideas to be not only disseminated, but also transformed:

The idea of divorcing design from its original context (like writing, which divorces language from its original context of utterance) is crucial to understanding relations among language, technology, and literacy. In Chapter 2 we saw how this idea is extended in today's digital texts, whose content is divorced from form (at the level of machine representation) in order to allow those texts to be appropriately scaled across a broad variety of devices.

The typewriter: a personal printing press

The origins of the typewriter go back to at least 1714, when an English engineer named Henry Mill applied for a patent for his machine for transcribing letters that would print letters on paper “so neat and exact as not to be distinguished from print” and whose impression would be “deeper and more lasting than any other writing, and not to be erased or counterfeited without manifest discovery” (Bliven, Reference Bliven1954, p. 24). However, it took over 150 years and dozens of other similar inventions before a marketable machine actually named ‘Type-Writer’ arrived on the scene. Attributed to Christopher Latham Sholes, a newspaper editor and politician from Wisconsin, the prototype Type-Writer was inspired by the piano, with alternating black and white keys that triggered typeface hammers that brought an inked cloth ribbon into contact with paper to leave a printed impression. The ribbon had to be hand-inked, the hammers produced only upper case letter forms, and typists couldn't see what they had typed until they had completed an entire line of text. Nevertheless, the arrival of the ‘literary piano,’ as the editors of Scientific American had called an even earlier prototype, signaled the obsolescence of “the laborious and unsatisfactory performance of the pen” and heralded “a revolution as remarkable as that effected in books by the invention of printing.”Footnote ²¹

After failing to interest Western Union in his machine, Sholes turned to Philo Remington, whose company manufactured firearms and sewing machines. Demand for firearms was down since the end of the Civil War, and the company had extra production capacity. Remington bought Sholes's patent and marketed the first Remington typewriter in 1874. Sales were slow, given that the Type-Writer cost $125, but one of the early adopters was Mark Twain, who, despite his distaste for the machine, became the first writer to submit a typescript to a publisher.Footnote ²²

One particular technical problem that Sholes and his collaborator James Densmore had faced was that the type keys often jammed if they were struck in too quick succession, requiring the typist to stop and pry the type bars apart. The original keyboard displayed the alphabet in sequential order but split across two rows of keys, as follows:

Densmore suggested reordering letter keys in an unfamiliar pattern to slow down typing. Sholes consulted with his mathematician brother-in-law, asking him to reorganize the key configuration so that the type bars that most often got stuck would be separated. Many calculations and experiments led to the four-row ‘QWERTY’ configuration that is still used on English language keyboards to this day. Sholes claimed that this scientific arrangement of the keys would boost typists’ speed and efficiency. It may have done so to the extent that typists spent less time prying apart stuck type bars, but, keeping in mind that typing was done with only two fingers at the time, the QWERTY layout actually made typists’ movements less efficient because it maximized the distance that their fingers needed to travel in typing most words (Beeching, Reference Beeching1974). Besides reducing the incidence of jams, the QWERTY layout also positioned all of the letters in the word TYPEWRITER in the top row of letter keys, a feature that salesmen used to full advantage when they demonstrated the machine.

Although a number of other keyboard layouts have been invented since Sholes's time, and these have been claimed to be more scientific and efficient (most notably the one developed by Dr. August Dvorak in 1932), none has been able to replace the QWERTY standard.Footnote ²³ Once again, we see that technological factors may sometimes be an impetus for change, but in many cases they are not, and that what makes the difference is the social context of the time and place. The technical problem that QWERTY targeted no longer exists – it has been irrelevant ever since the development of the typeball and was permanently put to rest with the personal computer. And yet QWERTY has prevailed – not because of any inherent technical superiority, but rather because of social inertia born of comfortable human habit and the consequent economic risk that any manufacturer proposing a new standard would face.

Unlike the technologies of handwriting and print, which do not favor certain scripts over others, the typewriter and the computer keyboard that evolved from it have a clear structural bias toward alphabetic writing. This is not surprising: a limited character set was a precondition for the typewriter; without an alphabet, the typewriter would not even have been conceivable. Attempts were made at adapting the typewriter to other scripts. For example, Underwood developed a Japanese typewriter based on the Katakana syllabary in 1923. However, because it could not include Kanji (Chinese) characters, which were typically used in conjunction with Katakana, the typewriter was not even marketed as a writing tool, and its use was largely limited to the preparation of billing statements in large companies (Gottlieb, Reference Gottlieb2000). Another limitation was that the typewriter imposed horizontal writing, whereas Japanese writing was most commonly formatted vertically. Finally, the typewriter's need to space characters uniformly created an unusual appearance on the page, and typists had to remember to insert word spaces to avoid ambiguities (Gnanadesikan, Reference Gnanadesikan2009, p. 129). A later typewriter designed in the 1960s for the Hiragana syllabary suffered a similar fate. It was not until the late 1970s, when word-processing technology made it possible to input Kana characters and convert them to Kanji, that the potential of the personal printing press was finally realized – but at the staggering cost of $37,000 per machine (ibid., p. 130). Today, Japanese computer keyboards retain the QWERTY keyboard, but they also print kana characters on the keys, facilitating the inputting of multiple scripts.

If the typewriter's design posed problems for languages written in non-alphabetic scripts, it contributed to the global spread of alphabetic writing by influencing decisions about what script to use for newly written languages. As Gnanadesikan points out:

In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, the Roman alphabet (sometimes extended with additional letters) has often been deemed the most practical means to transcribe languages that have not traditionally been written “because it looks international, because individuals already educated in the colonial languages (English, French, and Portuguese) already know it…and because of the lasting, arguably pernicious influence of the typewriter” (ibid., p. 261).

With electronics, type keys were freed from singular mechanical connections to typeface characters. Any key could theoretically be programmed to produce any character – in any language or script. This is the principle that allows the QWERTY keyboard to be used in Chinese, for example. Perhaps the most common way to write Chinese characters on computers is to use the standard Roman alphabet keys on a QWERTY keyboard to write in pinyin (Roman phonetic transliteration), which activates a menu of Chinese characters that correspond to that phonetic representation. The user then chooses the appropriate Chinese character from the menu, and this is inserted into the text. An alternative procedure (called Wubi) maps components of Chinese characters (radicals and strokes) onto the QWERTY keyboard. One enters these character components in the same sequence as one would handwrite them on paper. Wubi-configured keyboards are divided into five regions, each designating a different type of stroke: horizontal, vertical, left-falling, right-falling, and hook. For experienced typists, this way of entering characters is far faster than using pinyin. Yet another way of entering Chinese characters is with finger movements on a touchscreen – pattern recognition software converts the hand-traced forms into printed characters.

Today, the accessibility of self-publishing via websites, blogs, social networking sites, and online forums has led to the production of a staggering amount of writing published by non-professional writers. The publishing industry's traditional role in legitimizing text and gatekeeping what can become ‘public writing’ has become to some extent democratized. This significant change has also made possible the sharing of what was once specialized knowledge of professional printers with ordinary individuals. One important such area of knowledge has to do with the semiotics of typeface.

The semiotics of typefaces

Typographers often seek to make type as ‘transparent’ as possible, not distracting the reader's attention from the writer's work (Warde, Reference Warde1956). At the same time, however, there is a very long tradition, from Egyptian hieroglyphs to illuminated manuscripts to advertising today, of texts that purposely call attention to their surface visual form, beckoning the reader to look at them as well as through them (Lanham, Reference Lanham1993). Calligraphy and typography are semiotic modes in their own right, contributing their own nuances to the meanings prompted by words (van Leeuwen, Reference van Leeuwen2005a). Fonts put new faces on words, and in so doing they affect our reading of those words. Consider how font design characteristics add a dimension of coolness, warmth, or cutesiness to a greeting.

Conversely, we can be led to make associations between different words by means of similar typographic design, as in a 2010 Greenpeace campaign aimed against Nestlé, the company that makes KitKat candy bars, for buying palm oil from companies that destroy Indonesian rainforests and pushing orangutans toward extinction. The typography and red color was designed to lead readers to make an association between a KitKat bar and the word ‘killer,’ as shown in Figure 6.2.

Figure 6.2 Greenpeace's appropriation of the visual design of the Nestlé KitKat logo

Like language, typeface has meaning potential, but not predetermined meaning as in a code. Typefaces, like other aspects of style, get culturally appropriated and therefore can ‘mean’ different things in different cultural and historical contexts. For example, the Nazis appropriated Gothic script as a symbol of German nationalism; stickers from the early years of the Third Reich displayed slogans like “Feel German, think German, speak German, be German, even in your script” (C. Burke, Reference Crystal1998, p. 148). However, in 1941, when Hitler realized the importance of communicating his case to the wider world, he rejected Gothic script, calling it a Jewish invention (“Schwabacher-Judenlettern”), and decreed that the Antiqua typeface was to be the “normal script” of the German people (Steinberg, Reference Steinberg1974, p. 293). In early modern England, on the other hand, Gothic script had been appropriated by the common people because it was thought to be the easiest script to read.

Today, Helvetica is an example of a typeface that is both revered and reviled, and is even the subject of a feature film.Footnote ²⁴ Developed in 1957 by Swiss typographer Max Miedinger, Helvetica was designed to be modern, legible, comforting, and ‘neutral’ in the sense that the typeface itself should not convey any meaning and thus be ‘open’ to interpretation. Many cities have adopted Helvetica for their public signs displaying the dos and don'ts of street life. Critics of Helvetica condemn its lack of rhythm and contrast, its boring predictability, and its overuse in society.

Typefaces might be considered expressions of identity – just like clothes, haircuts, eyeglasses, and other visual design accouterments – and in this light it is notable that social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace allow users to modify typefaces in their personal spaces (the default fonts are Lucida Grande and Verdana respectively). However, in comparison with the many ways in which social networking users are unwittingly being homogenized by algorithms that make them behave in consistent, predictable ways, the typeface choices may be little more than a superficial gimmick to provide an illusion of agency.

Because visual design features such as typeface and layout contribute in significant ways to the meanings people make and take from texts, there is a substantial responsibility to understand the visual pragmatics that underlies their use. Kress and van Leeuwen are two scholars who have contributed much valuable work in this area (Kress & van Leeuwen, Reference Kress and van Leeuwen1996, Reference Kress and van Leeuwen2001; van Leeuwen, Reference van Leeuwen2005a, Reference van Leeuwen2005b, Reference van Leeuwen2006) and we will consider the pedagogical implications of this topic in Part III.

Conclusion

We have seen in the last two chapters how technologies of literacy have affected humans’ relationship to language. The invention of writing allowed language to be separated from speakers’ bodies and distanced from the original context of utterance. Paper, by providing a cheap, light, foldable medium, offered wider access to writing and drawing, and thus broader use of textualization and recontextualization. Print introduced the mechanization of writing, imposing another degree of spatial and temporal distance between the author and the final form of the work (a distance that had been introduced during the manuscript era by scribes). The typewriter made a simplified version of print accessible to the masses; it made printing personal and portable, but still maintained mechanical intermediaries between writer and written product.

The story of paper and print illustrates how material, social, and individual dimensions interact in producing new designs of knowledge, learning, and social life. The fact that printing did not become widespread for centuries in either China or the Muslim world leads us to the conclusion that it was not the technological innovation of movable type alone that made printing viable. Rather, a favorable social–economic–material ecology had to be in place to allow the technological innovation to take hold. Paper and print influenced the social–economic–material ecology by making it possible to circulate ideas to an unprecedented degree, and, for the first time, to archive texts at a potentially unlimited number of sites. In so doing, paper and print changed both the individual's and society's relationship to written language. These developments were crucial for the development of nation-states, the notion of the public sphere, and the consolidation of academic disciplines, especially the sciences.

Today, digital devices introduce a further stage of transformative separation between humans and language (albeit hidden from the eye), as HTML and other computer codes intervene between the embodied biomechanical movements of writing and the display of signs on screens of various types and sizes. The connections between these devices also make it possible for individuals to disseminate their writing with unprecedented speed and breadth of dispersal. It is to electronically mediated writing that we turn in the next chapter.