by Quentin J. Schultze
 The rise of the Internet's World Wide Web in the mid-1990s launched an
unlikely hero into the media spotlight: Johann Gutenberg, the 15th-century
inventor of movable printing type and technological forefather of the
vernacular Bible. Reporters, Internet columnists and even some scholars
began parading Gutenberg before the public as a kind of poster child for
the digital revolution. The Net, we were told, would do for modern society
what Gutenberg's invention had done for the Renaissance: spread the fruits
of mass education by democratizing communication. Everyone would become a
publisher. By late 1997, public discourse about the Net was so deeply
anchored in Gutenbergian mythology that skeptics of the digital revolution
were sometimes dismissed without a reasonable hearing.
In hopes of digging deeper, I revisited the long-departed world of
Gutenberg and of the first major mass communicator to use Gutenberg's
technology -- Martin Luther. I wondered what more significantly shapes the
use of new technology, the nature of that technology itself or the social
and economic context in which it developed? More specifically, how might a
strongly religious context, the rise of the Reformation, have influenced
how the printing press was distributed and institutionalized? Does it make
any sense to compare the life and times of Gutenberg or Luther with those
of Bill Gates and Pope John Paul II?
In our understanding of the digital revolution, I think we stand about
where Gutenberg and Luther did, with plenty of ideas and little firm
grasp. If confusion is democracy, we are rolling in the green. The
techno-gurus offer their poster children to all takers -- often at quite a
price on the lecture circuit. Business is rolling in the cash as well as
losing its shirt with trendy ideas and faddish management books that have
ignored far more business wisdom than they have created. Religious groups,
too, are busily cultivating the digital landscape, often funded by donors
who hope that pornographers or other evil folks will not commandeer the
future. And then there are scholars and professors, myself included, who
claim to see some truth in the so-called digital revolution. Bless all of
their souls, for we shall need as much help as we can get.
Like all of us, Gutenberg (1394-1468) inherited a social and
technological world created by previous generations. Monks gave their
lives to the painstaking process of copying one page of a manuscript after
another, until finally another "book" was completed for religious leaders.
Reading itself was largely the domain of priests and, to some extent,
their wealthy, educated patrons.
When Gutenberg was a young man, someone in Western Europe invented
block printing (already used for centuries in China), in which "printers"
carved outlines of words or pictures on a block of wood and then inked
them for the "press." The movable-type printing press, for which Gutenberg
is so well known, was invented in about 1450, 70 years before the outbreak
of the Reformation. In this process, masterminded at least partly by
Gutenberg, printers placed reusable, individual letters or characters of
type in a form to create a printable page. Hand copying of manuscripts was
time-consuming and highly individualized; no two manuscripts were exactly
the same. Printing, on the other hand, created a means to make artificial
copies that merely imitated the "authentic" reproduction process of the
scribes. Printing was considered artless and crude -- a kind of cheap
imitation or virtual copy of the real thing.
Printers and scribes competed for customers into the second half of the
15th century, when printing finally won the day. Scribes catered to the
luxury market by crafting elegant, high-quality manuscripts -- much like
the difference today between handcrafted and factory-made furniture. But
as the prices of printed volumes declined, scribes found themselves
without work -- like COBOL programmers in the 1980s. At first, scribes
sought legal protection for their former monopoly, but they eventually
gave in to the inevitable by inserting printed sections into their
handwritten works. Some scribes even became consultants, advising printers
on how to design their pages to look like calligraphic art.
Early printing was financially risky. The ability to print books did
not guarantee a means of marketing them successfully. Printers were driven
not by the religious and artistic impulses of the scribes, but by the
economic realities of the marketplace. The early years of promise also
created the stress of uncertainty -- perhaps a feature in the rise of all
new media. No one demonstrates this more than Gutenberg.
The public mythology about Gutenberg locates him in a saintly world of
disinterested inventors. The truth is that he was an entrepreneur who took
one financial risk after another, using other people's money, and who
maintained a secrecy that was designed to keep any potential competitors
from gleaning his ideas. Gutenberg worked so surreptitiously that the best
documents we have about his business affairs and technological inventions
are from the courts, where he battled unhappy investors who had tired of
his many promises and few results.
Throughout his career, Gutenberg repeatedly solicited additional
capital, but refused to offer his "product" for sale until he had
perfected the process. He became a kind of entrepreneurial schemer who
continuously had to develop new, fundable ideas in order to keep the money
on the table for his major preoccupation -- the movable-type press.
Gutenberg created the mold for casting precisely similar letters and
numbers. He also developed an ink that would adhere uniformly to the type.
He took various partners and developed other business enterprises along
the way in order to fund his desire to hit it big in printing.
Gutenberg's tight secrecy, accompanied by his burn rate, led to his
decline. He would even dismantle his experimental equipment during his
various lawsuits so no one could figure out what he was up to. One of
these lawsuits finally wiped him out financially. His financiers won all
of Gutenberg's materials and equipment, and hired away Gutenberg's
foreman, who knew how to use the technology -- an early case of corporate
raiding, perhaps. It was they, not Gutenberg, who published the so-called
Gutenberg Bible sometime before 1456 and used Gutenberg's technology to
print the elegant Latin Psalter (1457) and the Catholicon (1460), a
reprint of a popular encyclopedia compiled in the 13th century. Meanwhile,
Gutenberg, destitute and almost blind, eventually received from the
archbishop of Mainz an annual allowance of corn and wine, along with a
suit of clothing. There is a lesson here for the depressed areas of
Silicon Valley.
Since Gutenberg clearly had the elements of movable-type printing
before investors shut him down, why did he fail to launch the world's
first book-printing business? The answer appears to be that Gutenberg did
not see himself in the printing business per se, but in the
religious-manuscript business. Gutenberg's aesthetic paradigm defined the
book as an extension of the manuscript, not as a distinct creation.
Manuscripts, however, were not just the creation of scribes, but also the
craft of highly gifted illuminators. Gutenberg's movable-type technology
itself would simply not enable him to compete on the illuminators'
aesthetic terms.
Unable to foresee the nonreligious market for simple printing, he yoked
his business to a religious interpretation of the godly craft of
illumination -- to the idea of "text" as a means of authentically pleasing
God. He repeatedly delayed the launch of his technology until he could
solve the problem of creating grand illuminations within his printed
books. Those delays cost him his business.
As one historian put it, Gutenberg "succeeded in automating the scribe, but not the illuminator." Or as I would put it, Gutenberg framed his
aesthetic paradigm for the printing business within the
religious-manuscript market of the day. This paradigm did not suit the
iconoclastic times that were around the corner. The Protestant emphasis on
"the Word" would create new secular and sacred markets. Protestants liked
simple, printed books, and might have loved amazon.com. As Elizabeth
Eisenstein, who wrote one of the classic works on the rise of mass
printing in Europe, put it, Protestantism was "the first movement of any
kind, religious or secular, to use the new presses for overt propaganda
and agitation against an established institution." The Protestant church
reformers "unwittingly pioneered as revolutionaries and rabble rousers."
What some people might call a "democratic" development, others might call
a "propagandistic" movement or paper spam.
Religious and financial interests merged in the Protestant Reformation,
where printing was both a lively business and a potentially powerful form
of religious communication. Martin Luther became the first mass-mediated
publicist or propagandist. As historian Mark Edwards claims, Luther
"dominated publicity to a degree that no other person to my knowledge has
ever dominated a major propaganda campaign and mass movement since. Not
Lenin, not Mao Tse-tung, not Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, or Patrick
Henry." For several years during the Reformation, evangelicals like Luther
quickly and effectively reached large audiences with "thousands of
pamphlets discrediting the old faith and advocating the new." These
pamphlets were cheap, easy to distribute, quick to read and easy to
conceal. They were hawked on the street and in taverns, and advertised
with jingles. Luther's New Testament vernacular Bible, with commentary,
set the stage for later commentated Bibles that guided the reader's
interpretation.
Luther had a knack for the new communications medium; other
evangelicals were not nearly so effective. Luther himself democratized the
medium by pushing out his products and making them cheap to print and
distribute in the interest of printers and publishers. For one thing,
reprintings of Luther's pamphlets made money for printers, who did not
have to worry about copyright law. Luther himself was interested not in
cash infusions, but in distribution -- give away the product free and you
might create a market! For another, Luther's pamphlets were inexpensive
compared with vernacular Bibles, so why not get the gist without all of
the expense and hard work? Even some Roman Catholic publicists printed and
distributed Luther's anti-Catholic pamphlets. Luther roundly criticized
sloppy, profit-driven printers who marketed the Bible, but his quest for a
vernacular version of the scriptures also inherently tied believers'
spiritual thirst to the capitalistic energies of an expanding
mass-communications business.
This merger of financial and religious interests made printing the
first truly mass medium in Western history. Even so, the printing press
was not a "mass" medium in the sense of reaching everyone; most people
were spectators of the religious drama that was unfolding in the new
medium -- as in the early years of the Internet, when most people did not
have access. But the press could nevertheless reach more people more
quickly and more cheaply than any previous medium. Like e-mail today, the
press could distribute messages to many people -- if they had access to
the technology and knew how to use it (that is, if they were
literate).
During the first half of the 16th century, Catholics and various
Protestants, especially Luther, competed in the new court of printed
public opinion. Between 1518 and 1546 alone, printers produced at least 6
million vernacular religious tracts -- one for every two members of the
German-speaking lands. Apparently Protestants did a better job of
communicating their messages; their treatises were often less expensive,
more compelling rhetorically, and hence more widely printed, distributed
and read. But the Protestant messages might also have been more open to
various interpretations, enabling readers to hear in them what they wanted
to hear, prefiguring what Jacques Ellul in this century called the
"propaganda" of the media. As Edwards concludes, "In general, the messages
sent were not always the messages received, and the historian who seeks to
reconstruct the early Reformation message and its appeal must pay at least
as much attention to the context of its readers (and hearers) as to the
text that they read (or had presented to them)."
Nothing could be more true of the Internet today. We can talk all we
want about the "democratic tendencies" of the technology, but who is
really interpreting these messages and what in the world are they
concluding? We have not a clue. The statistics on Net message
distribution, the growth of the number of domain names, the number of
individual citizens with Net access, and all of the other widely used data
simply gloss over the real, underlying communication. We have created a
public rhetoric about democracy anchored in technological mathematics, not
in human understanding or cultural interpretation -- not even in civil
discourse. We are defining Net-based democracy in terms of transmission,
not in terms of actual human communication. In fact, our contemporary
public rhetoric about the Gutenbergian revolution does exactly the same.
Some commonplaces never change. Luther created chaos before denominational
cosmos, and we appear to be doing something very similar with Net culture,
sacred and secular. The Net is to democracy what a stadium is to a soccer
game. Somebody has to decide how the game is played.
Americans often associate democratic power with the ability of the
underdog to triumph over established institutions. They equate
egalitarianism with a leveling of power across many individuals or
groups in society. Democracy exists, Americans assume, when everyone has
an equal voice in defining reality. And we get our own voices by being
part of many messages -- by being mass communicators or at least mass
consumers. Freedom and symbolic quantity are virtually the same.
Therefore, we consider the Internet as the most liberating mass-media
technology of all times.
But we are also frequently uncomfortable with the ways that evil or at
least arrogant people are able to use the media to advance their own
interests. The Net is great, but let's silence the pornographers,
bomb-makers and hackers who are up to no good. What does history tell us
about these kinds of debates?
Will the Internet necessarily champion the underdog in culture, or even
just in religion? Any inherent propensity of one technology over another
to foster democracy is overshadowed by the social institutions in society,
including the ways that media are financed, regulated and distributed, and
the almost indefinable realities of the individual rhetorical moments when
audiences will respond. By about 1470 the cost of a French printed Bible
had dropped to about one-fifth of the cost of a manuscript Bible, perhaps
giving Calvinism the same kind of boost that Luther had in Germany. As
Eisenstein states, "Where indulgence sellers were discredited, Bible
salesman multiplied."
Moreover, new power structures and established institutions invariably
come to replace the old ones, and any initial glow of inchoate democracy
can easily be undermined by the rising centers of symbolic power. Today's
public references about the rise of the printing press tend to overlook
the fact that the printing press shifted authority from church to the
individual rhetorician. As the church and book owners/collectors lost
control of the manuscript culture to the operators of the printing press,
they also relinquished much of their authority to individual authors. In
short, public personality -- or persona -- became crucially important in
mass communication, as it has been ever since. The printing press tended
to shift power from the more stable social institutions to the more
dynamic and industrious communicators. As a theologian friend of mine
likes to say, the medium helped replace one authoritative Catholic pope
with many popular Protestant popes.
Finally, the openness of citizens to both democratic opportunities and
responsibilities is crucial. Technologies do not produce democracy, even
if they bring down the dominant institution or eclipse evil empires. As
the president of the Czech Republic, Václav Havel, has said, "Democracy
and civil society are two sides of the same coin. Today, when our very
planetary civilization is endangered by human irresponsibility, I see no
other way to save it than through a general awakening and cultivation of
the sense of responsibility people have for the affairs of this
world."
The role of the printing press in early-modern Europe shows that the
impact of new communications technologies is highly dependent on context.
The same technology can affect different social groups and cultures in
widely different ways, can unify as well as divide, and can secularize as
well spiritualize. There simply is no predetermined impact because of the
crucial roles of economics, politics and culture. New media forms do not
simply replace older ones. Even after sermons were printed, sermons were
still orally delivered. In fact, many people "heard" Luther's pamphlets
read by someone else, both because some of the listeners were not literate
and because oral reading was still a significant public act. Preachers
often mediated Luther's writings in the public square, perhaps just as
Internet content today is mediated especially by journalists. Printing
probably changed the nature of some public discourse, but public
discourse, including sermons, itself probably changed how people read or
at least how they interpreted the written and printed word. The historical
impact of the printing press on religion shows how complex the impacts of
new technologies in society really are. Within the Christian church the
new technology fragmented theology and ecclesiology, producing
Protestantism in all of its variety, dynamism, confusion and
contradiction.
But as Eisenstein shows, the same presses "created a new vested
interest in ecumenical concord and toleration" -- namely, scientific ways
of thinking and knowing. As Luther and other evangelicals used the new
technology to preach the gospel-or at least their own version of it-they
also encouraged printing and reading per se. Christians' expanded thirst
for reading "tapped a vast reservoir of latent scientific talent by
eliciting contributions from reckon-masters, instrument-makers and
artist-engineers." As odd as it seems today, this thirst for reading
fueled a renewed drive within humankind for a kind of scientific
ecumenism, or scientific dogmatism, depending on one's point of view.
Nothing was more important for the rise of scientific communities across
geographic space than the printing press. This technology became part of
the human quest for a unified approach to mathematics, natural
investigation and scholarship in general.
Gutenberg's investors had no clue about what would eventually happen
with the technology they capitalized. On the one hand, science has grown
in stature and cross-cultural impact even through the ages of electronic
and now digital media. On the other hand, various religious groups have
used the Good Book and their own commentaries and other writings to foster
alternative views of truth. In fact, some of the most print-based
religious groups are the fundamentalists, who often view the scriptures
reverently, much the way that some scientists view their textbooks and
professional journals. Somewhere in between, or across, these sides of the
print divide, science has created an amazing consensus of thought that
permeates even modern religious cultures.
Perhaps the internet is doing all of the above and more: encouraging
and unifying small religious and other movements; further facilitating
scientific unification across geographic proximity, if not also creating
new scientific theories and concepts; fostering the rise of new forms of
spiritual irrationalism such as those discussed in Wendy Kaminer's wild
book, Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials; focusing the public even
more on particular public personas in news, sports and everything else;
creating new classes of investors who are willing to publish online just
about anything, regardless of whether or not they agree with it;
germinating new technological ideas that are luring capitalists who hold
unreasonable expectations of financial bonanzas. The truth is that all
kinds of ironic, contradictory and even seemingly regressive things are
happening in the Internet world, and we have barely a clue how to
interpret it all. We, too, have our Gutenbergs and Luthers and all of the
additional characters that make the current times so interesting and
challenging. And thank God for contrarians like Albert Borgman (Holding
On to Reality) and Stephen Talbott (The Future Does Not
Compute), who are helping to highlight the folly of our ways in
a digital world.
If God is behind all of this, God surely has a sense of humor. If we
are in charge of our own destinies, we are truly "lost in the cosmos," to
steal a title from Walker Percy's marvelous work, subtitled The Last
Self-Help Book. But one thing is certain: our utopianism about all of
the benefits of the Internet is misguided. We are all in for serendipitous
developments and historical reversals that will show us just how important
our political, economic, governmental and religious institutions are in
shaping the future. I doubt that technology itself will ever deliver more
than the level of responsibility that we bring to our modems, our
speakers' platforms and our online and printed publications. Science and
technology change, but human nature is remarkably consistent, confusing
and confounding.
Copyright 2001 CHRISTIAN CENTURY. Reproduced by permission from the January 31, 2001 issue of the CHRISTIAN CENTURY. Subscriptions: $49/year from P.O. Box 378, Mt. Morris, IL 61054. 1-800-208-4097
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