Better, Faster, Cheaper

It’s interesting to note the parallels between the printing revolution and the modern technological revolution brought about by the computer and the Internet. In both cases the distribution of information created an increase in levels of consistency and entrenchment of standards. Although there is clearly a difference between manual calculations and handwritten books, the common denominator of manual labor and all its perils were inherent in both. Just as the need for 10 copyists to serve one clerk in the 1450s created a bottleneck in information distribution, extensive manual calculations done by hand created a bottleneck in mathematical formulations. Errors in literary duplication must’ve been the norm in much the way that errors in handmade calculations were commonplace until the invention of the computer.

After the advent of printing, pneumonic devices and memorable rhyme schemes also lost prevalence. After the widespread adoption of the Internet, the necessity of books has greatly diminished in much the same fashion. The trend, not surprisingly, is towards offloading information from individual memory into a collective source that is easily retrievable in a timely fashion. As the world becomes more complex in terms of its various minutia and sub specialization, the strength of the individual seems to drift towards effective referencing technique, and less on memorization.

Although there is a great deal of standardization that has taken place due to our communication infrastructure, much of it is hardware-based. In some ways the printing revolution was actually more substantial to the fixation of the process by which information is transferred. The substantial diminishment of individual interpretation occurred when typeface and authorship authenticity concerns become commonplace. The printing revolution in many ways standardized and ensconced the evolving variation within the transmission of stories, language and other forms of communication, and the effect must have been substantial.