Information flow and the printing press (also networks)

The invention of the printing press, like all of the other technologies we've discussed, had the effect of changing the flow of information throughout society. Previously, books were hand written, usually by monks, and reserved for the wealthy and for the church. In this way, the printing press brought books and discourse to the people. But I think this disguises the true effect it's invention had on how people shared information. The bible, most notably, and other academic writings became available to everyone, but so did published versions of what used to be gathered from friends and neighbors. On page 40, Einstein writes, "Insteadof a cross-fire of gossip conveying random impressions about what was expected or haphazard interpretations of what a sermon meant, books came that set forth (with all the i's dotted and all the t's crossed) precise codes for behavior that godly householders should observe. These codes were known to others-to relatives and neighbors-as well as to oneself." For this type of information, distribution became more centralized after Gutenberg, not less. Cue the Internet. In a similar fashion, even as scholarly information becomes more centralized a la Wikipedia, social information has once more been decentralized. We now receive ideas and interpretations from peers, but peers from around the world, not just our immediate vicinity. The shift from person to person information flow to book to person was accompanied by more walls and privacy between neighbors, and the shift back has been accompanied by the reverse. Look no further than the Facebook privacy scandals. Tv and radio certainly had intermediate roles, but I think it's safe to say that the internet has refocused out attentions on the norms and social codes of our peers, without the intermediaries of publishing houses. I couldn't help but notice while I was taking notes that I'm basically talking about network theory. Roughly speaking, for casual communication before the printing press, we can used a decentralized but only somewhat interconnected graph, followed by a far more centralized one after the printing press, with publishing houses as the hub nodes. With the Internet, we move back to a decentralized model, but with far more inter connectivity, approaching a complete graph.