The Gutenberg Printing Press was invented in 1436. Overnight, literacy rose, books spread. Copernicus published his heliocentric work on astronomy, Martin Luther’s pamphlets upended both religious and political stability. By 1500 there were 20 million books and we entered the beginning of the modern world.
Between 1436 and 1500? Chaos. There were competing versions of Aristotle. Chaotic spellings of local dialects. Missing chapters from Greek masters. People didn’t know what to believe, what to think, or how to spell. That’s what revolutions are like: the old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff can be built.
Right now, we’re living in the year 1500. They call this a digital revolution. And it’s true that everything’s chaotic again. But that’s what happens in revolutions. Know what else happens right before revolutions? Mass Media. Whether it’s the Arab Spring and Twitter or our American Revolution and newspapers.
That’s right; NYU’s Media Professor, Mitchell Stephens writes in History of Newspapers:
“For the most part, American newspapers in the years leading up to the American Revolution represented something the world had never before seen: a press committed to challenging, even overthrowing, governmental authorities. This remains an unusual and difficult position for newspapers to take. Unlike pamphlets or broadsides, newspapers must appear regularly. Their publishers cannot hide from authorities, and, as proprietors of an ongoing business, they usually have a stake in the stability of the community and therefore in preserving the power of authorities. This tends to make newspapers conservative forces, more likely to try to unify the members of a community than to try to incite them to anti-authoritarian violence. One explanation for the uncharacteristic role the papers played before the American Revolution is that they were in fact unifying and supporting a community — a new community that was forming within the British Empire, of Americans. These newspapers were in a sense loyal to the authorities — the new authorities who had appeared on the continent: the Sons of Liberty.”
Shortly thereafter, with the rise of the Penny Press in the late 1820s, adult literacy exploded again. People’s worlds expanded. They began to demand more. They read about peasants in neighboring countries rising against monarchies and believed they could do it too.
In the years between 1836-1890 there were rebellions and revolutions in France, Belgium, Poland, South Wales, Bosnia, France again, Algeria, Vietnam, Dagestan, Brazil, Canada, Afghanistan, Mexico; hell in 1848 alone there were revolutions in Italy, Germany, Denmark, Hungary, Switzerland, Ukraine, Poland, Belgium and France again, plus Ireland, Wales, Colombia, Brazil, Romania, Transylvania, Sri Lanka; after that wave there was Shanghai, again Vietnam, Burma, China, India, Mexico, Estonia, another round in Mexico, Italy, and Poland, then Jamaica joined the fun, plus Siberia, Japan, naturally Ireland again with Spain, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, Guatemala, India, Herzegovinia, Bulgaria, and Peru for good measure, one more go around for Vietnam, plus native Americans in Canada, and the US, then Indonesia, Korea, and again Peru. Seriously.
Exactly four-hundred years after Gutenberg kicked off decades of chaos, the Penny Press did the same.
I’m not suggesting this conflagration was because of the Penny Presses any more than I think wildfires are started by wind. No, my point is our politics gets ugly when there’s high poverty, high literacy, high economic disparity, and lots of news sources. So buckle your safety belts, it’s going to be a rough decade.