19th Century Moral Panic Over Paper Technology (2017) | Hacker News Reader

19th Century Moral Panic Over Paper Technology (2017)

slate.com

72 pointsmonort21 comments

This reminds me of the destkop publishing revolution that started in the 1980's. Some dire predictions about the devaluation and trashification of printed material, from books to newsletters, and of the printing industry, now that anyone could relatively cheaply and easily print what they needed on their personal printer using the newfangled personal computer instead of having to take their work to a professional printer to have it printed for prices that were unaffordable for most individuals.

Now no one thinks much about them anymore, but personal printers were once new and considered to be a radical disruptive technology.

That really goes for any new technology that makes the dissemination of information more easily accessible to the common man, and/or makes it easy to duplicate works.

The printing press, magnetic tape, CD burners, MP3, peer-to-peer filesharing, high speed internet, the list will go on forever.

Anything that lets ordinary people duplicate and share information will be vilified and demonized by those in power, because they know their power is built on an information monopoly.

>trashification of printed material

Surprisingly for them, the opposite happened, computers were trashified.

The predictions were 100 % correct. The rules and good practices of typography for the presentation for the presentation of written materials had been refined by scribes and printers over 3000 years. Generally, they would be followed, because the barrier to entry would be high, equipment would be expensive to buy and it would take long to learn its proper use. Consequently printed material would be expensive, and the buyer would expect decent presentation for their money.

Suddenly, Desktop Publishing as it was called, shows up, and people produce printed materials that looks as if someone hadn't even spent 2 weeks of learning the most basic conventions.

And that's perfectly fine. Let people play around. If it looks like shit, people will tell them so.

Needless adherence to a set of optuse rules stifles the creative spirit.

Most of those rules were driven by anything but practical concerns. Typography in Europe was dominated by "picket fence" black-letter scripts which emphasized the vertical strokes to the near exclusion of everything else, rendering the script difficult to read even for that subset of the population which read professionally. Newspapers until very recently were horrendous evenly-spaced columns of monotonous walls of text with barely any more formatting than punctuation. Until the modern era, graphic design and to some extent design in general focused on adding more and more minute details, as if the purpose of design was to demonstrate you cared by how much time it must have have taken to produce the thing by hand. The more details, regardless of their function, the more effort it must have taken and thus the more professional it must be. If you ever have the chance to take a history of graphic design course, you'll see it's basically culture driving it with little understanding or theory. It's not really a refinement created through 3000 years of scientific inquiry and we can place our trust in the traditions of skilled artisans who built this system for us. There really isn't a system until maybe around the turn of the century. It's basically just random bullshit and we're only just starting to figure things out more formally.

> Suddenly, Desktop Publishing as it was called, shows up, and people produce printed materials that looks as if someone hadn't even spent 2 weeks of learning the most basic conventions.

I shall take this opportunity to remind you of the internet of the '90s...

Interesting. Intuitively I would expect one of the effects of the internet/computers/smartphones would be to further reduce illiteracy, since it is mostly text based, and it is more engaging to teenagers than books were.

That seems to be the case. Found some chart for France of illiteracy by birth year [1] [2]. There might be other factors but I kind of doubt that schools have improved much for generations born in the early 80s vs late 80s, while illiteracy dropped by about a third to half.

[1] https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/graphique/1281410/graph...

[2] https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/1281410

I sometimes work with old newspapers in bound volumes. It is immediately obvious when a newspaper switched to wood pulp, typically in the 1870s. The earlier editions are beautiful, the pages supple and in nearly as good condition as they were new. Then as soon as the switch occurs the pages are yellow and brittle. The challenge is to turn the page without it crumbling.

The notion that media change society has been most compellingly been explored in Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979), itself strongly inspired by Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy.

https://www.worldcat.org/title/printing-press-as-an-agent-of...

The impact really cannot be overstated, though it's often more subtle (though deeper) than portrayed.

And yet now every media outlet and pundit blames everything on the proliferation of fake news made possible because of easy access to sharing ideas. History does repeat itself.

I don't think it's the same thing now - media is much more targeted and personalised than has been possible before. Newspapers were nowhere near as effective as the modern, tracked Internet.

Well, another option is that they weren't wrong in the 19th century, and they're not wrong now.

Agreed, but I like the article because it turns moral panic into something as normal as weather.

Ah, yes, and every curve is a line.

If some amount of something didn't have meaningfully negative effects, than a vastly increased amount of that same thing can't possibly have negative effects!

Both are true. It takes society time to learn to deal with anything that makes disseminating ideas easier.

Confusing the tool for the effect.

Advertisements and propaganda actually work that's why so much is spent on them. You can often exactly measure the effect. But blaming radio, TV, magazines, billboards, comic books or the social web is incorrect: it's not the medium it's the message that has an effect.

And the message needs to be a certain form. Generic pulp novels and shooter games clearly do not cause violence where other forms of messaging do. Witch burning, lynchings and demagogues clearly come from some style of message that can drive masses of people simultaneously.

The medium is the message.

> it's not the medium it's the message that has an effect.

Exactly.

Thousands of years ago Socrates was complaining about the invention of writing which would "create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves".

Hundreds of years ago due to the invention of printing press "there was growing concern (...) that these cheap, plentiful books were seducing children into a life of crime and violence".

And today people worry about TV, video games, etc. - while at the same time holding books as the holy grail of knowledge.

All these are merely mediums for transfer of ideas. Blame the message, not the messenger.

This is really interesting. Decentralizing information and knowledge has been a good thing for a long time :-)

And now I eventually understand what "pulp fiction" means. Great article indeed.

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