The most revolutionary invention of the last two thousand years
The past two millennia has been riddled with inventions that have revolutionized the world
Significantly: electricity, the Indo-Arabic number system (from zero to nine), weapons, birth control pills, the idea that we are all the same, the idea of being unconscious (Freud), the organization of science, the valve Thermionics –DeForest in 1915 — which followed by the transistor in 1945 –Bardeen and Shockley — gave rise to our electronic age, the current educational system, among other lots of devices and ideas. However, it seems to me that the printing press has changed the world more than any other invention. But why did such simple technology have this enormous influence? And why, after 500 years, has no one invented a superior replacement?
I suspect it is because the text has a special relationship with the human mind. Printing is the - umpteenth - biggest wave of innovation, which has started with the co-evolution of language, thought and speech. Discourse - speech - allows us to share and compare internal models of thought with the outside world, a capacity that gives us enormous selective advantages. However, the sounds are ephemeral, they disappear the moment you wonder who said what and when did they say it?
The writing - the previous wave - is like an explosion of hot air that catches the words in flight and crashes them against a page where they can be examined by anyone, anywhere and at any time. Writing makes laws, contracts, history, stories, and poetry possible, not to mention sacred texts with their overwhelming influence. Printing massifies and transforms writing into the medium of communication par excellence, and the world has never been the same since then. In the five hundred years that followed the Gutenberg Bible after the fifteenth century, millions of books have been printed. Suddenly, it was worth it, and soon it became essential, even for ordinary people, to learn to read. Now, people whose brains have trouble with this trick are at a serious disadvantage, while others, with special overflowing happiness, can make a living just by organizing words on paper.
But Information and Communication Technologies raises a new question: Is text more than a temporary resource, necessary due to the lack of means to register and transmit voice and images? We'll see. In a few years, sensors, storage, and bandwidth will be so cheap that many people will be restricted only by technical limitations. At some point in human history, anyone will have the ability to transmit their ideas through images and sounds, as has been done until today, letter by letter, with text.
What we know as technology, the visible objects that buzz and shine, are only the physical manifestation of a specific type of social system - invisible - that emerged more or less three centuries ago and that we know today as “Techniques”. The printing press is, without a doubt, the most important tool in the last two thousand years and has contributed to improving our ability to turn knowledge - into Power - into today's inventions that have become our only competitor in evolution.
From its early days of movable type to ours, of photons and a global electronic spiderweb, the printing press has given its best. The World Wide Web is just another form of printing and Gutenberg would be proud to see how far his initial invention has taken us. However, and perhaps I am arrogant in my opinion, I am afraid that in the future –that my grandchildren and their children will enjoy–, the communication tools will not be anywhere near today.