To be connected to one’s fellow man

Means one stays alone for a span

Oh the things schoolboys glean

From lewd magazines

Or reading a Bible that’s banned

Eisenstein posits a great deal of information to digest in a mere fifty pages. While casual students of history take it for granted that the advent of the printing press precipitated things like the Protestant Reformation, there is a great deal of assumed gradualness about the process of disseminating printed documents to the masses. However, not only does Eisenstein dispute these assumptions, she also raises the idea that the act of pushing people away from illuminated manuscripts and towards print began a process of standardizing thinking while it standardized textual presentation. Moreover, the idea of the burgeoning print industry crossing national, religious and linguistic boundaries is an extremely compelling one. The power of print to duplicate and disseminate in a way that far outstripped scribal work completely changed the face of nearly every field- from law to astronomy.

Above all, the most interesting part of the reading was the exploration of the gradual solipsistic isolation and self-reflection that people found themselves in once literacy had become so pervasive. “Not a desire to withdraw from a worldly society or the city of man but a gregarious curiosity about them could by the eighteenth century be satisfied by silent perusal of journals, gazettes, or newsletters. Increasingly the well-informed man of affairs had to spend part of each day in temporary isolation from his fellowmen.” (p. 41) This notion of technology being an agent of simultaneous unification and isolation is one that we will doubtless keep returning to as every technical advance since—the radio, television, computer and mobile devices- continue to advance this seemingly contradictory state.