Sunday, August 19, 2007

Eisenstein's Changes: Printing and the Web

In “The Printing Press As an Agent of Change”, Elizabeth Eisenstein listed six consequences of the shift from handwritten manuscripts to printed material.

Eisenstein’s consequences of printing were:

1)Dissemination
Printing spread information far and wide in books, pamphlets, newspapers, broadsides and other material. In the space of a hundred years or so, Europe went from being an information-poor society to a (comparatively) information-rich one.

2)Standardization
Everything from spelling to language became more uniform. It’s no accident that English as a unified language really emerges during the period when printing became popular.

3)Reorganization
With printing came the ability to organize material more effectively. In fact as information proliferated, organization became more important. Arranging information alphabetically really got its start during this period.

4)Data collection
Printing didn’t exactly make data collection easier, but it made it possible to spread the results of the data collected far more widely. Now scholars and merchants hundreds of miles apart could be sure they were working with the same information. It also meant that mistakes and inconsistencies became more obvious.

5)Preservation
With hundreds, or thousands, of copies of texts produced at a time and spread far and wide, the chances that a work would survive became much greater. Even when the religious or secular authorities tried to suppress a work they had much less chance of success.

The Catholic Church may have attempted to suppress Galileo’s “Discourses Concerning Two New Sciences” after it was printed, but before they could do so copies had already reached the Protestant nations of Europe and Galileo’s discoveries were safe.

6)Amplification and reinforcement of existing trends
Everything from nationalism to Protestantism to science to the rise of vernacular languages for scholarly communication were well-established before printing arrived, but printing made all those trends more powerful and spread them more rapidly.

So now it’s 500 years later and we’re in the middle of a shift that’s at least as big as the introduction of printing and moving a lot faster. It’s instructive to compare how Eisenstein’s big six stack up on the internet and other new media.

1) Dissemination:

A big win. The new media spread everything from pornography to philosophy to physics around the world far faster and more efficiently than printed matter ever could.

2) Standardization:

A necessity. Where printing encouraged regional and national customs, languages and views of data, the new media encourage international standardization of everything from language to presentation.

In fact technical standards, from HTML to RSS are central to the new media.

HTML provides a particularly instructive example. Ten years ago, back in the Web Paleozoic, it was accepted practice to use all kinds of non-standard tricks and clever hacks to design ‘killer’ web pages.

Reading books on web design from that era can give you the creeps.

The problem was that these non-standard methods actually interfered with communication because they broke browsers and sometimes even crashed computers. However it was impossible to convince some people that non-adherence to standards was a bad thing. They honestly didn’t understand why they couldn’t use their little hacks to make their web pages look just so. (On their computer and their browser, of course. But hey…)

The other problem goes well beyond web page design. The new media provides us with a raft of tools to aid standardization and we come to rely on them, sometimes to our detriment. The new media are still very much a work in progress and some of our tools just aren’t smart enough to do the job.

Case in point: Spell checkers and the dreaded homonym/homophone problem. Spell checkers ‘know’ that ‘two’ is a word. But so are ‘to’ and ‘two’. If you rely on the spell checker to give you the right variation you’re going to produce anything from occasional illiteratisms to howlers that can make you look like an absolute idiot.

The problem, of course, is that we expect standardization to the point where we’re upset if we don’t get it. We used to deal with this with paid experts called copy editors, or constant reference to dictionaries. Now we just rely on fallible tools and suffer the consequences.

3) Reorganization:

This one is really interesting. In print the reader has virtually no control over organization and presentation of material and even the author frequently doesn’t have much. In the new media we have almost total control over the organization of the material.

In fact we’re so used to being able to reorganize data to meet our whims, never mind our needs, that we feel cheated when we can’t shuffle the data around to suit our fancy.

Case in point: Wordpress.com, the site that used to host this blog, has a number of limitations on what you can do in terms of data organization and presentation. The themes (page templates) in particular suffer from a number of irritating limitations, such as not being able to have a list of previous articles automatically appear on all the templates. That lack of flexibility in data presentation is the main reason I gave up on them.

4) Data collection:

The biggest win of all. The new media are data sponges, soaking in every conceivable kind of data and making it available everywhere in the world. In fact our biggest problem is not drowning in the information tsunami.

That is, of course, one of the big reasons that reorganization is so important. Selecting the kind of data we’re interested in and the view of it we want helps use swim with the data wave instead of being overwhelmed.

5) Preservation:

A major, major lose. Data on the web is not only ephemeral, perhaps worse it is subject to change without notice. What was there last week may not be there today – or it may have been changed to eliminate embarrassing, damaging or particularly useful information.

History, as defined on the web, even more mutable than it was for Winston Smith in 1984. The Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s dystopia had to physically recall and change books before shoving inconvenient material down the memory hole. With the internet, there’s no need to recall anything and the memory hole is as close as the nearest computer.

Factual information disappears in a heartbeat as well. There’s usually a huge loss of information at the end of every semester, as thousands of students leave school and their web accounts are closed. The fact that some of that material is extremely useful to a fair number of people doesn’t protect it. It vanishes silently away, leaving only 404’ed references on Google – and wailing and gnashing of teeth among those for whom the information was important.

6) Amplification and reinforcement of existing trends.

Macrocosmically, yes. Microcosmically, yes and no. The new media reinforces major historical trends like delocalization, disintermediation, specialization and anti-mediocrity.

“As Maine goes, so goes California – except twice as far and four times as fast.” The old joke isn’t quite so funny any more.

All these macrotrends can be traced back hundreds of years, some of them into the High Middle Ages, even before printing. The new media reinforce and accelerate those changes.

At a micro level, the Long Tail Power Law applies with a vengeance. That is to say that the new media offers an enormously wider range of choices in everything from friendships to industrial suppliers. The counter-intuitive result of that is that a few of those choices become enormously more popular than the rest but that the aggregate of the less popular choices is likely to be much greater than the volume of the few enormously more popular choices.

In other words, Britney Spears becomes enormously more popular, but if your tastes run to the pibroch (the classic music of the Highland Bagpipe), you have a lot more choices available to you as well.

The other thing that happens is that as the choice space expands exponentially, people are likely to discover things that they like more among the choices they didn’t know they had before. That tends to produce rapid, and rapidly fluctuating, shifts in relative popularity of the various choices. Today it may be Britney Spears, tomorrow she may be replaced by someone you haven’t heard of yet.

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