1. Six Information Revolutions
From A History of Mass Communication:
Six Information Revolutions
by Irving E. Fang

2. Six Information Revolutions
1. Writing Revolution
- 8th century B.C. Greece
- convergence of the phonetic alphabet
from the east and the papyrus, an
import from Egypt to the south
- writing is used to store knowledge
- “the human mind would no longer be
constrained by the limits of
memory.”

3. Six Information Revolutions
2. Printing Revolution
- second half of the 15th
century Europe
- convergence of paper from China
(originally from Arab and Moorish
cultures) and a printing system by
German goldsmith Johannes
Gutenberg
- “With printing, information spread
through many layers of society.”

4. Six Information Revolutions
3. Mass Media Revolution
- middle of 19th century Europe and US
- convergence of advances in paper
production and printing press
methods
- newspapers and magazines reached
the common man
- “For the masses, literacy came within
reach.”

5. Six Information Revolutions
4. Entertainment Revolution
- end of 19th
century in Europe and
America
- stored sound, affordable cameras and
motion photography
- “Like the pots and oans coming off
the assembly lines of the Industrial
Revolution, entertainment could now
be infinetely replicated and canned.”

6. Six Information Revolutions
5. Creation of the Communication
Toolshed Home
- middle of 20th
century
- telephone, broadcasting, recording,
improvements in print, cheap
universal mail services
- “…the media of communication have
become inseparable from our lives.”

7. Six Information Revolutions
6. The Information Highway
- at present
- convergence of computer,
broadcasting, satellite and visual
technologies
- “Communication is shaking off
transportation for work, study and
play.”

8. The Printing Press and a
Changing World
From communication.ucsd.edu

9.  “The history of the book presents us with a
complete, observable communications
revolution… By following the developments
in manuscript and print book production,
tied to the changes in the technologies
used to produce those texts, we can also
chart the various changes in social
organization, politics and economics from
the feudalism of the 7th century, through
to the advent and advance of early
capitalism in the 15th century.”

10. Four Important Periods in the
History of Printing
I. 7th to 13th Century: The age of religious
"manuscript" book production. Books in
this period are entirely constructed by
hand, and are largely religious texts
whose creation is meant as an act of
worship.
- 12th
-3th century: rise of the merchant class,
rising interest in the outside world

11. - Universities were created in Europe
- “These were major sites for the
institution of a new relationship to
books, to learning, and to the Word of
God.”
- “Learning in Europe had been
dominated by the Roman Catholic
Church. With the advent of the secular
university, students were no longer
studying for the clergy.” (since
merchants have different interests
from priests)

12. - these new centers of learning created
demands for books
- books were locked away in monasteries
- Two new kinds of institutions grew up around
the universities: stationers and book copiers.
These folks provided paper and libraries of
text books that had been carefully studied
and compared to other books for accuracy.
They made these books available for copying
by students. When a student needed a text
for a class, he would go down to the
stationers and copy them - by hand. Or he
could pay a book copier to copy the book for
him.
- there were a lot of inaccuracies and mistakes
in the copies

13. Changing images…leaning to realism
Images of their own social world
Hours of Catherine
Cleves 1140
Holoy Family with
Jesus in a walker
New kind of
realism in
religious pictures
Tacuinum Sanitatis
10th
century
How-to books

14. Books were secular…
Chirurgi Magna
1363
First book on
surgery
Canterbury Tales
1387

15. Four Important Periods in the
History of Printing
II. 13th to 15th Century: The
secularization of book production.
Books are beginning to be produced
that do not serve as objects of
worship, but that try to explain
something about the observable
world. The difficulty with the spread
of such knowledge is that production
is still taking place via pre-print -
manuscript - methods.

16. 1452 – the Gutenberg Printing Press
- technologies of paper, oil-based ink
and the wine-press to print books
- “One thing to remember is that
Gutenberg gets credit for an
invention that is thought to have
been developed simultaneously in
Holland and in Prague.”

17. - “Gutenberg's contribution to printing was
the development of a a punch and mold
system which allowed the mass production
of the movable type used to reproduce a
page of text. These letters would be put
together in a type tray which was then
used to print a page of text. If a letter
broke down, it could be replaced. When the
printing of the copies of one page was
finished, the type could be reused for the
next page or the next book.”

18. - The printed book quickly becomes a
regular object in the world. By 1501
there were 1000 printing shops in
Europe, which had produced 35,000
titles and 20 million copies.