Untitled - witz cultural

33AN tNrRoDUcroNstudentsofthehistoryoftheculturaleffectsofprinttechnologyhaveshown,Gutenberg's invention produced what we today understand as scholarshipand criticism in the humanities. No longer primarily occupied by the task ofpreserving information in the form of fragile manuscripts that degraded withfrequent use, scholars, working with books, developed new conceptions ofscholarship, originality, and authorial properfy.Hand-set printing with movable type permits large numbers of readerswidely separated in time and space to encounter essentially the same textandhence creates a new kind of virrual community of readers and manyother things basic to modern culture. The existence of multiple copies of thesame te)ct permits readers hundreds of miles and hundreds of years apart torefer to specific passages by page number. Printing, which thus exemplifiesasynchronous, silent communication, provides the conditions for the developmentof a humanistic and scientific culture dependent on the ability to citeand discuss specific details of individual texts. And of course it drasticallychanges the nature of education, which moves from dictating primary textsto the student to teaching the student modes of critical analysis. "Even in theearly eighteenth century," Mcluhan reminds us, "a 'textbook'was still definedas a 'Classick Author written very wide by Students, to give room for anInterpretation dictated by the Master, &c., to be inserted in the Interlines'(O.E.D.). Before printing, much of the time in school and college classroomswas spent in making such texts" (Understanding Media, t89).High-speed printing, which appeared in the nineteenth century trulyacted as a democratizing force, producing many of our conceptions of selfintellectual property, and education. In addition to creating a virhral communityofreaders, the relatively inexpensive texts created by high-speed printingradically changed the notions of an earlier manuscript culture about how topreserve texts: with printing, one preserves texts by creating and distributingmultiple copies of them rather than, as with manuscripts, which eventuallydegrade after many readings, protecting the text by permitting fewer peopleto have access to it. As we all know the book also functions as a kind of selfteachingmachine that turns out to be far more accessible and hence morequickly democratizing than manuscript texts can ever be.Although the fixed multiple text produced by print technology has hadenormous effects on modern conceptions of literature, education, and research,it still, as Bush and Nelson emphasize, confronts the knowledge workerwith the fundamental problem of an information retrieval system based onphysical instantiations of text-namely, that preserving information in afixed, unchangeable linear format makes information retrieval difficult.