The Origins of a Free Press in Prerevolutionary ... - Web Publishing

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distributed annuals were part of a major paradigm shift. Matthew Shaw suggested
that in the British-American colonial world, “Almanacs played an intimate part in
the shift from a predominantly oral culture, to one in which the authority of print
was paramount.” 62 As cultural historian Lawrence Levine observed, the spread of
literacy has profound and revolutionary changes on a society. Levine noted
differences between oral societies and those that utilized writing, and he turned to
multidisciplinary research to understand the meaning. Levine reached across fields
to theories from psychology, anthropology, and communication to explore the
overall psychological and social changes spurred by a new print culture. Literate
societies, he noted, are quite different from non-literate societies, reflected in the
way that people within these societies are capable of thinking. Levine’s analysis is
crucial to understanding the influences as print culture spread beyond the elites,
beyond the middling sorts, down to the small farmers and workers. 63
Levine pointed to groundbreaking work by J. C. Carothers and Marshall
McLuhan who examined how a new communication medium itself—separate from
its content—can bring these changes. As Carothers wrote from the perspective of
an ethnopsychiatrist, literate people live in a visual world, a fundamental key to the
development of thought. In a preliterate world, words have a magic power, the
same power possessed by whatever the word represents: “it was only when the
written, and still more the printed, word appeared upon the scene that the stage was
set for words to lose their magic powers and vulnerabilities.” It is not a coincidence
that scientific thinking did not emerge until after printing spread. Written language
62 Shaw, “Almanacs and the Atlantic World,” 2. This is not meant to imply that oral or
scribal culture was—or has been—killed off by print. In reality, they still coexist today, but the
emphasis, the predominant medium, has shifted—and still shifts today. See, for example,
Chartier, Cultural Uses of Print, 5, where he noted that no culture is completely oral or completely
print-based, but rather that, “different media and multiple practices almost always mingled in
complex ways.”
63 Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from
Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 157.