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on a wide range of human movements—including literature, politics, government,
economics, religion, and philosophy—the influence of the medium itself often goes
unnoted due to the attention to the content it carries. While literature on the
history of printing is growing, such studies “are isolated and artificially sealed off
from the rest of historical literature.” The influences of print, Eisenstein noted, are
difficult to precisely determine and describe. 76
Historians working centuries after the introduction of an influential
medium are likely to take for granted the existence of the medium as it has evolved
by their own time. At the present time, for example, television, computers, and cell
phones have had major influences just now being recognized. Those growing up
with such new media technologies are virtually unable to conceive an existence
without such devices. Yet for those literally watching those changes, it is simple to
observe that constant, instant communication with portable, pocket telephones is
extremely different from occasional use of devices tied to wires. The influence upon
communication extends to the medium, not just in the words sent to others.
Sorting out just how that changes individuals and the larger society is more difficult
to determine. To look back several hundred years, discerning how the new medium
of print changed a society is even more complicated to observe and impossible to
quantify. While examples of such changes in culture and society can be found in
contemporary print and writing, determining causality is seemingly impossible.
Several historians of Europe have related these transformational
characteristics of printing to major cultural shifts and political revolution. When
Eisenstein referred to the printing press in early modern Europe as an “Agent of
Change,” she described it as the “crucible” within which modern science, the
Reformation, and the Enlightenment were formed. The comparative fixity of
printed texts, their wider circulation, and that fact that print made older works and
76 Eisenstein, “The Rise of the Reading Public,” in David Crowley and Paul Heyer, eds.,
Communication in History: Technology, Culture, Society (New York: Longman, 1991), 94-102.