{"id":18156,"date":"2011-07-25T08:16:04","date_gmt":"2011-07-25T15:16:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/?p=18156"},"modified":"2012-09-03T07:26:27","modified_gmt":"2012-09-03T14:26:27","slug":"a-fifteenth-century-technopanic-about-the-horrors-of-the-printing-press","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/a-fifteenth-century-technopanic-about-the-horrors-of-the-printing-press\/","title":{"rendered":"A Fifteenth Century Technopanic About The Horrors Of The Printing Press"},"content":{"rendered":"

C4SIF.org<\/a> | In talking about various technopanics over time, there\u2019s always someone who hates some new technology because it somehow \u201cundermines\u201d the good \u201cway things were.\u201d These days, think of the books by the likes of Nick Carr or Andrew Keen, who focus on just how awful new technology is making people, compared to \u201cback in their day\u2026\u201d when things were just lovely. Yet, as we\u2019ve pointed out, these sorts of complaints about new technology happen throughout history<\/a>, such as the attacks on the telephone (makes men lazy and breaks up your home life) and novels (corrupts the mind). But sometimes it goes back much, much further. In the past, we\u2019ve even joked<\/a> about those \u201cpoor monks\u201d put out of the scribe business by the printing press.<\/p>\n

But what we didn\u2019t realize was there actually was just such a concern at the time.<\/p>\n

ChurchHatesTucker<\/a> points us to a wonderful historical analysis of a 15th century luddite, abbot Johannes Trithemius<\/a>, who was no fan of the printing press<\/a>, because of what it was going to do to those poor monks. It wasn\u2019t just that it would put them out of work, but that it would impact their souls. He worried that the printing press would make monks lazy.<\/p>\n

It was okay that the act of copying was hard. It built character, in Trithemius\u2019 opinion, the same way as chopping wood (though to this \u201cinterior exercise,\u201d i.e. exercise of the spirit, he assigned far more importance). For monks, labor was part and parcel of devotion, and if you weren\u2019t good at writing, you could do binding, or painting, or for heaven\u2019s sake practice. And it goes even further: the labor of manuscript writing was something for monks to do \u2014 for there was no greater danger for the devout soul than idleness.<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n

For among all the manual exercises, none is so seemly to monks as devotion to the writing of sacred texts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He also pulls out the typical \u201cbut this new fangled thing just isn\u2019t as nice as the old stuff\u201d:<\/p>\n

He does spend some time talking about practical reasons that printed books weren\u2019t anything to get bothered about: their paper wasn\u2019t as permanent as the parchment the monks used (he even advocates the hand-copying of \u201cuseful\u201d printed works for their preservation); there weren\u2019t very many books in print, and they were hard to find; they were constrained by the limitations of type, and were therefore ugly. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And then there\u2019s just the fact that if you\u2019re not writing a book, you don\u2019t really \u201cget\u201d it:<\/p>\n

He who ceases from zeal for writing because of printing is no true lover of the Scriptures. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Honestly, it sounds like a near perfect 15th century version of Nick Carr. Carr loves books, but frets about what the internet is doing to our appreciation of books. But, of course, this all seems to come back to Douglas Adams\u2019 famous saying, which I\u2019ll paraphrase: everything that exists before you were born is just normal, the way things should be. Everything that is invented from your birth until you\u2019re about thirty is cool and neat and innovative. And everything invented after you\u2019re thirty is \u201cagainst the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it.\u201d Read More<\/a><\/p>\n


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C4SIF.org | In talking about various technopanics over time, there\u2019s always someone who hates some new technology because it somehow \u201cundermines\u201d the good \u201cway things were.\u201d These days, think of the books by the likes of Nick Carr or Andrew Keen, who focus on just how awful new technology is making people, compared to \u201cback […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[294],"tags":[159],"class_list":["post-18156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article","tag-copyright"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18156"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18156\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}