Printing press hastened revolutions
Now it's the Internet's turn
By Deirdre Griswold
The speed at which a new international anti-war movement has
developed has stunned the ruling classes everywhere and elated
those pressing for social justice and equality. Many have
observed that this was impossible before the Internet brought
the world together as never before.
What an irony. Because the Internet was first developed by
the Pentagon to meet its own needs for high-speed communication
for military research and development.
It quickly became an indispensable business tool--as the
mushrooming up of dot-com industries showed in the 1990s. But
once computers and Internet access became affordable to workers
and students, and the knowledge to use them efficiently spread
throughout the working class, the genie was really out of the
bottle.
Not since the invention of movable type and the first
printing of books back in the 15th century has a new technology
of communication had such a profound impact on social
movements.
Printing was actually invented first in China. But the
Chinese language had 80,000 different characters instead of a
short phonetic alphabet, so printing books was not practical.
In Europe, improvements in paper and printing, some learned
from the East, coincided with great peasant rebellions against
the landed estates as feudal authority was beginning to break
up. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed as the nobles
tried to repress these peasant wars. In addition, the needs of
a rising bourgeoisie for free trade were fast coming in
conflict with feudal restrictions.
By the 1400s, much of the impetus for social change was
being directed against the Catholic Church, which not only
owned huge tracts of land where it oppressed the peasants but
also had a monopoly on learning. Monks with quill pens were the
guardians of the written word. Monasteries were the libraries
of the Middle Ages. Only priests were allowed to interpret the
word of god.
Then came the Gutenberg Bible, named for Johannes Gutenberg.
It was the first Bible put out on a printing press, making it
affordable to the rising merchants and artisans of the day.
Poring over its words, those seeking authority for their
dangerous new thoughts about what society should be like could
find in the Bible's parables and stories the justification they
needed for taking on the old social order. They no longer had
to bow down to the Biblical interpretations cautiously doled
out by the priesthood. Clutching their newly printed books,
they were soon rising up in mighty armies against the status
quo.
Of course, the printing press also facilitated the spread of
other information that stimulated commerce and the
scientific-technological revolution. But its most famous early
achievement was the Gutenberg Bible.
The Protestant Reformation was the beginning of a revolution
in Europe to replace feudalism with capitalism, but this
upheaval was at first expressed as a struggle over religious
dogma.
It took further developments--both in the growth of science
and technology and in the rise of both bourgeoisie and
proletariat--for the Reformation to evolve into the
Enlightenment. By the 18th century, the bourgeois radicals in
the French Revolution, who called for "liberty, equality and
fraternity," no longer leaned on theology to justify their
battle for social change.
Is today's Internet, like the printing press of Gutenberg's
day, going to be the catalyst for another, deeper social
change, so desperately needed and so long in the making? It
certainly has a lot going for it.
Speed of dissemination makes it an ideal organizing tool for
mass movements. Also, emails can be sent at no extra cost to
tens of thousands of people. Web sites are accessible to anyone
with a computer. And while that was once prohibitive for the
majority of workers, computers are now affordable in much of
the world. Even if they don't own a computer, students and
workers can access them at schools, libraries and cyber
cafes.
Use of the Internet has exploded even as the corporate media
have become more controlled and monopolized than ever. People
in smaller cities and towns, especially, are at the tender
mercies of the television networks and a few so-called
newspapers like USA Today. But millions now surf the web and
find what they can never get from their local media: news and
opinion contradicting the establishment view.
This partly explains the unexpectedly high level of anti-war
activity outside the big cities--that and the increasing
poverty and joblessness in many less populated areas.
In addition to speed and low cost, the Internet is having
another very profound effect. It is not a one-way street. It
allows people to exchange views with one another in a less
inhibiting forum than most public encounters.
Much publicity is given to the dangers of the Internet, its
use by sexual predators and so on. But most people know that
this is a medium in which they can express their deepest
thoughts with fewer inhibitions. If they want, they can do it
anonymously. How they look, dress, whether they live in a shack
or a palace, whether they're on opposite ends of the earth,
they can talk to each other as long as they share a common
language. And there's always :-) symbols when words run
out.
It can be a form of communication stripped of all that is
superficial and that evades capitalist society's prejudices. It
can reinforce a sense of common humanity.
Humor has blossomed on the Internet. People in chat rooms
often treat each other with affection and warmth, even though
in many ways they are total strangers. While the themes of
television and movies so often terrify and belittle people,
they feel empowered on the Internet.
It's too early to know all the social ramifications of the
Internet. But, coming at a time when the contradictions of
capitalism become more frustrating and criminal every day, it
has fantastic potential for helping to punch through a path to
the future.
Reprinted from the March 20, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyrighted
under a Creative
Commons License.
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