ACP 2070
Editing Principles and Practice

Lecture 4
The Type Revolution

1. writing
2. printing
3. computerisation

Each of these involved a massive shift in human consciousness and organisation.

• Writing
  provided an extension of memory for those humans who gained the skill.
  
• Printing
  went beyond that and produced a replacement memory system (libraries and filing systems). This raised the issue of how humans trained themselves to keep track of the system; how they organised themselves socially.
  
• Computerization
  
  entered newspaper production in the 1960s: we are still in the process of discovering the sorts of changes to training and organisation it involves.
  
  The extent of the internet and the growth of social media via hand-held devices are things Anthony Smith could not have fully imagined when he wrote his book in 1980. They are perhaps the major issue of the moment generated by computerisation.
  
  Smith's main interest is the way the computer affects the structures of operation in newspapers and magazines. Computerisation has affected the way individuals work in newspapers. They have become generalists: generating copy, editing, proofreading, layout etc – jobs that used to be performed by specialists.
  
  This has had an impact on certain jobs (eg editing and proofing) and the role and strength of unions in the industry.

One key and most speculative issue is the kind of organization of authority that will arise from the computer revolution and the fundamental changes in terms of power that will emerge. Each previous information revolution has been associated with, has been a fundamental enabling mechanism for, different ways of controlling or dominating human societies. Scribal bureaucracies were different in the nature of their control from typewriter-armed corporate bureaucracies.

(Anthony Smith, Goodbye Gutenberg: The Newspaper Revolution in the 1980s, Oxford University Press, 1980, p.15)

What do we mean by scribal bureaucracy vis-a-vis corporate bureaucracies?

(The Church. So how was the Church different in its control from corporate [print] bureaucracies?)

Social control, only monks/priests could read God's law.

Corporate bureaucracies.

Walter J. Ong

Writing is in a way the most drastic of the three technologies. It initiated what print and computers only continue, the reduction of dynamic sound to quiescent space, the separation of the word from the living present, where alone spoken words can exist.
Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word by Walter J. Ong. (1982) Methuen, London. 

There are two significant media that use type today:
Print and New Media

• Print
  Look at the press in Australian context
• New media
  Showing us the paths type may or may not follow

Print

While writing has been around for thousands of years, print has been around for about 500 years now.mid 15C Johannes Gutenberg invents moveable type – revolutionary.

Explain mechanics

Gutenberg grew up in Mainz, Germany, a wine-growing region. The early modern wine presses had a spindle or screw mechanism and provided Gutenberg with the model for his printing press.

He adapted the pressing power exerted by the platen on the paper so it was even.

He created type pieces from a lead-based alloy, which suited printing purposes so well it is still used today. The mass production of metal letters was achieved by his key invention, a special hand mould, the matrix. The type is put into a matrix to form the page of text, inked, then pressed into paper.

The Latin alphabet proved to be an enormous advantage as it allowed the typesetter to represent any text with a theoretical minimum of only around two dozen different letters.

Gutenberg's basic process remained unchanged for centuries. A punch made of steel, with a mirror image of the letter is struck into a piece of softer metal. Molten metal is poured into this, and you get type. The type is put into a matrix to form the page of text, inked, then pressed into paper.

Prior to this, Writing and image making had been the means through which humans could record their experiences, history, law, religion and culture.

Print enabled the wide and multiple dissemination of these records.

Instead of needing a monk to finish the handwriting of a manuscript, the power of textual reproduction came in the hands of the person who could use and control the moveable type.

http://prodigi.bl.uk/gutenbg/default.asp

http://molcat1.bl.uk/TreasuresImages%5CGutenberg%5Cmax/kl1/001.jpg

The first book printed was the bible and it is no co-incidence that the first product of this technological development was part of European expansion into the colonial world.

The Bible was used by missionaries as a means of winning over native people to the value of an imported European civilisation.

The flip side is that while this increased the global significance and influence of Christianity, it diminished the power of the clergy in Europe.

No longer were they a vital cog in textual reproduction. The widespread dissemination of texts also meant that the religious structure lost a degree of control over the translation and interpretation of the Bible and other texts. Publishing became a feasible option for lay people.

There is a strong argument to make that the development this represents far surpasses any subsequent one in the history of communications – including tv, the pc, and the www.

Digression: Which is the best form of information storage technology we have available to us?Criteria (compactness, portability, longevity, durability, hardiness, accessibility)

• CD and DVD
• Computer hard drive
• On-line storage
• memory sticks
• Readers and other hand-held devices
• Paper

What makes it the most valuable is that print is still the most efficient and resilient form of information storage that we have available to us.

While print took absolute control of reading and writing out of the hands of the clergy, it did not democratise it.

Rather, it placed it in the hands of another group, the emerging mercantile capitalists who were able to invest in this new form of technology.

As we know today, what gets written, read and disseminated in Australia and the rest of the world is in large part controlled by a small group of people. The history of print is a history of this kind of control and attempts to avoid it.

Perhaps the most important area of the print media is the press

The Press

The term is derived from the printing press. Therefore the term is about 500 years old.

The press in Australia dates back to shortly after the arrival of whites. Though not immediately, while a printing press was brought out from England no-one was able to operate it.

Very shortly after the establishment of the colony a culture was formed which involved a press. How free that press was until the mid 19C is another matter. From what I've been able to ascertain, the press in Australia before the 1820s was very much a state-run enterprise and that criticism of the government often took the form of anonymous and surreptitious writings distributed through underground channels.

The so-called independent newspapers like the SMH started in 1840, Age 1854; the Argus was launched in 1846 before being taken over by the Herald and Weekly Times in the 1950s. Most of Oz's long term newspapers began between 1840 and 1880. In the 1890s, prior to federation, a diverse and engaged collection of magazines and newspapers existed.

This period is one of fierce debate with a whole variety of interests trying to push their cases.

• labour movement
• women's movement
• in Queensland especially pro and anti- black labour movements
• republican
• monarchist
• free trade
• protectionist
• Mags like the Bulletin radical nationalist

How does this compare with today? Do we have the same level of diversity?

New Media

Led by the Internet

http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml

http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/

The internet began with a series of technical discoveries and imaginings in the early 1960s

In the 1970s, though we cannot be too sure, the Internet was adopted by American security forces as primarily a defensive system.

What was needed was a communication system that was not centralised in one or two centres of communication but which was able to get around problems that would be created by major network damage.

The internet is a non-heirarchical linkage of computers called servers, no one computer comes before any other in the system.

Each is capable of originating or publishing documents on the net.

The destruction of no one computer threatens the integrity of the whole system.

This indestructability led to the first serious challenge to the original purpose of the net. The flip side of the resilience of the system is very hard to control and censor it. While originally a defence service system it quickly became exploited by diverse groups whose aims were very different from national security.

The structure of the internet offered a ‘democratic' publishing structure unlike none before.

Now we see all kind of groups disseminating their causes and info on the net. For example, a lot of far right groups in the US have a presence on the web and have run successful recruiting programs through it.

In relation to sport, we can see club web-sites and fanzines or e-zines rubbing shoulders on the web. Readership of these sites has not been determined by monetary power (as it is with the print media) but by ideas like quality and relevance for fans.

In recent times the e-book has emerged as a viable competitor/supplement to both print and Internet.

What are the pluses and minuses of the two media?

Print pluses:

• resilient,
• portable in small scale
• you can read it in bed, in the bath, on the train

Print minuses

• Effort involved in production
• Relatively slow speed of delivery
• Cost of distribution

New media pluses

• Rapid production and delivery
• Amount of storage capacity
• Cheap production costs (apparently)
• Flexibility
• Diversity
• The difficulty of censorship and control

New media minuses

• Who really understands how it works?
• Quality of information
• Cost and accessibility of browsers
• Relative fixity of browsers (this is changing)
• What happens if the forces trying to dominate the web are successful?
• What happens when the power goes off?

Some predictions

Print

I have confidence in Rupert Murdoch's judgement that print will be around for a long time. Though it certainly won't dominate as it has for the last 400 years

Still used as a primary form of legal and professional communication. At least in the foreseeable future.

Still used and the most important form of personal portable reading matter.

Internet

As attempts to censor and control become more effective, it will lose its diversity and become more and more a site of advertising and international business transactions and communications.

It will, however, remain a staple for those wanting their overseas, interstate and non-mainstream information quickly and who are prepared to pay.

If you are interested in the story of Gutenberg, the SBS documentary The Machine that Made Us, directed by Patrick McGrady (20/2/09) is available in the library.