We watched a documentary about a guy who is on a mission to make a replica of a Gutenberg printing press. One of the points this film brought up that I hadn't really thought about was that Gutenberg's bible ushered in the modern era, the Renaissance. It allowed people to share their ideas with a wide audience and helped increase literacy.
The guys who were making the press ran in to a lot of problems along the way. They only had a vague sketch of what the Gutenberg press looked like. They weren't even sure if the drawing was of a Gutenberg press. They had to rely on looking at similar machines like wine presses.
Another point I found interesting was that the printing press helped eliminate errors in text. It was very easy for scribes to make mistakes and they weren't going to rewrite an entire text just because they made one error.
Contrary to popular thought the first thing to be made with a Gutenberg press was not the Bible, it was actually grammar books and indulgences. I was always taught that the Bible was printed first so this was a bit of a shock to me but it made sense.
I really liked that this documentary not only showed how they made the press but it also showed them making their own paper. I've never seen paper made before so that was pretty cool.
Even though the printing press mass produced documents errors were still made. Sometimes the paper quality was bad, there were typos...etc. Human error. It was still people that were setting the type and not machines. Even now there are still errors because in most cases it's humans that are doing the writing.
One thing we talked about that I thought was interesting was how typefaces can have nationalism like Helvetica being the Swiss typeface. They can bring countries together or divide them. Helvetica was used by the EU to bring the European countries together. I think that the typeface used on the Gutenberg press brought countries together and divided them at the same time. While it could be used to spread ideas and bring people with similar thoughts together it also divided people like further dividing Catholics and Protestants.
Even people who are into new media still value books because they are expensive and hard to make. Although people still value books, new media has changed many aspects of our lives like sports. Baseball is the old and football is the new. Baseball is less enjoyable to watch on tv. It's a slower game and there's less going on. Football is also entrenched in war terminology and tactics which make it more intense and exciting whereas basketball is emulates current technology. I never realized how much it did. There's posts, picks, screen...etc. Football is starting to go the way of basketball. It's becoming less of a contact sport and the players are more spread out on the field. There are also many sports video games now. Like McLuhan says, these games are extensions of ourselves. We create avatars that look like us and we control the players. What will be next? A play called a tweet?
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