Elizabeth Eisenstein & Conjectures on Printing

I've heard the book that this article eventually becomes cited innumerable times, and I was happy to finally read the initial investigations. The little voice in me of proper historical method was first irritated that Eisenstein lacked much empirical evidence to back up her conjectures in this particular article, but it didn't matter later as the article developed and readers like myself could see how her project is twofold: one, to bring a revisionist angle to current accepted facts regarding history of printing and books, attacking generalizations such as "the book led to standardization in language and religious thought" and "the religious standardization of printing and language led to a demystification in texts and social practice"; and two, to bring questions of printing's "effects and consequences" into other fields of research, such as technology, sociology, the political economy of media, language, and theology/religion.

As Eisenstein says, the history of printing and its ramifications is "uneven", with differences in the kinds of social, religious and political impact depending on the scope of one's research. For example, Eisenstein brings our attention to how book printing had numerous distinctions for its first consumers, who themselves varied in demographics, and in what they perhaps wanted to read, what they could read (based on limitations in literacy and in government or religious-decreed access), and their level of access to books. Some other thoughts I gathered from this article (though it sort of conjectures a little too far into the present at the very end) relate to methodology: good historical research needs to constantly question assumptions and also that the printing of books is an example of an object of study where there is a clearly meta-communicative and meta-investigative level, especially for the historian. Books are not exclusively disposable commodities- they are objects that can be constantly re-circulated, and their content is in some sense another form of sociopolitical or socioeconomic value: books can increase one's skills, change or reinforce one's opinion, and bring about non-localized or localized solidarity.

The same is true today vis-a-vis more "immaterial" non-printed forms of content and their corresponding economies of information distribution and circulation, which are products and processes clearly linked to (and also divergent from) economies of book distribution. Regarding non-printed text, I think that format does play a huge role in distribution and in acceptance of content. How differently do we treat reading ancient documents in comparison to the windows we read onscreen? How does our attention change in relationship to these reading formats? How might our attitude change when we look at books versus computer printouts or flyers we get on the street? How might certain formats work well with specific kinds of content? I recall feeling a little disdain when I first saw the Kindle. Are children reading PC tablets or text on the iPhone as their versions of "My First Book"?