Travis Porter
Engl 360
10/20/2011
Essay 2
The
Printing Press and Rhetoric
Elizabeth
Eisenstein was an American historian during the early 19th
century and was known for her historical study of print, writing, and
the first study of the transition between manuscript to print. She
took a particular interest in one important factor of this
transition, the printing press. The first printing press was
developed by a German named Johannes Gutenberg around 1450. This
machine was probably the most influential tool of rhetoric ever
created.
Before
the creation of the printing press all text and print was hand
written as manuscripts by hired individuals. If copies of this
manuscript were wanted the author had to have it re written each time
which led to discrepancies and errors between texts. This process was
also slow and a highly inefficient way to spread any kind of
knowledge or rhetoric among the population. The Renaissance printing
press on the other hand, could produce three thousand and six hundred
pages a day. Each of these pages being written the same exact way
with the same exact text. As you can imagine this had a great deal of
influence on rhetoric and the rate it could be used to bombard an
audience. The book written by Elizabeth called “The Printing Press
as an Agent of Change”, analyzes these effects cause by the
printing press and shows how it led to the advancement of rhetoric.
In
Elizabeth Eisenstein's book “The Printing Press as an Agent of
Change”, she talks about how much study has been done on the
developments that led to the printing press and how it has become
such a successful tool today.(Eisenstein 4) However she states that
her main focus in her book is to explain the consequences of such a
device. There is even a cited passage in her text from a writer
stating that “The Immense and revolutionary change which it (the
invention of printing) brought about can be summarized in one
sentence: Until that time every book was a manuscript.”. This
statement alone is a statement of ignorance. I personally have not
spent much time in the study of rhetoric or history of the printing
press for that matter, but even I can say this is a bullshit
statement. The printing press gave those skilled rhetors a very
powerful tool that allowed them to reach farther and be accessible
longer than ever before.
One
of the ways this revolutionary machine affected rhetoric was that it
allowed a piece of writing to reach anywhere in the world in a short
amount of time. Manuscripts had to be handwritten which was their
drawback, a printing press could kick out many exact copies at a
rapid pace. This meant that hundreds of copies could be made and
distributed in a short amount of time allowing a writer to reach an
enormous amount of the public over a widespread area without much
work. In regards to rhetoric it meant sharing a viewpoint and gaining
mass support quickly. Another interesting way the printing press
affected rhetoric is in the way we perceive that information. When
somebody is speaking we can tell what kind of mood they are in, the
importance of the information, whether or not they are telling the
truth, and much, much more. When you read a book you really don't
have any idea of the feeling behind the words. Sure you can choose
certain types of words and use punctuation to get some of it across,
but you can't tell if what your reading is the truth, sarcasm, or
emotional. For example you could read about someone asking another
person “What the fuck are you doing?”, and this statement could
be serious, angry, confused, or joking. It could even mean something
completely different from what is written such as “Why are you
doing that”. This meant that when writing the author had to had
separate identifiers in the text stating that it was a “joke” or
“serious” or the reader may take it the wrong way.
The
printing press also gave rhetors a way to give more depth to their
work without detracting from the piece. In “Ancient Rhetorics for
Contemporary Students” the author talks about a concept known as
“copia”, meaning paraphrasing or compressed information.(Sharon
392) The invention of the printing press allowed for significantly
more of this during the 15th century. Before the press if
an argument was made orally the speaker had to be concise and give
only the most prevalent and moving information he/she could or it was
possible that the audience would be lost and pay less attention as
time goes on. I had a teacher tell me once that the more information
that is given, the less information is comprehended. If you try to
give a person too much information in too little time odds are they
will burn out and stop listening. Now this same theory applies to
reading, if a person is given too much information to read in too
little of a time they will give up or resort to “skimming” and
note taking. However one of the advantages of the printing press was
that if a writer took enough time to cram as much copia into his/her
writing then it could be reproduced with little work through a
printing press. Once the book was produced and picked up by a person
then that person could read to their hearts desire and set the book
down to come back to later when it became too much. The result of
something like this in a speech would be the audience walking out,
which is bad for the speaker. The press allowed the writer to only
have to create this large amount of information once lessening the
creation burden of the manuscript writer and putting it on the
machine, and from there the information became available to retention
at the consumers leisure.
Not
only did the printing press allow for a better delivery method of
more information, but it also allowed for new and improved knowledge
of both subject and rhetoric in the world. This unrelenting hailstorm
of literary material allowed for the market to be saturated with
educational material, novels, studies, and any other genre of
information that one might come up with. When you add all of this
together you can come up with one sure reality, competition. The
large amount of material that represented the same area of study or
the same genre of story caused writers to compete with one another to
create a better work, whereas before the printing press there wasn't
much competition. It took so long to accumulate material to write
about and get it written that not many people got their work out.
This new competition allowed people to take information from one side
and combine it with the other to create new knowledge that would have
never been discovered before. The competition also cause the writers
to work harder increasing the quality of what was produced. This also
meant that it revolutionized knowledge in a way that discredited what
was once true. For example one may have read a manuscript about how
the world was flat and believed it because there was no refutable
work or there was no access to such a thing in the area that person
lived. After the printing press that same person may encounter one of
many copies of a different book that said the world was round and
that book could change that person's mind, upon which the person
would spread the information that would ultimately lead to the “flat
world' theory being discredited.
Not
many people would think a machine could affect things such as
freedoms or creditability, but it does. Up until not long ago in the
grand scheme of things people were discriminated against for sex,
age, and even color. These factor could lead to even the best rhetor
being discredited and even put in physical harm. Writing changed this
by creating an anonymity that could keep such things from readers and
therefore not drawing the attention away from the work. The problem
is few of these people could write and even fewer could do it well
enough to reproduce any number of manuscripts. The printing press
changed all of that, if you could make one copy you could make
thousands. It did not matter if you were white, black, twelve,
female, or were born with three legs. As long as you could produce
something that could be edited and then used in a printing press you
could some day be a famous writer. The machine gave those few who had
to be anonymous their chance to stand out and be heard all over the
world.
Despite
all of these important reasons the printing press revolutionized
rhetoric and literature I believe the most important change it
brought was in religion. One of the most powerful books ever written
was the bible. From the bible has stemmed, war, happiness, genocide,
and the unification of many different kinds of people under one
particular belief. The printing press allowed for the many different
kinds of religions to spread their word and educate their pupils.
It's common knowledge that every religious text whether it be the
bible or Qur’an are not small texts. Each one of these could take a
writer weeks to make just one copy meaning that religion had to be
spread orally. This also meant that what one group of people might
hear about a religion in one area could be completely different in
another. Once the churches were able to mass produce their writings
they were able to unify the teachings by giving everyone a book so
that each person received the exact same religious knowledge. It also
made expansion of the religion much easier because of how quickly
literature could be spread. The printing press brought many things
from knowledge, freedom, and even power and completely revolutionized
rhetoric from the moment it was discovered.
Works
Cited
Sharon, Crowley. Ancient Rhetoric
for Contemporary Students. 4th. New York: Pearson Education Inc.,
2009. 392. Print.
Eisenstein, Elizabeth. The
printing press as an agent of change: communications and cultural
transformations in early-modern Europe. 1st. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1979. 4. Web.
<http://books.google.com/books?id=WR1eajpBG9cC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0
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