In physics and mathematics, a “singularity” is a point or an event where the rules break down: nothing makes sense anymore. Thus, nothing about the future can be predicted. There is no way to “describe” the singularity or the world on the other side of it. It’s a world we can’t see, because we have no system for looking at it.
It’s a fascinating problem for scientists. They know such worlds exist on the other side of black holes, which (with the “Big Bang”) are the most famous singularities in physics. And they know that in the other world, laws apply. But they are laws with no apparent relationship to the laws on this side.
It is as if the singularity constitutes a total division of meaning, that the only way to understand the world beyond is to go live in it.
In this way, the phenomenon of singularities resembles history. The atomic bomb is a good example. It was reasonable for those scientists in the 1940s to wonder if they shouldn’t hold back from that brink, from stepping across the splitting atom like godless landlords and slinging an entire world tenancy into a future that nobody could see, or escape.
Step and sling they did, and it changed our social, scientific and emotional landscape completely. Someone living in this world would be hard-pressed to explain it to someone living in 1940. The act also changed history completely out of proportion with the event. The scientists only wanted a bomb; instead, they created an age.
That’s another curiosity of singularities: their effect is never singular. Singularities always create entire new worlds, from which there is no return to the old. At the time, there is no way to describe the event, or the laws on the other side. Like the Los Alamos scientists, Johann Gutenberg, in the middle of the 15th century, only knew his means of reproducing information using moveable type was unprecedented in its power. From his world, he could not see the other side and what different world this power might create.
In his world, before the year 1450, information was transmitted by a “scribal culture,” whose system extended three thousand years back toward the dawn of human communications. In that scribal culture, information was recorded and reproduced in handwriting. Each copy of a book or script took as long to create as the last. Information was reproduced at the rate of a scribe, working with feather quills, an inkpot, and paper sheets, copying one page at a time.
The scribal system was very slow, and very expensive. To imagine the relative expense, consider a modern textbook or a reference such as “The World Almanac” restricted to scribal reproduction. How many scribes could a publisher reasonably pay? One thousand? How long would it take 1,000 scribes working a 40-hour week at journeyman wages (they were, after all, professionals) to produce 1,000 copies of “The World Almanac”? What kind of market would be created by 50,000 consumers each wanting a copy? What effect on culture and intellect would be created by such a shortage of reference material?
Information in the scribal culture was scarce and exclusive and thus an instrument of power and privilege. Before Gutenberg’s printing press, the famed “feudal masses” of the Middle Ages had little or no access to information. Because they didn’t read, they couldn’t read. It was the way of that world, absolutely normal, the status quo. No one, not even the powerful and privileged, who controlled the information, had given much thought to a world of reading masses, of what might happen to ignorance and feudal docility in an age of common literacy. There was no reason for such thoughts, no way to describe so bizarre a fantasy world.
Such imaginings certainly didn’t interest Johann Gutenberg, an Austrian entrepreneur depressed by misfortune. He had had bad luck, or no luck at all, in his get-rich-quick schemes in the 1440s, including a mirror that was supposed to capture spirits, and he was deep in debt. Now, in 1450, he had a new scheme to copy books better and faster than anyone ever had. Some of the technology was old, going back to China, but his application was brand-new, and he was sure it would make money. He guarded his new business plan closely until he felt it was ready to take public.
Then all Johann Gutenberg needed was the right title. If the title was big enough, it would draw attention to the technology, which was his real product. He chose the Bible.
You have to agree, for a book with a good set of media codes, the Bible can’t be beat. There was the first line, no other like it before or since: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” And it was non-fiction! There were the plots and sub-plots rife with good and evil, and the promise and delivery (via immaculate conception) of a Messiah, a son of God on Earth, who performed miracles and in the end got crucified. And then came back to life! Talk about a potential page-turner, in the hands of a mass audience. It was a great story, with a dedicated, widespread audience. It had its passionate critics, too, which was always good for business.
After all his disappointments, Johann Gutenberg had hit upon the perfect marketing tool for the world’s first commercial printing-press technology. The Bible and the printing press was a marketing marriage made in heaven. All it did was:
1. Create the book industry;
2. Create the book industry’s original and all-time No. 1 best-seller;
3. Create shared media codes, which we call "broadcast media;"
4. Create mass media.
He couldn’t know that; couldn’t see it. Gutenberg only knew that his technology would work. And so the first singularity passed unanticipated, at some precise moment in history when Gutenberg peeled back the first sheet, eyeballed it, spread down another sheet over the wet type, pressed it against the type, lifted it off, and then a third, printed and laid side-by-side on the printer’s table with the first two, all three identical, the printer in two minutes’ time precisely reproducing information that would have taken a careful scribe (in the interest of faithful reproduction) several days or weeks and great care.
Standing there, in his Mainz print shop that day, staring at the three pages that created the first singularity in media history, he could not have foreseen common literacy, the Age of Mass Media, The New York Times, or Paris Hilton.
Paris Hilton? The Bible begat Paris Hilton? Well, it took awhile, but yes. Played backward, all the laws of the media world would fetch back from the four corners, over the 550-odd years, called in from the branches of science and art and thought, converging and then hurtling as the mass collapsed upon itself toward Mainz and then vanished, a universe disappearing in a blink through a point defined in space and time by three identical pages, and the scent of drying ink, in Johann Gutenberg's shop. Imagine the thunder, in the silence of a singularity un-created.
Curiously, a researched history of the first media singularity, and of new laws starting to be created in its wake, did not appear until 1979, when University of Michigan historian Elizabeth L. Eisenstein published “The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.” The title is typical of the historian’s reserve. Eisenstein does not come right out and say that Gutenberg with his moveable type blew away the scribal culture without a trace and blew away the old social structures as well.
Eisenstein carefully declares that the printing press was in fact only one agent of the changes under way in early modern Europe. There also had to be present a Copernicus, a Galileo, a Newton, a Columbus, a Martin Luther. She develops a thesis, however, that the ability to reproduce accurate information in volume, with the resulting wide access, is the single theme that can unify the historic discussions of that remarkable era, and that that theme - printing - was the true revolution. Martin Luther in Germany, empowered to circulate his church reform views in volume, so alarmed Henry VIII that the English king “nationalized” all print functions on the isle, the first modern example of prior restraint.
So the singularity created by Gutenberg was volume. Reform, research and exploration were only specific and historic uses of this information volume that was naturally starting to spread out across flat ground. Printers quickly realized a general market for their new product. Imagine a bookshop scene in Paris, London, or Rome, in 1455 or 1460, as the first pages off Gutenberg’s press began to arrive.
“What good is this?” says an alderman, holding up the page. “It looks so . . . so artificial.”
“Yes,” concedes the stationer, as the booksellers were called in those days. “Such work will never equal the art of a friar with his parchment and quills. But this new ‘printing’ is fast, and cheap. For the first time, information is readily available to the masses.”
“But,” protests the alderman, “95 percent of the population can’t read.”
The stationer shrugs. “They will,” he says.
The stationer’s words heralded the dawn of broadcast. The word “broadcast,” incidentally, did not originate with media. It’s originally an agricultural verb, meaning to scatter, or sow, in all directions. If you have ever scattered grass seed or granular fertilizer across a lawn, then you have broadcast. Watering a lawn from a hose is essentially broadcasting water. On the early morning “farm reports” on midwestern radio stations, feed and fertilizer manufacturers advertise “broadcast” products.
Volume was information’s water hose. The volume singularity created by Gutenberg’s press made it possible to broadcast information in all directions, across an entire field of people. People felt this strange rain, looked up at it, licked it, liked it, started to drink it in, felt intellect sprout and start to take root. How must it have felt, to a literate 50-year-old in the year 1500, to look back and try to imagine the world before print?
Books were the first form of broadcast, as printers took classics from the scribal culture and mass-produced them.
Soon another type of communication emerged. Instead of reproducing old information, some printers saw merit in recording new information, that, because of media code, was of interest to a general audience, and distributing it on a regular basis. It wasn’t long before merchants picked up on the new system as a good way to reach people with word of their products; so good, in fact, they paid the printer to carry their ads.
In terms of media history, newspapers were clearly the most far-reaching result of the first singularity. They were the crucible for all the broadcast realm that was to follow. In that crucible, after the volume singularity, new laws started to form. Imagine the local excitement in the 1500s when people started receiving pages that weren’t all about God, but all about them. It started with books, but the greatest change to flow from Gutenberg’s creation into the everyday lives of people, measured by actual revenue over the last five centuries, was the newspaper. At the end of the 20th century, the newspaper was still the No. 1 moneymaker of all the media businesses, even television.
Like a water hose, the newspaper distributed information out to a general audience from a central point. This was revolutionary, because it not only turned the direction of information around 180 degrees, it disconnected the information from real time. Before newspapers, people had to go to a central place – churches were popular – to hear a speaker deliver the news, and they had to be there when the speaker was there. Newspapers brought the speaker(s) to the people, and let them read the news when they wanted to. An unbelievable development.
Embedded in the pages were many of the same media codes that pull us into the pages today. Remember, these first newspapers didn’t invent the media codes. The codes had always been there, and people had always responded to them. But the response had always been direct, and personal. Something happened, and people who saw it, or heard it, or experienced it, reacted to it, according to the codes – the original reaction codes – that they associated with the event.
Now the newly forming media took those codes and turned them into a business. Natural codes became media codes, that could be shared by many people, across great distances. People loved it. No newspapers? How did we survive? This is what it was like: when you finish this paragraph, close this blog and your computer. For three days from this moment, avoid all media. No reading, no books, newspapers, or magazines, no television, no radio, no CDs, no iPod, no Internet – not even email – no movies, no ads, no commercials, no billboards. For 72 hours, you are to do nothing but experience life as it happens around you.
That was the life of the average human being in the 15th century. The media codes will still be there; you will react to events as they happen around you. And because the codes are still there, you will understand perfectly how the 15th-century Europeans felt, when the first newspapers started to appear. Once humans saw they could share these codes, through a media, there was no turning back.
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