Modern Renaissance
Johann Gutenberg is considered the inventor of movable type printing in Europe. Only fragmentary and partly uncertain information exists about his life and work. This also applies to the year of his birth, which is usually cited around the year 1400 in literature.
The use of movable type was a significant improvement over handwritten manuscripts, the method used at that time for book production in Europe. Gutenberg’s printing technology quickly spread across Europe and later, throughout the world.
In Renaissance Europe, printing with mechanical movable type ushered in an era of mass communication that forever changed the structure of society. The increased flow of information—including revolutionary ideas—swept through the social masses during the Reformation and became a threat to the power of political and religious elites.
The rapid increase in literacy permanently broke the monopoly of the literate elite on education and learning, fostering the emergence of the middle class. The rise in cultural self-awareness among people led to the growth of proto-nationalism, and European vernacular languages increasingly replaced Latin as the lingua franca.
In the 19th century, the replacement of Gutenberg’s manually operated presses with steam-powered rotary presses enabled printing on an industrial scale.
The world we live in today was born in the Renaissance. The social dynamics described by Shakespeare, as well as the characters from his plays, remain relevant today. Romeo and Juliet personify the ideal of romantic love. Romanticism—a literary movement that emerged in the late 18th and particularly in the 19th century—is responsible for the rise of the novel, a relatively early form of mass media, through which the ideal of romantic love became a widely accepted ideal of the relationship between men and women, giving romantic love an important and recognizable role in the context of marriage.
Changes that occur in one aspect of life often spill over into another. As he arranged lead type in his printing shop, Gutenberg could not have anticipated that his invention would, among other things, influence the transformation of traditional relationships between men and women. Technical changes, such as Gutenberg’s printing press, trigger qualitative leaps in social relations. Changes in communication methods always bring about the most dramatic shifts in relationships among people.
Anthony Giddens, a contemporary British sociologist, served as the Director of the London School of Economics from 1997 to 2003. In one of his lectures, he stated: “Before the end of the last century, the Internet was in its early infancy. Now, it has spread in a completely unprecedented way—connecting people and organizations across the globe on a daily basis, deeply integrating into everyday life. Billions of people have access to the Internet, and their number is growing day by day. An increasingly connected and networked world offers many advantages and benefits, but it also brings new risks, some of which are of global scale. In the 21st century, the opportunity to work and the risk are combined as never before.”
Regarding today’s society, Giddens says: “Both in terms of opportunity and risk, we are in uncharted territory that human beings have not discovered before. We do not know in advance what balance to expect, as many opportunities and risks are quite new, and we cannot rely on past history to assess them. Climate change is one of these new risks. No other civilization before the advent of modern industrialism has been able to interfere with nature in the way we do on a daily basis.”
What kind of world awaits us in light of all these changes? Let’s briefly imagine Europe before Gutenberg’s time: all life phenomena—from random thunderstorms or earthquakes to a good harvest or the death of a loved one—were defined either as God’s will or as the devil’s malice. The medieval man took life for granted and placed complete trust in the priest, who interpreted all occurrences, the world, life, and death for him. The priest was literate and, in modern terms, had a monopoly on information.
Similar to the priests of those ancient times, in modern society, the media holds a monopoly on information. The importance of the media in propagating the modern way of life is evident. The media provides us with interpretations of certain roles or lifestyles that media consumers follow, moving within a clearly defined moral framework.
With the advent of the Internet, the media world has fundamentally changed. Now, media content is no longer determined by chief editors but by the users themselves. The messages that will be sent through the media and the moral rules that will be promoted depend on the users. Information is transmitted globally with minimal censorship. Similar to the Renaissance, information circulates relatively unhindered, including revolutionary ideas.
In a global society, in a world full of diversity, Giddens rejects the possibility of a single, understandable, all-encompassing ideology or political program. Instead, he supports the idea of “small events-images,” those that directly impact the home, workplace, or local community of each individual. Thus, in contrast to the global processes and major changes that humanity faces, stands the individual, who, by solving their small problems, protects and gradually transforms society as a whole, leading it into a completely new, changed world.