Individual creativity coincides with the notion of personal achievement. In an authorial culture, everyone becomes the author of their own achievements. One's life, which in feudal times was judged by fealty to one's local lord, the Church, and God Almighty, is increasingly judged in modern times by one's record of personal achievements. The Reformation theology of Martin Luther, and even more so John Calvin, with its emphasis on improving one's personal calling as a way of affirming one's election and salvation, metamorphosed over the following centuries into secular devotion to personal achievement in the marketplace.
The idea of authorship facilitated the concept of owning one's own words. Copyright laws made communication among people a commodity. The notion that one could own thoughts and words that others would have to pay to hear them marked an important change in the history of human relations.
Before print, people shared their thoughts together orally, in face-to-face dialogue and exchange. As mentioned earlier, even manuscripts were read aloud and were meant to be heard rather than seen. The print revolution helped nurture a more meditative environment. Books were read silently and alone, creating a new sense of personal privacy and, along with it, notions of self-reflection and introspection, eventually leading to the creation of a therapeutic way of thinking about oneself and the world.
Print also imprints the idea of completeness and enclosure on the psyche. In oral cultures, there are no firm boundaries of where one thought leaves off and another begins--only seques or pauses. Conversations and stories drift into one another. Speaking and listening is an open-ended process, often disjointed and fragmented, people floating onto other themes and topics only to drift back to previous subjects during conversation. Ideas and stories reduced to print are fixed. Each book is seen as autonomous and timeless in its own space. A book, after all, is temporally and spatially enclosed. It has a beginning, middle, and end to the story and is bound between the front and back jackets.
Walter Ong observes that ideas on a page are not subject to discussion. Readers can't talk back, argue the point, or take exception. They can however, write the author or publish their own rebuttal. Each counterpoint, however is itself bounded and enclosed by the nature of the medium. Every author knows all too well that the printed page is final copy. Once it goes to print and is mass-produced, it is untouchable. The text does not accommodate changes.
In all of these particulars, print text creates the sense of autonomy and impenetrability. It's not difficult for one to imagine the idea of individual autonomy growing up in a literate print-oriented environment where so much of the communication itself is autonomous in nature. After all, reading is a solitary experience and requires great concentration. Interruption from others undermines one's attention. When one reads, one is usually engrossed and often loses the sense of passing time or where one is. When reading, one is in one's own world. The experience itself is enclosed and bounded.
Print communications strengthened the sense of individuality at the expense of loosening older communal ties. But, it also had the effect of connecting individuals in new kinds of affiliations and connections that stretched across broader swaths of space and time. Print became the vital command and control mechanism for managing the "energy throughput" of a new and increasingly complex urban commercial culture across Europe, America, and beyond. Consider the various contributions print made to the making of the modern world.
Rifkin, Jeremy. The Empathic Civilization: the Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis. New York: J.P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2009. Print.
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