ARTS2090 Final assessment

QUESTION 4: When publishing changes, so does society. Investigate and compare the impact of two publication technologies, one pre-1900 and one post-2000, on a specific aspect of society (e.g. education, politics, creative industries, science, entertainment, social relationships).

INTRODUCTION

Publishing has been progressively developing for years, from pre-1900s when communication in the public is limited due to lack of technology until the advanced media technologies-internet has arrived. This is the main cause of breaking down the limitation of the century, creating the closeness in the social circle and hence, the social relationship has greatly changed. This essay will primarily investigate two publication technologies across two different periods of time, the pre-1900s and post-2000s. First of all, it's essential to look at the brief history of each publication technologies. Next, by analysing the massive changes between them, we will be looking at how they have altered a new picture to the entire society and eventually, it comes to the point of how this transition particularly influences our social relationship.

PRINTING PRESS

In exploring the impact on social relationship, we have learned that Johannes Gutenberg was the inventor of the printing press in 1400s. Since the printing press has introduced, it has crucially become a life-changing event historically and more importantly the invention lessens much more time for book production by using movable type printing. (Farzaneh, 2009) Also,  this immediate effect has gained so much more support because it has proven in Farzaneh's statement (2009). When this occurred during the Renaissance period, where there was a shift from the growing demand for books as a result of the nation has increasingly become more intellectually curious. That means, it has entered the new period which is culminating in a tendency of cultural activism, hence, the printing press has thrived in the later 500 years.

The printing press from www.flickr.com

Prior to the invention of the printing press, retrieving information is a big task because it was limited to the ones that could speak Latin fluently under the control of the Roman Catholic Church and therefore, with the existing language barrier between people, this created a large gap between the upper and lower classes in the society at that time. (Olson, 1996) Thus, this revolutionary movement undeniably challenged the Church as it had proven that knowledge is no longer to be the property of the rich and authority but shifted this power to the common people across different class boundaries. That means, the growth of the liberal ideas and attitudes made the Church lose the control over the domain of knowledge in the public. However, with society was able to interpret the belief of secular religions better than before, in the way that a new bonding in the public has developed, which people started to freely share the similar perspective and understanding and thus particular groups had formed. In other words, this also impacted on social relationships as Briggs and Burker(2009) have stated,within this 'print culture', it's not just about spreading ideas but the even greater contribution would be the developing shift of relationship between space and discourse. The printing press can be also considered as the agent of change like the technologies in later centuries, it assisted social changes rather than originating them.(Briggs and Burker, 2009)

Furthermore, social relationships have further developed since the time when the publishing of books allowed for standardization for literary works. The consistency of language rules allowed the readers to interpret the ideas close to what the author was intent to express because this approach had huge distribution on correcting mistakes and errors unlike the previous work. Also, mass production with identical words and images wasn't a legend anymore, but overall, this kind of consistency enhanced the reading experience inevitably. (Arthur cited in Rosenblatt, 1964, p.17) Again, Arthur(cited in Eisenstein, 1979, p.689) regards social relationships such as the relation between the teacher and student has transformed under this influence. When the student could take full advantage of more advanced texts with the updated version, they start to surpass not only the peers but might as well as the wisdom of their teachers. It profoundly means higher education has laid the basis for understanding the people around more.

                  Three examples of the Saturday Evening Post from www.flickr.com

As a result of the introduction of the printing press, the idea of magazines came to America and the really first successful magazine in the U.S would be the Saturday Evening Post, which was published in 1821 and it was popularized as a weekly publication at that time. Magazines had only started to swell its publication from fewer than 100 to 600 by the time when it's regarded to be the mass medium in 1850. What this technological development had ever done to the human race was that it strengthened the opposing views and reinforce the thought against the issue of war.(Anonymous, 2013) Consequently, to some extent, the spurring of magazines hence generated a desire of peace within the public sphere and people felt more pitiful and caring towards each other, led to the effect of pulling the society even closer than it ever had.

After all, the printing press flourished the knowledge and understanding of what a society ought  to have and it has stayed changing in the following centuries until the arrival of internet, which became the resourceful tool to get access to the information. In comparison to the printing press, it's designated to fulfil more human needs throughout society as the services have been providing a new prospect to the accelerated economical  world in every norm and value.

INTERNET

The arrival of internet from www.flickr.com

In the beginning, 'the Internet was based on the idea that there would be multiple independent networks of rather arbitrary design, beginning with the ARPANET as the pioneering packet switching network but soon to include packet satellite networks.'(Leiner, Cerf, Clark, Kahn, Kleinrock, Lynch, Postel, Roberts and Wolff, 2012, para.13) Eventually, the World Wide Web(WWW) has developed in the 1990s, the dominant network has resulted in adopting numerous new approaches to this underlying technology according to Leiner, Cerf, Clark, Kahn, Kleinrock, Lynch, Postel, Roberts and Wolff(2012). And the popularity of internet is continued to grow after the Web 2.0 in 2000s. Thus, information can be found and shared regardless of geographical location around the globe. This unprecedented change puts emphasis on promoting SNSs such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr, are the platforms that have been making more possibilities for us to interact.

It is true because 'the internet has become a prime venue for social interaction' (McKenna, Green and Gleason cited in D'Amico, 1998, para.1) In essence, social interaction is a big topic nowadays when people are forming closer relationship not just to the ones they know in reality, but also those whom they only meet online. It habitually becomes a nature to talk to strangers without a face-to-face meeting. In a sense, internet communication may produce greater intimacy and closeness. However in some cases like the 'couch potatoes' in terms of media, may indirectly weaken the bonding between people and make a close relationship fall apart when one's immersing on internet too much.

Internet is used for so many social purposes and is still continuing to make massive changes to the society like the printing press once brought to us. However, its real growth began in 2006 when it started to lead us to a new direction as a comprehensive tool to touch the world.(Nauert, 2006) Most of us have been witnessing the emergence of the internet is becoming our communication vehicle, powerfully linking us together via the online world through SNSs. Furthermore, our online communities are built up under the growth of personal engagement. Nauert(2006) has pointed out that the internet not only affects our involvement in online interaction, but also our offline action. More importantly, the idea of social activism also comes up with  our participation online.

Internet and social relationship from www.flickr.com

Positively, the continuing growth of the internet connection offers us more possibilities to expand our groups of friends, our friends we meet in person as well as the ones we meet online. Accordingly, the data has shown that internet users have met an average of 4.65 friends online from the report.(Nauert, 2006, para.17) Also, teens these days tend to use the network as a type of phone to chat and exchange 'instant messages' with their friends.(Bargh & McKenna as cited in Gross et al. 2004) There is another hypothesis of people may form closer relationship since they can be better disclosing their inner self online, such a virtual communication is likely to be more self-expressive for online relationships. (McKenna, Green and Gleason, 2002) That means, this technological breakthroughs strategically increase the intimacy in interactions, even more, some media research studies suggest that the internet is helping to renew old friendships when it's enabling us to look for people that we haven't contact with for years through SNSs , as well as the ones that are hard to reach perhaps from the other half of the globe. For example, this reconfiguration has maintained a strong tie between couples who live in different countries so that geographic distance won't be the cause of their broken marriage(Hogan, Li, Dutton as cited in Dutton et al, 2009b). Similarly, online dating started to thrive in these years, in Hogan, Li and Dutton's(2011) article, it indicates that there comes a trend of people who have found their partner through numerous site sources such as the SNSs, which are associated to the online dating sites.

Twitter logo from www.flickr.com

Besides, the emergence of  Twitter, has intensified our social engagement in the 'imagined communities' by reassembling individuals in this process of production. Since it differs from the older generation of printing press, its evolutionary movement has increasingly enhanced the distribution and aggregation in a sense. Not to mention that such a SNS prompts the information and equally distributes power for amateur journalism, the grass root ones to have a say. In this contemporary society, this mode of publication is highly recognized as a fast transmission to link the users together through its sharing mechanism. Therefore every content can be seen for any categories of people such as employers, close friends, family members even strangers we have never met in real life before.

Hence, these electronic relationships that have built up from Twitter creates a confusion when it becomes much harder for us to tell whether the friends we are interacting is showing the 'real them' or only acting in a way that we are expecting from them to be. Instead, the indulgence of interaction on Twitter is 'driving us to relate more with acquaintances we aren't close with and neglect the ones we really care about.'(Anonymous, 2012) Evan(2010) also suggests that such a SNS is only used for venting feelings, if a person chooses to express anger through SNS rather than talking over the issues in person, there will be a sign of danger of personal relationship. Even more, if private information is publicly shared in this large circulation of contents without the other person's agreement, it will obviously wreck a social relationship as well.    

CONCLUSION

Social relationship from www.flickr.com

Broadly speaking, these two publication technologies constitute the society in two different ways when they are distinguished from the different modes of publishing. For the printing press era, it was defined as the very nature of the society since it only started to make contents spreadable, as the basis of the concept of publication which makes something public in the very beginning. The ongoing change only took another big step into this contemporary society when the internet eventually arrived. Consequently, these two major changes from 'printing' to 'networking' remarkably have reshaped our society. But more importantly, our social relationships were also challenged from our participation, especially the internet which produces considerable impact on social relationships in both positive and negative ways.

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