GutenWORD

GutenWORD

"To have literacy you have to have books." -Miller. 

The above quote was said during our most recent and my personal favorite lecture. We discussed the invention of the printing press and how books affected life as we know it. The lecture could've gone on all day because having writing be spread everywhere really does affect everything. When people thought about or saw the printing press they probably said, "Oh cool," and moved along with their day but this lecture did no such thing. We not only discussed the dates and the invention itself but the before and after, the impacts, the why. By doing that I think I got the deepest understanding possible. 

By understanding the "pre-Guten world" then learning how it changed after the invention, I was able to see clear improvements and effects throughout the word such as, wide-spread literacy which led to the renaissance, political/ religious revolutions, journalism itself, standardized maps, basically an advanced world. 

But how could a metal machine that imprinted ink on a page cause all of that? Well, having a machine that doesn't break as much helps and the fact that Gutenberg's books were pretty cheap helped, but I think the biggest factor was that it wasn't in Latin! All the common people of Germany could read from it not just the highly educated elites of Europe. Now that it was translated to a simpler language it could be further translated to English or French or whatever because it wasn't Latin. Having writing be available to more and more people is what led to the spread of literacy and innovation. I can imagine that if Gutenberg or anyone else printed their work into Latin instead of a language people actually used it would not have spread as quickly and we wouldn't have been as advanced as we are today.