The printing press changed everything, so will the internet

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Ecological change is gradual but boundless

My last two posts, Meta-messages and the Internet and The internet and the attention war, were about the competitive dynamics, incentives, and resulting meta-messages of the pre-internet and internet media ecosystems. Here, we’ll explore the impacts of an earlier communications technology, the printing press, and ask what it suggests about the trajectory of the internet age. In 1998, at a conference of religious leaders in Denver, renowned media ecologist Neil Postman gave a talk called Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change. For the fourth of his five items, he observed:…

The printing press changed everything, so will the internet

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