Tools and Transformations by Clay Shirky:

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Imagine a technology that, from its inception, threatens to throw intellectual society into chaos, a technology that radically democratizes both production and consumption of media while creating countless new forms of expression. Now imagine that while some of the new material produced is of lasting value, most is evanescent at best, and that the resulting flood of material weakens traditional institutions, eroding their special place in society by making the functions they provide seem irrelevant to young people.

Imagine, in other words, that this technology creates a stark choice between preserving the current state of society vs. embracing the new, even given the destruction of of traditional values and institutions. Which side would you be on?

I don't have to ask, because if you are reading a Penguin blog, you have already identified yourself as one of the revolutionaries, an embracer of the most intellectually radical technology the world has ever seen: the printing press.

It is impossible to be pro-book and anti-revolution -- the printed word is revolution incarnate, responsible for a greater alteration of the intellectual landscape than anything since the alphabet itself. Movable type so thoroughly remade European culture that the 17th century has more in common with the 21st century than it did with the 15th.

Prior to Gutenberg, most of the books in Europe were the Bible; scribal production was so slow that simply recopying that one book took up much of the available output. After Gutenberg, publishers began experimenting with new forms -- novels, scientific papers, periodicals of all sorts.

People were scandalized by all this novelty. The Church denounced the translation of the Bible into local languages. Martin Luther's 95 Theses, reproduced widely, were the first mass media event. Treatises were written arguing that the scribal tradition must be defended from the soulless efficiencies of the printing press (though deliciously, these arguments were then printed, in order to be able to get more readers quickly.) And of course, morality was threatened -- it did not take long for the new class of publishers to discover that erotic literature sold well.

It's worth noting that most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient. Readily available translations of scripture did destroy the Church as a pan-European institution. Most of the material produced by the new class of publishers was flyweight. Scribes did lose their social function. And so on, through a battery of transformations including public scrutiny of elites, the international spread of political foment, and even literate women. (The book to read on these transitions is Elizabeth Eisenstein's two-volume work The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.)

All of which brings me to the internet. It too democratizes both production and consumption of media. It too is producing a staggering volume of new material, some good but most flyweight. It too is upending the role of traditional gatekeepers and destroying the older economics of scarcity. And it too is leading to a cottage industry of hand-wringing: "Why can't we just get a little bit of internet, but keep most things the way they were?" (and, deliciously, this argument is often made on weblogs, in order to get more readers quickly.)

The problem with this view is that there is no intellectually coherent conservative position with regard to the printing press. Most of the defenders of current culture don't even try to explain why it was OK that the printing press destroyed scribal production, but not OK that the internet threatens newsprint, or why a proliferation of new creators and experimentation with new forms was good in 1508 but bad in 2008. It is simply assumed that revolutions in the past were good but those in the future are bad (and of course all of this is painted on the broadest possible social canvas, to hide the "Life was better when I was younger" flavor of the argument.)

It is too early to tell whether the internet's effect on media will be as radical as that of the printing press. It is not too early to tell that there is nothing that happened between 1450 and now that comes close. It is also not too early to tell that we are in for a significant transformation of intellectual life, and the lesson from the last revolution is that the way to make society better is not to try to preserve the old forms, but to experiment, wildly, with new ones, including hybridization of the book with the web.

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