Thanks, Gutenberg – but we’re too pressed for time to read

The rise of print “technology” had far more profound consequences than many of us would think. At the time Gutenberg invented the print press in the 15th century, there was no easy way of recording and sharing ideas and information on a mass basis.

Once a method of producing large quantities of print material became available, social and intellectual change, such as the Reformation, and the ascent of modern science, was not far behind.

Today’s Gutenberg is Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web. In the 17 years since he launched his technology on an unsuspecting world, he has transformed it. Nobody knows how big the web is now, but estimates of the indexed part hover at around 40 billion pages, and the ‘deep web’ hidden from search engines is between 400 and 750 times bigger than that. These numbers seem as remarkable to us as the avalanche of printed books seemed to Brandt. But the First Law [of Technology] holds we don’t know the half of it, and it will be decades before we have any real understanding of what Berners-Lee hath wrought.

The First Law of Technology holds that the short term effects of new technologies are over estimated, while the their long term influences are underestimated.