Gutenberg to Internet

Dodo bird.

A very nice article (via Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic) by a blogger named Clay Shirky. He writes about the demise of newspapers and the rise of...what?...well, we don't know yet.

I particularly appreciated the reference to Elizabeth Eisenstein, a historian I read in college, and whom I'll have to re-read. Her book's in the basement at the moment, soon to be bumped up to the living room book shelf. What historians of her generation were interested in were not the large swaths of history in which trends stabilized, but the moments in-between:

Elizabeth Eisenstein's magisterial treatment of Gutenberg’s invention, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, opens with a recounting of her research into the early history of the printing press...Literacy was on the rise, as were books written in contemporary languages, Copernicus had published his epochal work on astronomy, and Martin Luther’s use of the press to reform the Church was upending both religious and political stability...What Eisenstein focused on, though, was how many historians ignored the transition from one era to the other..."How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself like?" Chaotic, as it turns out.

Makes me realize the true scope of what we're probably in the midst of right now, as more and more newspapers shut down. Revolutions are never pretty.

Update (3/17/09)
Downsized: "Seattle Paper Shifts Entirely to the Web", NYT, 3/17/09