The Change After the Change

The most frequently repeated mistake in the analysis of communication revolutions is the assumption that the revolution, once identified, can be bounded — that there is a 'before' and an 'after,' and the analyst's task is to describe the transition between them. Eisenstein spent her career demonstrating this assumption is false. The transition from scribal to print culture unfolded over two centuries, and the process was not linear. It moved in lurches and reversals, through periods of rapid change and apparent stability, producing consequences that were sometimes immediate and sometimes delayed by generations. The first generation saw the obvious changes — cheaper books, wider distribution, displacement of scribal labor. The second saw the Reformation, made possible when ordinary laypeople could read Scripture for themselves. The third and fourth saw the Scientific Revolution, built on the institutional infrastructure that the second had created. The change that ultimately mattered most was the change after the change — the consequences of consequences that