Been reading a lot about the Reformation recently, and thinking about how the printing press played into it. What's striking is that practically all the major reformers were "print natives" born after about 1480 - they had grown up in a world where print was everywhere.
The major reason the Reformation spread so far so quickly, and took so many different forms (often wild and disruptive forms) was due to print. The reformers were savvy and understood how to use print to spread their messages.
The Reformation was a truly enormous upheaval. At least hundreds of thousands and more probably millions of people died as a direct result of it. Printing - a new mass media technology - was an integral part of that.
The parallel with our own time isn't lost on me. The internet is everywhere now, and it allows for new, transformative, and potentially incredibly dangerous messages to easily spread. New forms of mass media are disruptive, not in the Silicon Valley sense, but literally.
There's a particularly resonant quote from a scholar and theologian in the 1550s lamenting that people in his time just yelled at each other and disputed constantly, with lethal consequences. Yeah, man, I get where you're coming from.
So if you feel like you've watched the best minds of your generation destroyed by internet-induced madness, well, I'd imagine a lot of folks in the 1520s and 1530s felt the same about their contemporaries and cheap, polemical pamphlets.
