PERSPECTIVES ON THE PAST
Back
Transcript of Audio Clip
Michelle Kendrick
With global expansion there are new technologies developed and with these new technologies come fears and anxieties about how they're going to erode boundaries.
One new technology that has had the following fears expressed about it: For instance it's thought that this technology would take away people's jobs, would replace the skilled individual worker with more technology; that it would allow propaganda and pornography and bad information to be disseminated on a wide level and that it would also allow errors, to be permanent and fixed.
It was also thought that this technology might make people lazy that it didn't require quite as much work as previous communication technologies did and thus people wouldn't have to work as hard to be literate. And it was also thought that this new technology was too multimedia that it allowed the power of the image to subsume the power of language and of writing.
All of these fears and anxieties, which probably seem fairly common to us, were expressed not about the internet or the world wide web as it might seem but were expressed in the 15th Century about the printing press. And, yes, the printing press did change things but it didn't necessarily change things in the way that people were anxious about.
In fact the printing press allowed new knowledge to emerge globally. People from different locations were able to share knowledge. It enabled more information from across the globe to be brought together, and thus great leaps in science and astronomy and technology were enabled.
| 
View the Video Online
