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Statement of Competency C

In which I discuss social, cultural and economic dimensions of information use.

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The logic of information must ultimately be the logic of humanity.
For all information's independence and extent, it is people, in their communities, organizations, and institutions, who ultimately decide
what it all means and why it matters.
(Brown and Duguid, 2000, p. 18)

Practically anything people do involves some kind of information. By thinking they process information, by talking they exchange information, by writing something down they preserve information. Buckland (1991) defined these different forms of information as (1) information-as-process, (2) information-as-knowledge and (3) information-as-thing.

However, no matter in which form it appears, as Brown and Duguid (2000) point out, the meaning of information is defined by the people who use it. Without the human, i.e., cultural dimension, information is just “dead letter on the paper” and its use becomes ritualistic. As I show in my EVIDENCE 1 to this competency, the history of the herbal and medicinal books, like De Materia Medica, in the Medieval Europe could be an example of this “ritual” use of information that without active input and understanding degraded to the point that did not have any factual qualities.

However, the real problem why the knowledge that survived the shipwreck of the Roman Empire did not have wider effect on the European society was that they were very scarce and the access to it was very limited. For the information to have any relevant impact on society, it must have a means to be disseminated to a wide area and accessible to large number of people. The Renaissance is a perfect example how access and dissemination of information influenced social, cultural and economic flows in society.

In 1453 the Byzantine Empire and the city of Constantinople fell under the attack of the Ottoman armies. Following the defeat, many of the Byzantine church officials, monks and scholars, as well as craftsman fled to Italy bringing with them long preserved knowledge and manuscripts of classical past. This influx of new ideas from the Middle East came on the heels of the century-long endeavor by Italian humanists, eagerly aided with upper class of their society to find “forgotten” manuscripts lost in monastic or cathedral libraries throughout the country. The church councils, like the ones in Constance (1414-1418) and Basel (1431-1449), which brought together clerics and their scholarly advisers from the whole of Europe, became major humanistic meeting places. These councils also provided opportunities for a brisk book trade and the occasion for a search for manuscripts north of the Alps. The relative abundance of old, newly acquired, and rediscovered manuscripts facilitated the emergence of a lively manuscript market, especially in Italy. The rising literacy rates funneled by the growth of the universities and rising monetary power of the bourgeois outgrew the “one-book-at-the-time” system of the book production. The secularization of the copying and pecia system did not satisfactorily solve the problem.

The pressure of society to find the most effective way to disseminate the knowledge was so strong that thirty years after invention of printing in 1450, printing presses were operating in almost every bigger town in Europe. Although most of the printers were members of emerging bourgeois class, it was the well-established elite—the aristocracy and the church—that provided initial financial support and the enthusiasm that ensured the successful development of printing. In spite of the rising economic power of the mercantile middle class, the nobility and the Church were still the only parts of society with sufficient wealth and market demand to support printing startups.

Leading humanists and the members of noble families, like the Medici, collected books for their intellectual curiosity, and in the process accumulated impressive libraries. Many, in the spirit of humanism, opened them to the public. These public libraries enabled much wider access to various manuscripts, but at the same time created demand for copies that could be carried away and studied at home. Ironically, the printers benefited the most from these public libraries. They gained the access to the manuscript exemplars that would be otherwise inaccessible to them, and the increase of public reading meant an increase in book sales.

The need of the Church for liturgical and theological literature was behind most of the medieval book production, and that trend continued well into the Renaissance period. The influence of the Church on the social perception of information as well the format in which information is delivered could be seen in the adoption of codex as the standard book format.

As I show in my EVIDENCE 2 to this competency, the Church was neither the originator nor the sole reason why codex become the dominant book format. However, Christian religion gave the necessary social relevance to the codex to overcome the forces of tradition. In the same way, the attitude and action of the Church was important, but not the only force that contributed to the development of printing and dissemination of information. Nevertheless, the Church was one of the crucial factors for quick adoption of printing because it one of the richest and best-organized patrons, with steady and well-formulated demand.

Many of the Popes were also well-known intellectuals and humanists, actively supporting copying and the search for manuscripts of Greek classics. Moreover, the Church, as any well-established elite, that do not want to lose its grip on society, saw in the printing press a tool with which they could effectively retain control and influence. The Church very soon found out that the printing press is “God’s gift in the Devil’s hand” (Stipčevié 2000, p. 81) and that it is impossible to control who prints what. This was especially true in the 16th century when presses were easily made by almost every carpenter and light in weight. As John Hill Burton said, “in the end it was found easier and cheaper to burn the heretics themselves than their books” (Aldis 1941, p. 114).

The ease with which a book could be printed in almost unlimited number of copies and carried the distances regardless of language or political borders had a profound influence on the readers, but even more on the writers of the books. Geoffrey Roper, in his article Faris al-Shidyaq and the Transition from Scribal to Print Culture (Atiyeh ed. 1995) describes the intellectual change that occurred in the 19th century in the Islamic society of Middle East with the introduction of printing, but it could be also applied to the 15th century Europe. With the onset of printing, writers found the new inspiration in the fact that their writings would be almost certainly preserved for posterity:

This meant a new and more confident response to the challenge of creative writing; for whereas previously much literary effort had gone into the task of retrieving, encapsulating, summarizing, and commenting upon past knowledge and past literary achievement, now, in the print era, this could all, in a sense, be taken for granted. New ideas and original thoughts and expression could claim the full energies of writers, who were now secure in the knowledge that, once published, they too, would be safe for posterity. What this eventually brought about was nothing less than a major reorientation of literature and knowledge—instead of always looking backwards, it could now look forward to new horizons. (p. 222)

This newly found intellectual energy profoundly changed human society. The printed book helped the development of science which enabled humans not only to better understand but to better control their environment. But in spite of all the social, cultural and economic changes in society that printing initiated, the concept of acquiring knowledge remained the same. Education meant that a person would acquire some definitive set of skills, some knowledge that could swim with him out of the shipwreck, with which one would be able to support himself throughout a lifetime.

However, as I show in my EVIDENCE 3 to this competency, digital technology and the Internet, does not change only the technology, but also brings fundamental changes in society as well. The better access to the information and knowledge, and the speed, with which some information could be spread or disseminated, fundamentally changes the dimensions of our world. Drucker (1994) calls this brave new world the “knowledge society” where learning is a process that never ends. The most important gift that we could give our children is not just to give them our knowledge, but to teach them how to learn so they have a tool to handle any future changes.

Reference:

Aldis, H. G. (1941). Printed book, The (2nd ed.). Cambridge: The University Press.

Atiyeh, G. N. e. (Ed.). (1995). The book in the Islamic world: The written word and communication in the Middle East. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Brown, J. S., & Duguid, P. (2000). The social life of information. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Buckland, M. K. (1991). Information as Thing. Journal of the American Society for Information Science. 42 (5), 351-60.

Drucker, P. F. (1994). The age of social transformation. The Atlantic Monthly, 274(5), 53(18).

Stipčević, A. (2004). Socijalna povijest knjige u Hrvata (Vol I). Zagreb: Školska knjiga.