print revolution

Printing Revolution and its Impact on Social and Cultural Formations
Printing revolution ushered in the era of modern Europe by making both ancient and medieval texts available to a broader audience which produced a fertile ground for new ideas and new theories. Marshall McLuhan rightly notes that the shift from predominantly oral culture to print culture also affected the nature of human consciousness in that print represented an abstraction of thought which gave precedence to linearity, sequentiality and homogeneity. This mode of thinking is very much evident not only in rationalist philosophy, realistic fiction, but also in the rise of scientific materialism in the following centuries. Printing also led to the standardization of various European languages as works began to be published in these languages. Eventually this standardization of vernacular languages contributed toward promoting literatures which were used to create national mythologies. Whereas maps were in circulation since ancient times, cartography as a science is the child of print revolution. And cartography was not only important in demarcating national boundaries, but also mapping the territories that were colonized in the new world.
In order to understand the deep changes that were the result of printing revolution, we need to focus our attention at the transition from the scribal to the print culture which brought the book culture from inside the monasteries to outside into the universities. This outwards movement got lay people involved in reading and writing activities. During the Middle Ages, the book production in the manuscript form was confined to monasteries and other ecclesiastical centers which had thus direct control of the resulting book culture. The scribal culture of the Middle Ages depended on the meticulous copying of manuscripts by scribes who spent hours at their task in scriptoria. Such a labor intensive task could not lead to large scale duplication and hence, access to