PART III

SPECIFIC ISSUES
IN SCIENCE,
TECHNOLOGY
AND SOCIETY
THE
Lecture 7

INFORMATION
AGE
INTRODUCTION

▪  This section provides overview on how writing evolved through time and internet
came into being. Discussion on how information became accessible and
inexpensive thru the discovery of printing press by Johannes Gutenburg is also
presented on this part. Emphasis is given on the influence of social media to
people’s lives.

Learning Outcome:
▪ illustrate how information age and social media have made an impact to our lives.
THE INFORMATION AGE
▪ began around the 1970s
▪ a.k.a Computer Age, Digital Age, or New Media Age
▪ brought about a time period in which people could access
information and knowledge easily
PRE-GUTENBURG PERIOD
▪ During the Middle Ages in Europe, most people lived in
small, isolated villages.
▪ For most people, the only source of both religious and
worldly information was the village Catholic priest in the
pulpit.
▪ News passed from one person to another, often in the form
of rumor.
▪ Written documents were rare and often doubted by the
common people as forgeries.
PRE-GUTENBURG PERIOD

▪ Almost no one could read or write the language they

spoke. Hammurabi code written in stone tablet

▪ Few literates mastered Latin, the universal language of

scholarship, the law, and the Roman Catholic Church.
▪ Books, all hand-copied, were rare, expensive, and almost
always in Latin.
PRE-GUTENBURG PERIOD

▪ Most people passed their lifetime without ever gazing at a

book, a calendar, a map, or written work of any sort.
▪ Memory and memorization ruled daily life and learning.
Poets, actors and story tellers relied on rhyming lines to
remember vast amounts of material.
▪ Craftsmen memorized the secrets of their trades to pass on
orally to apprentices.
▪ Mechanics kept their accounts in their heads.
PRE-GUTENBURG PERIOD
▪ Scribes, often monks living in monasteries, each
labored for up to a year to copy a single book.
▪ The scribes copied books on processed calfskin
called velum and later on paper.
▪ Books in Europe were typically handwritten
manuscripts while paper money, playing cards,
posters, and the like were block-printed from
hand-carved wooden blocks, inked and
transferred to paper.
▪ Before Gutenberg, all texts had been printed with
woodblocks or fixed text stamps, both of which
were complex and time-consuming processes.
THE GUTENBURG PRESS

Johannes Gutenberg turned

the printing world upside
down and brought on a new
era of print with his
revolutionary innovation of
movable type in 1445.
THE GUTENBURG PRESS
▪ Movable type printing used metal stamps of
single letters that could be arranged into words,
sentences and pages of text.
▪ Using a large manually operated, the stamps
would be arranged to read a page of text so that
when covered with ink, it would print out a page
of text.
▪ Movable type kept the metal stamp letters
separate, which allowed printers to reuse the
letters quickly on succeeding pages.
GUTENBURG REVOLUTION
▪ The printing press made it possible to produce books much
more quickly and cheaper than ever before. By 1463, printed
Bibles cost one-tenth of hand-copied Bibles.
▪ The demand for books exploded. By 1500, Europe had more
than 1,000 printers and 7,000 books in print.
▪ Books spread new ideas quickly and sped up the process of
change. For example, as a young sailor in Genoa,
Christopher Columbus read Marco Polo’s famous Travels, in
which he described his journeys to China.
▪ Newspapers and pamphlets generated information and
ideas even faster.
GUTENBURG REVOLUTION
The impact of printing press…
▪ it allowed for the much more rapid spread of accurate
information
▪ planted the seeds of democracy and human rights in the
next generation of thinkers.
▪ Literacy began to rise as well as the types of information
people could be exposed to.
▪ When Europe was recovering from the devastating impact of
the Black Death, the impact of printing press decimated the
population and had led to the decline in the rise of the
church, the rise of the money economy, and subsequent
birth of the Renaissance.
GUTENBURG REVOLUTION
The impact of printing press…
▪ The printing Renaissance opened the realm of learning and
reading to the local populations as schools were built and
books about education were written and print published.
▪ introduced the era of mass communication, which
permanently altered the structure of society.
▪ The relatively unrestricted circulation of information and
revolutionary ideas transcended borders,
captured the masses in the Reformation, and threatened the
power of political and religious authorities.
GUTENBURG REVOLUTION
The impact of printing press…
▪ the sharp increase in literacy broke the monopoly of the
literate elite on education and learning and bolstered the
emerging middle class.
▪ Across Europe, the increasing cultural self-awareness of its
people led to the rise of proto-nationalism, accelerated by
the flowering of the European vernacular languages to the
detriment of Latin’s status as lingua franca.
GUTENBURG REVOLUTION
The impact of printing press…
▪ establishment of a community of scientists who could easily
communicate their discoveries through widely disseminated
scholarly journals, helping to bring on the scientific revolution.
▪ authorship became more meaningful and profitable. It was
suddenly important who had said or written what, and what the
precise formulation and time of information.
PRINTED MATERIALS AS
AGENTS OF CHANGE
The printing press…
▪ allowedfor the spread of knowledge both within elite
communities, like the Catholic Church and the scientific
community, and also to the rest of the general population.
▪ brought about several new social dynamics that lead to several
social revolutions.
▪ brought about new innovations and ideas that lead to changes in
power and standards in both religious and scientific areas of
European culture, including: a shift in religious power from the
church authority to the general population, standardization of
scientific reporting, and an influx of new scientific discoveries.
POST-GUTENBERG PERIOD
The Gutenberg printing press caused a dramatic social
and cultural revolution. The sudden widespread dissemination
of printed works – books, tracts, posters and papers – gave
direct rise to the European Renaissance. It led to the
Protestant revolution, the Age of Enlightenment, the
development of Modern Science and Universal Education.

It helped in the wide dissemination of the Protestant tracts

and the arguments between Martin Luther and the Catholic
Church - which fueled the Reformation. The Reformation that
began in Germany in the early 16th century, led to the Bible
being printed in the languages common to people.
THE EMERGENCE OF NEW
TECHNOLOGIES
▪ The technology of information
dissemination or mass
communication has evolved in
the next centuries.
▪ Radio broadcasting and TV
broadcasting has covered wider
range of audiences.
▪ And at present, printed materials
are already overwhelmed by the
World Wide Web.
▪ https://youtu.be/Q_fE0ZBN-Tc
Social Media at your fingertips!
Twitter
A microblogging and social networking
service on which users post and
interact with messages known as
"tweets".
Instagram
A photo and video sharing social
networking service
Linkedin
A business and employment-oriented
online service that operates via
websites and mobile apps.
Facebook
Originally designed for college
students, Facebook makes it easy
for you to connect and share with
family and friends online.
TikTok
A video-sharing social networking
service
YouTube
An online video-sharing platform
THE DECLINE OF PRINTED
MATERIALS
▪ At present, people are beginning to look for secure and
accurate and believable news portals but, the traditional
trusted publishing outlets have less public beliefs as many
people believe governments are manipulating them.
▪ The local press are in sharp circulation decline, and the
online advertising businesses have moved to Google and
Facebook and others. The result has caused newspaper
closures and large-scale downsizings and redundancies.
▪ Many people now prefer to believe people from their social
environment, instead of turning to “the media”. The
collateral damage caused by the digitization is increasing
amounts of information and currently this is not going to
stop.
PARADOXES OF TECHNOLOGY
Empowerment vs Enslavement
Independent vs Dependence
Fulfills needs vs Creates needs
New technologies allow us to be connected to
and reachable by everyone. However, as a
result, our privacy is threatened and
technology starts controlling us. Whether we
want or not, we feel socially obliged to take
phone calls, answer emails, and send
responses to messages on Facebook.
New gadgets such as cell phones allow us to
do many things on our own. However, this
situation creates dependency, as we can’t go
even one day without our phones and we feel
helpless when the Internet is down.
Technology resolves some problems but also
introduces new ones, we need devices with
longer battery life, we need antivirus software
to be safe, we need to learn new skills, etc.
PARADOXES OF TECHNOLOGY
Competence vs Incompetence We can get any information we want and
reach anyone we want with the help of new
technologies. However, we lose our ability
to remember phone numbers and our
ability to articulate thoughts.
Engaging vs Disengaging When we are engaged in an activity that
involves the use of new technology, we
need to disengage from whatever we are
doing. We directly interact with our family
and loved ones less frequently because we
tend to engage more in new portable
technology tools.
Public vs Private New technologies blur the line between
what is public and what is private. People
may talk on the phone or message
someone among a circle of acquaintances,
which may be disturbing.
PARADOXES OF TECHNOLOGY
Illusion vs Disillusion We tend to think new communication
technologies make our lives better. However,
the more we communicate, the more trivial our
conversations become. In other words, more
communication does not always equal better
communication.
source: Sirkka L. Jarvenpaa and Karl R. Lang as cited by Acar, 2014
THE PRESENT

Speed of access limits the ability of the internet to be a channel for

all forms of media, restricting its use to text based and transactional
forms. As a result, much of the initial investment in the web went into
servicing and creating institutional opportunities, with e-commerce
emerging as the major new web-based phenomena.
THE PRESENT
Developments due to our migration to the WWW:
▪ the spread of broadband internet access - which made it possible to easily
both upload and download all forms of media: video, images and audio as
well as just text and transactions.
▪ The emergence of tools or applications - which made it simple for people
to publish or spread information. Blogging was the first example, followed
by social networking and distribution and sharing sites like YouTube and
Flickr.
▪ the creation of collective intelligence and ‘crowd wisdom’ - attaching
relevance and content to pieces of information being published like in
practices such as tagging, rating and commenting, as well as services such
as social bookmarking and news-sharing sites which allow individuals to
store and share information.
CREDITS
Lecture source: Science, Technology, and Society Module by Gonzales, Maalihan, and Montalbo (2020)
Images extracted from:
▪ britannica.com

▪ History.com

▪ interestingengineering.com

▪ google.com/search

▪ printrunner.com

▪ miprinting.blogspot.com

▪ stmuhistorymedia.com

▪ indiamart.com

▪ ft.com

▪ businesshorsepower.com

▪ Olympiadgenius.com

▪ https://free-powerpoint-templates-download.com/
RELATED MATERIALS
▪ https://prezi.com/cqwv8nwzbcmx/information-age/
▪ https://prezi.com/tzwe8klf3anb/from-gutenberg-to-the-internet-a-comparison-of-t
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▪ https://slideplayer.com/slide/7466727/