Conscious Assessment of Print

Tim Carmody describes the Print Revolution in his article "10 Reading Revolutions Before E-Books." He discusses how print changed the way we interact with a text fundamentally, and I think this is very true.

Walter Ong claims in chapter 3 of his book "Orality and Literacy" that writing restructures consciousness. This is very relevant to the print revolution of the Renaissance that Carmody was talking about- print changed the way we consciously experience a text.

Oral speech, as Ong discusses in the chapter, is a social act that takes place in a specific location at a specific time, and is challengeable. For the longest time people, even those exposed to writing, would hold oral communication much more reliable than written word. When interacting with print, everybody interacts with an exact copy of the same print, so a print that was distributed could reach many individuals and offer a sense of community- after all somebody else somewhere was experiencing this same exact text. Further more, like all writing, it's experienced away from its creator and at a different date, so there is that disconnectedness. So instead of interacting with a person, they're interacting more directly with the text itself. The author is writing it for a large audience and therefore has to cater it to the people. "The writer must set up a role in which absent and often unknown readers can cast themselves..." (Ong 100). That is where the community aspect is built, several, perhaps hundreds or thousands of people reading, interacting with the same text. Also, as Carmody argues, this helped to change readers' expectations of texts in the future.