sententiae

It’s now almost a commonplace that people compare the way the internet has changed how we gather, use, and disseminate information to the way printing revolutionized the same in the 15th century.  Hornschuch’s comments about Guttenburg are as applicable today as they were then:
“However, since Johann Gutenberg of Strasbourg devised the art of typography at Mainz about the year 1440, everything nowadays can be done at less expense and with less hard work: for as many letters can be printed by one man in one day as could scarcely be written by several men in a whole year.  As a result of this such a great flood of books on all subjects has been poured out to us, that there will never in future be any work that is out of the reach of even the most needy.  Such were the achievements of Johann Gutenberg” (4-5).  His complaints about the sloppiness of printers and the mistakes and misinformation they allow to be circulated also sound eerily familiar.