The Press
Never Really Free
Gutenberg's printing press was more than just a new machine. It transformed culture by changing the way information was transmitted and preserved. With the printing press creating a thousand copies was almost as easy as making one. This fecundity allowed all sorts of information to flood the world. It allowed the construction of libraries that carried information from the past.
By the time of the American Revolution newspapers had become significant. I assume that then, as now, the news was current events of interest. I imagine that merchants took advantage of the medium to advertise. This was all supported by the tech of the printing press. A newspaper wasn't just a piece of paper that a person could read. It was something that you knew many other people were reading at about the same time.
I'm no scholar - but I bet newspapers helped set people up so they could respond to Paul Revere's midnight ride.
I was an enterprising kid - Dad frowned on allowances. I earned pocket money by scrounging construction sites for bottles left by the workers that I could cash for the refund. For a few years my trade was being a paper boy - I delivered newspapers to doorsteps. I delivered the Telegraph Journal in Saint John. It was a morning paper - on your doorstep by 7am. I liked the job. I liked being out in the world during dawn when the birds were singing and most people were asleep.
The Telegraph Journal was owned by the local millionaire - KC Irving. KC owned the Telegraph Journal and the Evening Times Globe (Saint John's afternoon paper) and the TV station. He also owned the pulpmill that polluted the air enough to make one cough and an oil refinery.
By then the term 'press' had started to jump to the term 'media' And KC had a lock on Saint John's media that was maybe unique. He owned both newspapers and a TV/radio station. He got very little public scrutiny for huge projects like a superport that received oil for his oil refinery. He had a pulp mill beside the Reversing Falls - a local wonder of nature. Aside from citizens murmuring among themselves 'never a discouraging word was heard'.
Even KC's media empire was a good source of information. It's a big world and there were lots of interesting things to report on that didn't affect KC at all and the business was to present interesting stories that drew eyeballs to nearby ads.
The business of selling ads that run beside free or cheap news is a pretty old business model.
The internet may have broken that model.
It is easy on the internet to get all sorts of information for free. Or at least was. Now lots of information has retreated behind paywalls.
It's easy to filter out ads. There's software. Stuff as simple as taping a sheet of paper to cover up the offending part of the screen.
The ads themselves have become obnoxious - obnoxious enough that eyeballs avoid the articles.
The people selling advertising space were in a bind - the only people buying ads were people with business plans that depend on attracting people with certain psychoses (imho) and the ads were driving reasonable people away.
Websites are moving to subscription based paywalls.
This might actually be a blessing in disguise. Now the barriers to entry are pretty low. I could probably do it myself. But for me that doesn't really work.
I harken back to Saint John long ago. The press was a big part of our world. It was stuff we all shared even if we disagreed about the meaning of what we were seeing. Once - even as a radical student I had an idea about what conservatives were thinking because we all read the same newspapers.
That doesn't hold now.
I trust the CBC to be a pretty 'unbiased' source of news. But that may just be because I'm comfortable with their biases.
What do you think?
I open the floor
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.