14 | Mass Media and Historical Change
of multiplying incantatory spells, much like advertising in our age’ (McLuhan
[1962] 2011: 40). In his famous work on book printing in the early modern
period, the German media historian Michael Giesecke emphasised that in
China and Korea, printing had only had a limited effect until it was re-im-
ported from Europe. The author claims that in Korea, book printing had only
served as a means for institutional communication, but had no relevance in
everyday life. The reason for this, according to Giesecke, lies not in the com-
plexity of the language. Rather, he determines that any desire to change the
dominating social and political circumstances, if indeed such desires existed,
would not have been associated with communication media (Giesecke 1991:
128–30). Other historians and scholars of communication and bibliography
studies wholly ignored printing progress in Asia or simply cited the technical
superiority of the German innovation.
A glance at existing literature on the Asian development provides a dif-
ferent outlook. From a research perspective, a technical comparison between
Asia and Europe is less productive than the consideration of the different social
and cultural dimensions of media changes. It is striking that, unlike in the
Western world, the invention of book printing in Asia happened quite incon-
spicuously and was not tied to an association with one man’s sudden stroke of
genius. What was considered a revolutionary act in the West occurred rather
as a long-term evolution in the East. Neither exact dates nor names of inven-
tors have been passed on; and in general, Chinese sources scarcely broach the
issue of printing before the sixteenth century (McDermott 2006: 9–13). The
development period, in fact, spanned over a thousand years, and pivotal inno-
vations were of transnational occurrence. The Chinese, for instance, produced
high-quality paper as early as the first century ad, and its use then spread
across the whole of Central Asia during the following centuries. Similarly, in
the first half of the eighth century, woodblock printing emerged in China and
Korea and was subsequently adopted by the Japanese in the same century.
The book market flourished in the eleventh century, leading to some experi-
mentation with movable ceramic type in China around 1040. Although this
invention never asserted itself, the notion was taken up in Korea and reformed
in the shape of metal type. Individual Korean scholars have dated the first
letterpress prints as far back as the eleventh century; however, most experts
suspect the formation period to be around 1230, although no corresponding
prints have survived from that period (Moon-Year 2004: 32; Seong-Rae 2004:
26). All of these inventions were regarded by the renowned art historian and
expert on East Asia, Lothar Ledderose, as part of a Chinese ‘modular system’,
in which various distinct forms of mass production continued to emerge over
several centuries (Ledderose 2000).
The great demand for books which encouraged such inventions and trig-
gered high-circulation publications in China and Korea was the product of