32 | Mass Media and Historical Change
use. Researchers on the topic of nationalism, however, hold the view that this
phenomenon developed as late as the second half of the eighteenth century,
while any previous cognition should be reduced to a sense of affiliation at the
most (Jansen and Borggräfe 2007: 26).
McLuhan’s notion that printing induced a novel conception of scribes as
authors, as well as the concept of intellectual property, have been much referred
to. Printing is thus thought to have been the agent for the evolving of individ-
uals as inventors with a claim to originality, whereby ‘change itself [became]
the archetypal norm of social life’ (McLuhan 2011: 177). Indeed, disputes on
plagiarism and disputes about authorship increased in quantity during the
Renaissance and portended the birth of the author (Burke 2000: 176). Many
creators of past innovations – such as the mirror, spectacles and the mechan-
ical clock – had remained unknown, whilst the image of the inventor now
appeared to rise to that of a prototypic character of the Modern Era (Hörisch
2004: 130). To begin with, the emphasis on individual names on the covers
of books, catalogues and images was conducive to this trend, even though the
original intention was to stimulate sales. Book covers have thus been perceived
as the birth of advertisement (Saenger 2005: 197; Eisenstein 2005: 33). One
may also add that censorship laws such as the obligatory imprint, as well as
prosecution in case of non-compliance, forced people to regard texts as indi-
vidual creations. The emergence of paramount figures like Luther, Da Vinci
and Galilei also seems to confirm this evolution of creative individuals as being
a result of printing.
The associated assumption that printing had generally encouraged indi-
vidualisation bears even more truth. As Neil Postman argued, printed texts
prompted individual reflection; they also evolved on the basis of personal
avowals (Postman [1982] 2011: 27–32). When contrasting these discover-
ies with the Asian development, however, it once again becomes clear that
the birth of individualism was not necessarily impacted by printing. After all,
authorship initially had hardly any significance in Asia, and no mention was
made of the inventors of new media technologies. Furthermore, self-manifes-
tation cannot have been so effortlessly and rapidly achieved in Western Europe
either; for why else do we have so little biographical knowledge of perhaps the
greatest poet and playwright of all time, William Shakespeare. It was not an
anomaly for printed texts to be published anonymously or under false names
- the proportion of anonymous print-work in seventeenth-century England
rose to a full 30 per cent (Raymond 2003: 169). Another conflictive aspect is
whether this alleged individualisation is compatible with the simultaneously
postulated standardisation of society through the technology of printing. Elis-
abeth Eisenstein has attempted to elucidate this discrepancy by claiming that
standardised writing was precisely what encouraged efforts to develop a per-
sonal touch (Eisenstein 2005: 72, 104).