The Breakthrough of Typographic Printing | 33It is without doubt that printing changed the way knowledge was imparted,
leading to modifications in visual and textual contents. Broadsides gradually
assumed the task of news distribution, which had previously been assigned
exclusively to the Church (Eisenstein 2005: 104). And since economic aspects
increasingly steered textual selection, printing also facilitated the rejection of
canonical texts. This novel way of accumulating knowledge also altered the
art of preserving memories, which is why printing has been designated the
‘engine of immortality’ (McLuhan 2011: 230). The preservation in print, the
storing of knowledge in libraries, and cataloguing and indexing with the aid of
bibliographies thus modified the selection mechanisms of memory culture. At
the same time, printing transformed the places associated with written com-
munication. According to Frieder Schanze, scriptoria were turned into offices
in the Modern Era; libraries became places of study for individually working
scholars, and for competitive reasons, the theatre concentrated increasingly
on physicality (Schanze 2001: 233–39). The dissemination of school books
changed the course of lessons as early as the sixteenth century, and the Church
also transformed its communication by means of the immediate utilisation of
printing, which Michael Giesecke has interpreted as ‘a rationalisation of office
communication’ (Giesecke 1991: 223–30, quote 230). Ecclesiastical rituals
are also said to have been harmonised.
The most convincing as well as the most difficult statement to prove is
McLuhan’s arguably most significant thesis, which describes typography as a
natural resource that ‘shapes not only private sense ratios but also patterns of
communal interdependence’ (McLuhan 2011: 186). In his work, he detects
a hierarchical shift from the aural to the visual sense, making homogeneous
visual perception the characteristic of ‘typographic man’. One objection to this
has been that medieval contemporaries had already perceived similar changes
(Neddermeyer 1998: 21, 550). Eric Alfred Havelock stressed very early on
that such an alteration of perception was detectable even in the ancient world,
namely in the transition between oral and written culture – a view which met
with much criticism. Contrariwise, public reading did not die out in 1500,
but, on the contrary, remained the norm for at least another two centuries
after the emergence of typography. The argument of ‘visual culture’ at first
appears convincing with regard to the educational sector, with textbooks now
more frequently serving as the chief source of knowledge, and learning exam-
ples being increasingly accompanied by images (Eisenstein 2005: 40–45).
However, this area of life also reveals the limits of the visual age. For despite
the expansion of the book market, it is common knowledge that schools and
even universities continued to adhere rigidly to teaching methods like spoken
dialogues and lectures. Other domains also demonstrate the simultaneous
expansion of speech and writing, such as in the form of sermons or songs
(Briggs and Burke 2002: 46).