The Breakthrough of Typographic Printing | 31system, without going hand in hand with a capitalistic structure (Lie 2003).
McLuhan’s socio-economic theses are also derived from the attribute of print-
ing he considers most distinct – the principle of uniform reproduction. This
led to the widely held deduction that the printing press had been the first
assembly line and the first mass production industry, and had thus effected
uniform mass production and industrialisation (McLuhan 2011: 142f.). But
once again the comparison with Asia is a warning against too readily conjec-
turing causalities, as neither printing techniques nor mass circulation entailed
the concept of Fordism.
The standardisations which had resulted from printing – including, for
instance, increasingly homogenised text forms, images, maps and diagrams as
well as the harmonisation of calendars and dictionaries – promoted the for-
mation of a collective body of knowledge (Eisenstein 2005: 23, 56), leading
to the assumption that printing implied linguistic standardisations. Its devel-
opment ostensibly led to a harmonisation of writing styles and dialects and
thus to the establishment of national languages. This seems to correlate with
the linguistic appeal of Bible translations in different countries, from a long-
term perspective as well, especially since an increase in vernacular prints from
the sixteenth century onwards has been substantiated. Yet printed Protestant
Bible translations should not be overrated, as vernacular languages asserted
themselves concurrently in countries with major confessional differences, for
example the Reich, England, France, Italy and Bohemia (cf. Gilmont 1998).
This should nevertheless be put into perspective. For in religious and aca-
demic communication at least, Latin continued to prevail for quite some time,
while the significance of dialects, on the other hand, did not diminish because
of printed language. What is more, the comparison with China underscores
that a uniform written language must by no means result in an automatic
eradication of dialects. On the contrary, it tended to remain on a somewhat
rarefied level relative to the spoken language. Considering that dialects did not
pale in significance until sometime in the twentieth century, it appears that
language standardisation occurred not only in connection with the education
system, but particularly in conjunction with the dissemination of electronic
media such as radio and television. Even in the case of national languages,
uniform modes of writing did not develop in Germany until later, arising
primarily in the wake of the general standardisation efforts emanating from
nineteenth-century nationalism. One must equally relativise the claim that
nationalism evolved on the grounds of printing in the sixteenth century, as
Benedict Anderson, amongst others, argues in his much cited work (Anderson
[1983] 2006: 31–48). Anderson argues in a brief footnote that printing had
no revolutionary impact in China, because of the absence of capitalism there
(ibid.: 46). He roots his most pivotal argument not only in the establishment
of national languages, but also in the awareness of contemporaneous media