Changing Humanity

How Michael Goldhaber correctly predicted the future

Image credit: Freepik

Thanks to an article in this week’s The Economist news magazine, I belatedly discovered the academic Michael Goldhaber and the paper he published in 2004 in an Elsevier journal Cultural Studies (which means, of course, it’s eye-wateringly expensive to access and read). In the article, which was primarily about the effects of the then-relatively-new phenomenon of people having meetings via webcam, Goldhaber considered the wider impact of the Internet on human psychology and behavior.

He noted that the development of the printing press brought about quite a radical change in how human beings thought about themselves and in how they acted in public. As oral traditions faded with growing literacy, people had access to more and more information about the world around them, and much of this information was empirically valid. Just as important was the fact this information was fixed. Whereas two people could listen to a third person speaking and then have quite different recollections about what was said, the printed word meant that it was possible to go back and check to see what had in fact been written. This gave us a much firmer basis not merely for scientific progress but also for a more widely shared view of reality. Whereas before, most humans lived in tiny micro-realities that were dependent on…