Information superhighways

ANDREW PETTEGREE reviews a book that charts how news networks flourished across Europe even before the advent of printing technology

- 

From print to AI, any major innovation in communication technology follows much the same trajectory. We start with technological fascination, which generates a massive influx of development capital, often without much reflection on how that investment can be recouped.

When the difficulty of monetising the new technology becomes clear, pessimism replaces the initial optimism. At all stages, innovation is driven by a wave of false prophecy. Nobody really knows what the consequences will be.

For four centuries, the cacophony of doom has mostly involved anticipating the death of the existing technologies - that print would destroy the manuscript, and that everything since would destroy the book. Newspapers, theatre, radio, cinema, television - all these were seen as the last straw for Gutenberg’s invention. For a moment at the turn of the 20th century, the bicycle was promoted as the agent of death, only to be usurped 20 years later by the automobile.

These dire predictions are based on one recurrent false premise: that the new will render existing technologies obsolete. Joad Raymond Wren never falls into this trap, but instead offers an extraordinarily broad and capacious survey of how the new technology of print was integrated into an already buoyant and diverse news market.