While I agree printed media is biased and is a medium for propaganda, it's hard to argue it's comparable in scale or effectiveness to social media.
1) in the Renaissance, literacy was much lower, books were scarce and expensive, and writing was often made in Latin, like the original bibles and Newton's Principia Mathematica. Therefore, print had MUCH less reach than social media.
2) the attentional cost of a book is vastly greater than a tweet. Tweets are designed to be simple and read in seconds; books are often complex and take weeks to digest.
3) due to 2, I feel Twitter's discourse evolves and devolves much, much faster into extremism and bullying and bad behaviors. It takes a long time for book disses to reach their target, not so for Twitter.
I could go on, but suffice to say, social media is an exponential notch above printed media in it's potential misuse and damage to society.
A lot of printed media was released in poorly bound booklets, without covers, it was roughly equivalent to a tweet or blog post today. The good ones got reprinted and/or compiled into an anthology, the bad ones were simply lost to time as kindling for the hearth.
Not as fast as a tweet, but low cost, sub-book media has existed as long as the printing press was around. The classic books we study today are the equivalent of the criterion collection dvd sets.
1) in the Renaissance, literacy was much lower, books were scarce and expensive, and writing was often made in Latin, like the original bibles and Newton's Principia Mathematica. Therefore, print had MUCH less reach than social media.
2) the attentional cost of a book is vastly greater than a tweet. Tweets are designed to be simple and read in seconds; books are often complex and take weeks to digest.
3) due to 2, I feel Twitter's discourse evolves and devolves much, much faster into extremism and bullying and bad behaviors. It takes a long time for book disses to reach their target, not so for Twitter.
I could go on, but suffice to say, social media is an exponential notch above printed media in it's potential misuse and damage to society.