But when Peruvian museums boast artifacts from before Christ, focusing exclusively on Atahualpa and his predecessors is akin to being so impressed by books that you conclude world history began with the Gutenberg press.
Shirky believes that we are on the crest of an ever-surging wave of democratized information: the Gutenberg printing press produced the Reformation, which produced the Scientific Revolution, which produced the Enlightenment, which produced the Internet, each move more liberating than the one before.
On the other hand, shortly before our show starts, Gutenberg invented the printing press.
Not since Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, or Alexander Graham Bell the telephone, has a human invention empowered so many and offered so much possibility for benefiting humankind.
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When Gutenberg invented the printing press, he created a legacy that will be hard to dismiss in a matter of e-years (since time goes by so fast between new apps and phones).
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But he assembles strong scientific and anecdotal evidence that the way brains work has been altered with every new medium introduced, from Johannes Gutenberg's printing press to Lee De Forest's audion, and that the Internet may be the most effective mind-mutating technology of all time.
That world began when Johannes Gutenberg introduced the printing press in 1455, and gave birth along the way to the Reformation, the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment, the Scientific Method, and finally the Industrial Revolution not to mention the modern era of newspapers, universal education and, yes, mass literacy.
Gutenberg's 15th-century printing press revolution succeeded in putting software at the center of the world.
"We've also got some of the earliest examples of printing in the world, from the 1400s, from Gutenberg and from Caxton and a rare edition of the complete works printed by Kelmscott Press by William Morris, " he added.
The printing press or the art of movable type that would trigger an explosion of Christian civilization, with the Gutenberg revolution in Germany, had been invented centuries earlier by the Chinese, but with no similar effect.
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