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[T]he assumption ... that the printed book represented a relatively unproblematic vehicle for the transmission of knowledge clearly needs to be revised.1
[I]n spite of the availability of a textual tradition involved in active textual literacy practices, the kinds of scientific and technological developments at the social level, and cognitive developments at the individual level, that a textual tradition is supposed to result in did not materialize in India.2
Introduction
For Elizabeth Eisenstein, the alleged intellectual upheavals of the sixteenth century are the direct consequences of the open-ended information flow made possible by the shift from script to print.3 She sees the spreading of the Renaissance far beyond the boundaries of the Italian peninsula, the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution as products of the ability of the typographical culture to make conscious what was implicit in the preceding cultural patterns. In this she is not alone. Latour, for example, uses the same kind of idea in his description of Tycho Brahe:
[N]othing dominates us more than the stars. It seems that there is no way to reverse the scale and to make us, the astronomers, able to master the sky above our heads. The situation is quickly reversed, however, when Tycho Brahe, inside a well-equipped observatory built for him at Oranenbourg, starts not only to write down on the same homogenous charts the positions of the planets, but also to gather the sightings made by other astronomers all over Europe which he had asked them to write down on the same pre-printed forms he has sent them. Here again a virtuous cumulative circle starts to unfold if all sightings at different places and times are gathered together and synoptically displayed. The positive loops runs all the more rapidly, if the same Brahe is able to gather in the same place not only fresh observations made by him and his colleagues, but all the older books of astronomy that the printing press has made available at low cost.4
What is driving this argument is the notion that physical replication of the symbolic reality due to its externalisation enables manipulation and verification by eye and hand. In other words, the cumulative cognitive advance which characterises modern scientific European culture is the result of a technical innovation....