En tu idioma / In your own language

Eduardo del Buey
Foto: María José Martínez / Cuartoscuro
La Jornada Maya

Martes 1 de noviembre, 2016

In 1439 Johannes Gutenberg introduced the modern printing press to the world, and ushered in a revolution in knowledge sharing and thinking. Until then, reading, writing, and learning had been the purview of the Church and a small percentage of the upper socioeconomic strata.

If you wanted to learn, you had to gain access to a monastery or church where scribes meticulously hand wrote texts and kept a monopoly on learning.

You had to go to the source of the text and that was usually extremely difficult, if not impossible.

Gutenberg changed all of that.

With a moveable type press, anyone could publish books, newspapers, and pamphlets, and get knowledge to people. This was a revolution in communications.

Soon, Martin Luther was using pamphlets to lead the Reformation through the publication of his Ninety-Five Theses, and his published translation of the New Testament into the vernacular in 1516 brought sacred texts to the masses.

This fundamentally altered the social order of Europe and gave way to what became known as the Reformation with its religious wars and the Renaissance, where information and the knowledge of the newly emerging age could be shared through time and space with large numbers of readers.

By changing the nature of communications, Gutenberg changed the world and set the stage for the rapid technological and social advances of the industrial revolution up until the digital era.

Four and a half centuries later, in 1989, Tim Berners-Lee invented the protocols that created the world wide web, the application that brought the internet to all through a variety of platforms. This quickly led to the digitalization of humankind's knowledge and led to an explosion of shared experience and a synergy hitherto unknown and unimagined.

Audiences can now communicate on issues from around the world, whether they know each other or not. This opens the door top global collaboration and commentary of all issues, and allows people to glean the best ideas from wherever. Today the synergies born of multidirectional global dialogue are creating new products, services, markets, and ideas.

Today, one can argue that the vast majority of human learning and experience is accessible on-line with a few keystrokes. No longer does one have to leave the comfort of one's chair to have access to all of humankind's knowledge and to communicate with a global audience for a few pennies of bandwidth and a smart phone.

This was born of the second communications revolution that is the very foundation of our lives today. One cannot conceive of life without the web, social media, or email. They are an integral part of our global and individual cultures.

At his master conference during the [i]Festival Internacional de la Cultura Maya[/i] in Merida, Mexico on October 21st, former Mexican Ambassador Juan José Bremer spoke of the Internet as the "omnipresence of all activities in our lives, a global vision that permeates our collective consciousness...it is an echo chamber that amplifies the noise and fury of our times".

The noise and fury of our times.

The truth is that if Gutenberg made us all potential readers and writers, the Internet and its rapidly evolving social media platforms have made us all communicators. We can now communicate instantly across the street or around the globe. That is of course if anyone is listening!

Yet as the late professor of economics at New York University Frank Moore Colby once wrote, “Every improvement in communication makes the bore more terrible.”

I always remind my students and clients that the way to resonate through the sound and fury is to ensure that your content, is interesting, novel, original, and unique. Today’s audiences have a very short attention span and, if you don’t grab their interest from the start, they will drift off to other things.

Of course, content can influence and lead to good or evil.

The Renaissance brought learning and beauty to the world, but the Reformation brought war and suffering that has continued until recently (i.e. Northern Ireland). Education and the ready availability of knowledge for all led to change, and change can be painful for some and liberating for others.

In the same way, the Internet is neither good nor evil.

It is whatever the user wants it to be. As was the case for print communications, one can share pornography or beauty, calls to violence or love. The technology is new, but the objectives and shared values are as old and complex as is the human experience.

The result is a modern Tower of Babel in which one can make an impact and choose what that impact will be.

Only when humankind refines and improves its mentality will this Tower crumble along with much of the sound and fury.

Mérida, Yucatán

[b][email protected][/b]