Over the course of human history, a variety of novel inventions have helped facilitate and advance the dissemination of knowledge across the world. Those outlined in the list below are some of the most important.
The Printing Press. While Johannes Gutenberg is often credited with inventing the printing press, his great contribution actually was improving the technology. Printing was developed in China, with The Diamond Sūtra, printed about 868 CE, believed to be the oldest known printed book. It was created using a technique known as block printing, which utilized panels of hand-carved woodblocks in reverse.
Moveable type, which replaced printing blocks with reusable moveable letters, was developed by Bi Sheng in China about 1041–48 CE. The moveable type was carved into clay and baked into hard blocks that could be arranged on an iron frame and covered in ink, and then paper was pressed against it.
Europeans began making wood-block prints at the end of the 14th century. Gutenberg, a German craftsman from Mainz, began experimenting with printing in the 1430s while living in exile in Strasbourg. He returned to Mainz by 1448 and set about perfecting a printing press with significant commercial applications. By about 1455 Gutenberg had produced the first book to be printed via the Gutenberg press, a 1,300-page edition of the Bible.
The influence of the printing press was staggering. As the machine was perfected further, more and more books, newspapers, pamphlets, and other edifying materials became available to the public. This gradually led to greater literacy around the world, as well as the sharing of knowledge and ideas, which resulted in dramatic social and cultural advances. Suddenly, knowledge was no longer only for the elite. If one could read, one could learn.
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Photography. In terms of conveying information to the public, photography was as big a game changer as the printing press, but photography did so via images instead of words. Before the development of photography in the mid-1800s, paintings and illustrations had been the only way to capture a moment for posterity. Photography offered a much larger and more socially vital canvas.
By the mid-1800s, photographers were capturing not only still lifes and images of monuments but also portraits of people and scenes from everyday life (as long as the people stood still long enough). The American Civil War was one of the first conflicts to be captured by photographers, and thus it was for every war thereafter. Whereas words could describe a scene, photographs brought it home with sometimes brutal clarity.
As photography was perfected and cameras became smaller and easier to use, photographers became social and cultural chroniclers and thus conveyors of knowledge. Photographs evinced the good, the bad, and the ugly in the world and sometimes sparked social change. For example, photographers working for the Farm Security Administration photographed the struggles of everyday life in rural America during the Great Depression, creating images that helped sell U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Other photographs that evoked an emotional public reaction included Josef Koudelka’s shots of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague, which were published in numerous magazines worldwide after being smuggled out of Czechoslovakia, and Alessio Romenzi’s images of a doomed ISIS fighter as he is captured by enraged Libyan troops in 2016.
Over the years, media photographs have helped sway public opinion about the Vietnam War, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and other conflicts around the world; captured the horrors of the Kent State shootings on May 4, 1970; and revealed the depths of poverty in America’s cities. This role continues today via the photographic coverage of social justice movements, such as Black Lives Matter, and divisive politics and supports the loudening voice of the disenfranchised.
Motion Pictures. Entertainment is the traditional goal of motion pictures, but the medium also has had an important impact in the dissemination of knowledge. As with photographs, motion pictures are able to visually capture an event and present it to a broad audience.
Motion pictures shifted from simple entertainment to serious edification with the documentary film—reality writ large. The very first motion pictures, called “actuality films,” were, in fact, mini documentaries because they captured snippets of real life. Just a few minutes long and mundane by today’s standards (one actuality film simply showed workers leaving a factory), these early films stunned audiences who had never seen anything like them before.
Documentaries in raw form were part of cinema’s early evolution. There is debate as to the first real documentary film, though Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), which documents the hardships of Inuit life, is considered as such by many film historians, despite the fact that certain events were staged.
Contemporary film documentaries advance knowledge by burrowing deep into a single issue, movement, event, or individual. Sometimes such films alter public opinion and facilitate change. For example, Blackfish (2013), a documentary about the consequences of keeping orcas in captivity, resulted in legislation to better protect orcas and helped bring about significant changes to how aquatic theme parks, such as SeaWorld, managed the animals in their care. Additional examples of transformative documentaries included Night & Fog (1956), Alain Resnais’s evocative documentary about the Holocaust, and Waltz with Bashir (2008), Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman’s animated documentary about his experiences as a soldier during the 1982 Lebanon war.
The Internet. When it comes to the dissemination of knowledge, the Internet is the modern equivalent of the printing press in terms of importance, influence, and reach. Starting in the 1990s, it brought to the masses the almost instant ability to access information from anywhere in the world with the click of a mouse.
Though the Internet is a relatively recent innovation, the concept of a worldwide network of information is not new. Nikola Tesla, for example, considered the idea of a “world wireless system” in the early 1900s, and other visionaries advanced similar ideas.
Technology caught up with the dream in the early 1960s when computer scientists developed a method of transmitting electronic data known as “packet switching.” This innovation was key to the Internet as we know it today.
The first workable “Internet”—a contraction for “interconnecting networks”—was the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), funded by the United States Department of Defense, which used packet switching to allow multiple computers to talk to each other on a single network. ARPANET delivered its first message on October 29, 1969—a single word (LOGIN) sent from UCLA to Stanford University. The test crashed the system, and only the first two letters were received.
Advance after advance followed, and in the early 1980s the Internet really started to take shape. The 1990s saw tremendous growth in Internet development, and today the revolutionary system is as big a part of many people’s lives as electricity and running water.
The social influence of the Internet is incalculable, especially in regard to the dissemination of knowledge. It allows researchers in different parts of the world to work together in real time, students to learn from instructors in other cities, and many people to access libraries and other information archives as easily as pulling a book off a living room shelf. It has boosted literacy around the world and made available to everyone music, books, films, and more.
However, the Internet is not perfect. Truth in the form of verifiable facts often sits side by side with untruth, and in the digital age it can sometimes be difficult to tell the difference. Nonetheless, the world would be a very different place now without the Internet. For those seeking knowledge, its value is limitless.