what happens if there is no printing press what problems we will face if there is no printing press
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The enthusiastic projections that accompany any new technology usually overestimate actual progress, but can vary wildly in their prescience on either side of the eventuality.
The eventual impact of a technology is at least weakly dependent on its ubiquity; the more widely spread the greater the likelihood and magnitude of impact. The typical new technology is very expensive or esoteric and, thus, is initially restricted to a small segment of the population. Some technologies, such as space travel, languish there indefinitely. Others, such as books, stay in the province of the elite for some time, and eventually make their way throughout the populace. Still others, such as calculators and televisions, start out expensive and enjoy a steady drop in price and a concomitant rise in circulation.
If one has a computer, connecting to the Internet costs little or nothing, since each node is independent, and has to handle its own financing and its own technical requirements. While the price of connecting to the Internet has been historically low, it still requires a computer. Though computers continue to drop in price, they still cost several hundred to several thousand dollars new. On the other hand, computers have enjoyed the longest stretch of uninterrupted exponential growth of any technology known to man.
As far as the interest in networks today, Joel Birnbaum would say we are in the third of four stages for a pervasive technology—where it has become well known and commonplace, but is used directly by only a rather small portion of the population.[17] The fourth stage is where the technology becomes integral to daily life.
Computer technology. What will be the situation when the exponential growth of both networking and computers has finally tailed off? It is the many-to-many nature of networked computers rather than the specific technology that is the heart of this paper. For that reason, but realizing that the ubiquity/availability question is an important one, I will use very conservative estimates of the capabilities of networks and computers when they "stop growing exponentially.
File transfers allow Internet users to access remote machines and retrieve programs or text. Many Internet computers allow anyone to access them anonymously, and to simply copy their public files, free of charge. Internet file-transfers are becoming a new form of publishing, in which the reader simply electronically copies the work on demand, for free. One aspect of file transfers is the latest rage on the Internet, and embodies an important computer software technology that will figure in the speculations below.
At this point let me draw a very conservative picture of a networked computer system in the year 2010. The network will have a wide variety of computers connected to it, including personal computers with the memory and processing capabilities of today's supercomputers. About 50% of the households in the U.S. will have computers (up from 28% today) and 30% of households will be connected to the network (up from 11% today).
"Scholars have long recognized the essential role of the press in spreading Protestant doctrine. Luther himself, in fact, claimed that the invention of printing was a gift from God to reform His church. But Eisenstein argues that print did more than spread the Protestant Reformation: in an important sense, print caused the Reformation. Without access to the printed editions of biblical texts and church fathers, and the worrisome variants on crucial dogmatic issues they contain, Luther might never have been stimulated to develop his revolutionary new theology.
These summaries do little justice to the case Eisenstein builds for the impact of the printing press. While not all historians share her enthusiasm, there is a general concession that the impact of print has been under-researched and, thereby, underestimated. The printing press was not the only change taking place in the period from 1450 to 1650, (just as networked computers are not the only change taking place today). Nonetheless, Eisenstein's research is clear evidence that the printing press had a profound effect on society during the time Europe was making the transition from a medieval to a modern world.