Lecture 4: Chronologies and Print

With like the majority of the information I receive in lectures, I'm not sure what to do with the very little I learnt in today's lecture. Not saying that it was bad or wasn't interesting, I'm just very confused with what I have been told. The gist of what I got was that Print was a more effective way of communicating over speech, and this was demonstrated by a large scale game of "Chinese Whispers". A message was passed around throughout so many people that it eventually got distorted and we ended up with information that was different to what was originally passed out. Whereas printed messages don't have the ability to distort, so everyone is going to get the same message without confusion. Because of this we can assume that Print and documentation & communication is correct and factual. There is no tone of voice and there is "no way" for the message to change.

I also got from the lecture that the invention of the Linotype Machine was a huge thing. Before Lino printing newspapers would be less than 8 pages long because of the length of time it took to create them. The Linotype allowed for people to document instantly, allowing for information to be accurate. There wasn't time for the information to be passed around and become distorted.

This is the part of the lecture that I got really confused at, simply because I know nothing about Politics, and things like democracy, consumerism and propagandas. But basically I think print became a method of manipulating people, especially around the time of the war. People great in wealth and authority would have access to equipment and so they could have a massive impact, and they did. They were able to produce posters that attempted to recruit individuals, in a light that made it seem that the war was going to be a great thing. They were able to manipulate people as people were still under the impression  that printed information must be true, whereas now-a-days we are more skeptical, especially with people being able to post what they like on social media sites, etc.

To summarise, I realise that Print was/is a very powerful invention and that we can take print to be more factual and correct than information that is just passed around.