but as @jeffjarvis also shows, those same histories show it takes time & experimentation to understand what a new technology will actually change & what guardrails we need to create around it—there are zero cases where we fully understood a new medium & could manage it from the outset, because a medium’s eventual shape is completely opaque in the moment of its creation—a primary reason to study these histories is to learn to evaluate our own shifts *slightly* more efficiently

our historical lenses are curved in such a way that we look back at "printing" as a singular event co-terminus with the positive developments we associate with the technology, but @jeffjarvis notes there were at 100 years of significant turmoil as people figured all that out—that all gets collapsed in the rear-view—I appreciate holding both the dominant effects of print (stability, fixity) in tandem with the messy realities that inevitably complicate that narrative