How the medium shapes the message: Printing and the rise of the arts and sciences

Abstract

Communication technologies, from printing to social media, affect our historical records by changing the way ideas are spread and recorded. Yet, finding statistical evidence of this fact has been challenging. Here we combine a common causal inference technique (instrumental variable estimation) with a dataset on nearly forty thousand biographies from Wikipedia (Pantheon 2.0), to study the effect of the introduction of printing in European cities on Wikipedia’s digital biographical records. By using a city’s distance to Mainz as an instrument for the adoption of the movable type press, we show that European cities that adopted printing earlier were more likely to become the birthplace of a famous scientist or artist during the years following the invention of printing. We bring these findings to recent communication technologies by showing that the number of radios and televisions in a country correlates with the number of globally famous performing artists and sports players born in that country, even after controlling for GDP, population, and including country and year fixed effects. These findings support the hypothesis that the introduction of communication technologies can bias historical records in the direction of the content that is best suited for each technology.

Quantifying the selective forgetting and integration of ideas in science and technology.

“…Computational social science has used big data methods to study the actuality mode (Assmann, 1995) of memories, focusing its efforts on the consumption of cultural content from Wikipedia page views (Candia et al, 2019; García-Gavilanes et al, 2017; Jara-Figueroa et al, 2019; Kanhabua et al, 2014; Skiena & Ward, 2014; Yu et al, 2016), scientific paper and patent citations (Candia et al, 2019; Higham et al, 2017a, 2017b; Mukherjee et al, 2017; Uzzi et al, 2013; Wang et al, 2013), and the effects of accomplishments, technology, language, and triggers in the dynamics of collective memory and attention (Bowker, 2005; Ferron & Massa, 2014; García-Gavilanes et al, 2017; Jara-Figueroa et al, 2019; Kanhabua et al, 2014; Ronen et al, 2014; Yu et al, 2016; Yucesoy & Barabási, 2016). For instance, on a broad societal scale, it has been shown that people forget the past at a rate that increases as time passes (Michel et al, 2011).…”

“…For instance, on a broad societal scale, it has been shown that people forget the past at a rate that increases as time passes (Michel et al, 2011). Further exploration shows that changes in communication technologies such as the rise of the printing press, radio, and TV have been shown to affect attention since researchers can correlate them with changes in occupations present in the community when these technologies emerge (Jara-Figueroa et al, 2019).…”

An attempt to unified approach to the evolution of products in the entertainment industry

“…Fashion trends are dynamic (Lorenz-Spreen et al, 2018;Cebula, 2013). Device and technology drive revolutional transition in culture (Buda, Jarynowski, 2015b;Jara-Figueroa et al, 2019: Hidalgo, 2015.…”

Postmortem memory of public figures in news and social media

“…Researchers have leveraged the textual content of Wikipedia articles ( 29 ), as well as logs of both editing ( 30 ) and viewing ( 31 , 32 ), as proxies for the collective memory of traumatic events such as terrorist attacks or airplane crashes. Jatowt et al ( 33 ) characterized the coverage and popularity of historical figures in Wikipedia, observing vastly increased page-view counts for people from the 15th and 16th centuries, a fact that Jara-Figueroa et al ( 34 ) later attributed to the invention of the printing press. In addition to news and encyclopedic articles, books ( 35 – 37 ) and social media ( 38 , 39 ) have also emerged as important assets for studying collective memory.…”