Many people have compared the internet to the printing press. Both made it far cheaper to copy and spread words, both broke the control of old gatekeepers, and both unleashed floods of information, valuable and harmful alike. This final level looks at what the history of print can teach about our own information revolution.

Lessons from the print revolution

• New media disrupt old authorities. Print weakened the church's control of religious teaching and helped challenge kings. The internet has weakened the control of newspapers, broadcasters and governments over what people see.
• Floods of information come first, trust comes later. Early printed books were full of errors and pirated copies. It took generations to develop publishers, editors, reviewers and libraries that helped readers judge reliability. Online, similar institutions are still developing.
• The same tool serves truth and falsehood. Print spread Copernicus and the Malleus Maleficarum, Luther's Bible and vicious religious propaganda. Digital tools do the same.
• Censors chase the new medium. Licensing, indexes and book burnings tried to control print. Governments today block websites, pressure platforms and arrest bloggers.

Differences that matter

The comparison has limits. Print was slow by today's standards; a pamphlet took days or weeks to spread. Online, a claim can reach millions in hours. Printers were identifiable people who could be held responsible; online authors can be anonymous or automated. And print did not watch its readers, whereas many digital platforms collect data on what users read and use algorithms to decide what each person sees next. Those algorithms are designed mainly to hold attention, which can reward outrage and sensation over accuracy.

Rights old and new

The struggles of the print era produced principles that remain central. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), in Article 19, protects the right to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. The phrase “any media” deliberately covers technologies not yet invented. Milton's argument that truth grows stronger when tested against error, and the principle that harms should usually be addressed after publication rather than by prior restraint, still shape debates over online speech.

New questions also arise. Who should decide what large platforms remove? Should algorithms that shape what billions of people see be open to public scrutiny? How can societies fight deliberate disinformation without giving governments power to silence critics? The print era did not answer these questions, but it shows what is at stake.

Access and the digital divide

Print eventually made reading available to almost everyone, but only after centuries of effort to spread schooling and libraries. Today, billions of people still lack reliable internet access, and access is often lower among the poor, rural communities and women in some regions. A right to information means little without the means to exercise it. Public libraries, which offered free access to print to anyone, offer a model: many now also provide free internet access and help in learning to use it.

Shared knowledge

Some digital projects echo the dreams of the print era directly. Wikipedia, launched in 2001, aims, like the Encyclopédie, to gather human knowledge in one place, but it is written by volunteers and free to read. Like early print, it faces questions of reliability; its answer is a set of public rules requiring sources, and a visible history of every edit, so readers can see how each article was made.

Preserving the record

Print made knowledge more durable by multiplying copies. Digital information can be surprisingly fragile: websites disappear, file formats become unreadable and companies delete data. Archives such as the Internet Archive, founded in 1996, work to save web pages, much as early printers saved texts that might otherwise have been lost.

Worked example: a pamphlet war, then and now

Compare a religious pamphlet war in Germany in the 1520s with a political controversy online today.

• Speed. In 1520 a pamphlet took weeks to spread from city to city. Today a post reaches millions within hours.
• Images. Cranach's woodcuts mocked the pope for people who could not read. Today memes and short videos do similar work, often stripped of context.
• Gatekeepers. In 1520 printers chose what to print, partly for profit. Today platform algorithms choose what to amplify, also partly for profit.
• Responsibility. A printer could be named, fined or jailed. Online, authors may be anonymous, and platforms are often legally shielded from responsibility for what users post.
• Your role. A sixteenth-century reader heard a pamphlet read aloud and could repeat it or not. Today each of us can share a claim with a click, making every reader also a kind of publisher.

The history of print suggests a few habits worth keeping. Check whether a source has a track record. Look for corrections, not only claims. Be wary of images and slogans designed to provoke outrage. Defend the right of others to publish views you dislike, and use your own power to share responsibly. Gutenberg's press did not, by itself, make people wiser. It gave them more to read, and the work of reading well was left to them, as it is to us.