“Not knowledge but libel and foolishness…No wisdom…just much posturing and gossip” is how NYT writer Edward Rothstein summarizes the point of view of Henry Peacham, an early critic of the new media.
Only thing - Peacham was making those observations in 1641 when print media was the next new thing.
Rothstein’s article is a review of an exhibition at the Foldger Shakespeare Library in Washington that I’d love to see, “Breaking News: Renaissance Journalism and the Birth of the Newspaper.” The review describes the exhibit as a “chronicle of chronicles, an account of how information about the wider world in 16th- and 17th-century England, including reports of wonders and horrors, wars and troop movements, murders and merchandise, gradually made its way from private journals or letters reporting on events witnessed, to publicly sold broadsheets and pamphlets.”
Like today, but more so, the emergence of a new media was part of a collision of factors that reshaped society. As Rothstein writes in his review, the “… story of how journalism became a public enterprise in Renaissance England is actually the history of how a public itself took shape; how out of a monarchical society in which great poverty and great wealth cohabited, another kind of identity evolved. It was based on slowly increasing literacy and impassioned written argument; it included curiosity about gossip and a taste for exotic tales; and it developed alongside a new commercial world in which written advertising, like the news it accompanied, helped shape taste and expectations."
As new technology disrupts the media world in the 21t century its good to hear from the ink-stained pioneers from the 1600’s.
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