The MAN
who Ignited Many Revolutions
The word revolution is disliked
by many but progressive changes have taken place mostly by revolutions. A
study of the world history will reveal that one man was responsible for most of
the revolutions since 1500 AD. Revolutions
prior to 1500 AD were military centric involving violence thereby causing death
and destruction. The revolutions after 1500 were more non violent than violent. Many social and political revolutions broke
out in the last 500 years because of this man’s technological development.
The
Man, I am referring to, was Johannes Gutenberg,
born in Germany who developed the printing
machine.
Johannes Gutenberg
This device took
knowledge to the masses which were once the guarded secret of the elite in the
society. Religion was the most dominant
force all over the world and their leaders could frighten the masses in the
name of God and religion and built their empire larger than an emperor. The first victim of the printing machine was
the religious leaders who were the custodians of the holy book. The printing
machine brought the holy books in everybody’s hand which decimated the
dominance of these religious leaders. He
sowed the seed of mass communication.
The first revolution was spearheaded by Martin Luther of Germany (1483 to 1546) who fought the protestant
reformation against the Pope in Rome. It
was not an armed revolution. The esotericism
of religion started melting all over the world. As reading of books and news
papers increased, knowledge expanded planting the ideas of a revolution. Social and political leaders started
attracting the minds of the commoners who were looking for change and progress.
Revolution
in India
Social and political revolution started only
after the introduction of print media by the British.
The printing machine
was first introduced in 1780 and the first news paper was Hicky’s Bengal Gazette.
Over
the years the circulation and number of news papers and magazines increased
igniting the revolutionary feelings and thoughts of the commoners in
India. The first vernacular (Bengali)
news paper was Amrith Bazzar Pathika
1868. The first Tamil news paper
was “Swadhesamitran” started by G.
Subramania Iyer in 1882.
The print media brought
to light several social reformists like Rajaram Mohan Roy, Ishwar Chandra
Sagar, Dayanand Saraswathi, Rabindranath Tagore, Swami Vivekananda and many
more. The Hindu culture underwent
several changes from extreme orthodoxy
to liberal approach. The social and political
revolution in India, unlike the West, was very peaceful and did not invoke any
armed rebellion. The leaders of the
revolution were well educated and upheld the value of India’s ancient culture, epics,
Vedas and other literature but opposed only the conservatism of reaching them to the masses. All the leaders used the print media to reach
the masses and were very successful.
The political awakening
against the imperial British rule was also caused by the spread of print media
in Indian languages. The British
colonial government put several restrictions on the freedom of Indian press as
they realized that its freedom will boomerang on their domination. Subrmania Bharathi
who worked as Assistant Editor in ‘Swadesamitran’ took refuge in Pondicherry when
the British were after him for his spread of freedom fire to the commoners
through his magazines. He continued his propaganda
of freedom through dailies and weeklies while in exile in Pondicherry. Most of
the freedom fighting leaders was directly involved in some news daily or
weekly. Gandhi would not have succeeded
in his struggle against the British but for the print media.
The Modern Revolution
The revolution started
by Gutenburg shifted to the USA in the
20th century. The IT corporate sector revolutionized the technical
aspect of written and spoken communication. William
Gates popularly known as Bill Gates through his Microsoft firm specialized in
the technicalities of written media and brought in numerous developments in the
last twenty years. The preparation for a
thesis or a book which consumed two
years of full time efforts until 1990 is now reduced to six months. The
presentation quality has substantially improved in terms of editing,
formatting, spell check highlights, cross reference, foot notes, diagram, charts, tables, and a few more reducing
the burden of the old tedious methods of typing and proof reading. The e-mailing programme, gives an address to a
person without having a physical place of dwelling.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin
the promoters of Google, took the revolutions to newer heights. The search
engine called ‘Google’ introduced by them has become a part of life for many
writers. There is no author of book,
thesis and article who does not use Google. Most of the information required are now available
through their web site. It brings to the
table top the required information for
which one may have to visit several libraries 20 years ago. Name the information you get it from Google
with in a fraction of a second.
Conclusion:
Gutenburg’s transformation
of the means of revolution remains strong, only its technology has changed.
It contributed to the development of
language and literature whereas the new information revolution is more
technological aiming at speed and reach.
The importance of language proficiency and literature value are going down
giving away to technology. English, the
dominant computer language is transforming and romanizing many vernaculars. The SMS exchanged by youngsters are in Tamil
language but written in English.
This is not the end of
the present revolution. Many more developments are on the pipeline. Technological
revolution is so far peaceful, however, it has precipitated new types of
conflicts like Cyber war, network hacking and hate campaign which affect the
economic and social fabric of the world.
“Those who make
peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” (John F. Kennedy)
Dr. Krishnan
Arunachalam
Ref: www.wikipedia.com
Arunachalam/ Thiagarajan
in YMCA Toast Masters Club
(Published in Mylapore Club Magazine Jun/2015)
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