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The invention of moveable type did a number of things for the creation, management, storage and distribution of information. It:

1. standardized vocabulary and grammar making it possible for more people to communicate with each other.
2. duplicated content exactly, making multiple identical copies of a document reducing forgeries and creating, in a sense, the idea of a fact.
3. dramatically reduced the cost of books making it possible for ideas to get into the hands of people who would otherwise not have access to them.
4. created the idea of indexing so people could easily find and retrieve information but also cross reference material so that connections they would otherwise never encounter became clear and context was readily available.

In other words, the printing press made literacy, as we have known it for hundreds of years, normal. Of course, it also ruined out memories, stored information untouched for years so that later it could misinterpreted and used out of context, and spread inane and dangerous ideas causing war and revolutions.

The insides of a Z3 - the first programmable computer built in 1941

Now we are more than 500 years into this information revolution and the benefits are becoming clear. Being able to read and write is not only considered normal but considered a basic human right even in culture that never had a written language, never mind movable type. But the limitations and costs to this revolution as well. The video The Future of Reading touches on some of these costs. There are mountains of printed texts that can’t be properly maintained. We have become so dependent on printed documents, we have no way of knowing anything without referring to them. They are not as permanent as we thought they would be and some that we depend on are disappearing. We no longer trust information without proper paper documentation.

Now we are in the midst of a new revolution in information and some argue that information stored digitally is not only very different from what was printed on paper;  it actually marks a reversal of what the printing press did in the 15th century. Consider the four points above. Digitally stored data:

1. pays little attention to standard language. Twitter, texting, social media and word processing all use different syntaxes and that doesn’t even consider the many languages used on the internet.
2. content is endlessly edited so the same piece of information can be copied, pasted, altered, excerpted and reinserted to turn a fact into almost anything but what it originally meant.
3. reduces the cost of duplicating data to near zero but increases the cost of the infrastructure to the point of being out of reach of many people.
4. makes it possible to find anything with a query so finely tuned as to return no context at all.

Some would say that your news and information can be so completely personalized that it’s possible to never encounter and idea that you don’t already agree with or that you have never heard of before.

And this brings us to a really strange set of circumstances in which the truth is distinct from the facts, and the likelihood that you can ascertain either in the traditional ways you might have when the printing press made literacy possible seems less certain. For example, if you usually go to CNN for your news, try reading only Fox News for two weeks. And if you usually go to Fox news, try CNN exclusively for two weeks. You'll start to wonder what planet you're on.

And here's an irony that we will explore in the next module. Artificially intelligence, which governs so much of our decision-making, requires a steady flow of facts. It can't function on anything else. For example, China has no credit bureaus, so each loan is evaluated individually by an algorithm that considers 5000 personal data points in eight seconds. As we will see next module, data is the new oil. The world runs on data.