Media being free by right

During the eighteenth century of America's history, newspapers were very important to the people because it bridged the gap between Great Britain and America. It kept the people informed and kept the people educated. It was the most successful business during that time... also free. A lot of the American people were already being taxed for trade, property, food and family. So they were pretty tired of being taxed so much that most people weren't making enough money unless you had a solid profession such as a doctor, publisher or a lawyer. So the paper was really all they had left that was untaxed, free and knowledgeable.

Congress then decided to pass another act that would continue to raise money to protect the colonies. 

The Stamp Act was passed in 1765 that put tax on every single piece of paper that went through the printing machine. That included the newspaper, letters and even playing cards. The people rioted right away and demanded that the newspaper, out of all things, should be illegal to tax. The people fought for that right for about a year and the Stamp Act was completely revoked in 1766.

This shows how powerful the media had an effect on the people then and today. We rely so much on the media to not only keep us cultured but educated on what is going on. Of course we, today, have different technologies of the media such as the T.V and the radio to keep us informed about the outside world but back then the newspaper all they had. Besides, at the time, the government was trying to take the money any place that they could but how can you charge something that is naturally free by right?

The Mass Media and the Consequences

In Elizabeth Eisenstein's

"The Rise of the Reading Public" stated that the mass media basically has had some positive and negative affects on the growing people. She has talked about how the media is the cause of separation between people and religion, tradition and basic educational skills.

I do agree that the mass media has broken up religion and people. A lot of sunday rituals that take place in a church revolves around the world around it. If you were to go to a christian baptist church and walk into a sermon given by the pastor, you will hear about the local travesties and dilemmas happening within the community. Later followed by some kind of good act, "divinely" sent, to fix the problem and to make peace within the community. There is no sermon that starts of with solely the bible and ends with it. If one wants to go to a Catholic Mass or a Jewish Temple to find otherwise, you will find no different. The sermon is first started of with God (Allah, Jesus, ect.) and ends with current reality. 

Eisenstein also suggest that the mass media has cut off the simple tradition of the story teller and replaced it with the literate person who reads the story and makes the story teller look misleading or uneducated. I strongly disagree with this. Traditional vales can only be past down from word of mouth. A culture cannot be defined through the scrolls and text an archeologist/historian might find buried deep beneath the ruins in the Sahara. It is the people that has great grandparents that taught them what scrolls could not and their grandparents before them. Story telling is a social way of media and therefore cannot be tainted nor diminished. Therefore, making the eldest in any family, culture or religion the most wise and educated.

Either way in my opinion, Elizabeth Eisenstein walks a thin line between the optimistic values and pessimistic blemishes of the mass media. And no matter how thin that line is, no one can deny that the media has made its progress through out the years and that transition between storyteller and Pop Magazine is becoming a little bit smoother.

Print Media's Affect on Western Civilization

The Rise of The Reading Public by Elizabeth Eisenstein, was a great in depth look into the origins and influence of print media. Eisenstein is trying to demonstrate that the history of print media is generally the "history of civilization". Eisenstein goes in further by trying to draw from the spread of print and its influence on institutions of the world, (be it political, social, philosophical etc) Past and contemporary. She makes a case that:

"If the printing press exerted some influence upon them, why is this influence so often unnoted".

Eisenstein also argues how do we (in a historical sense) assess the effects that print has had on western civilization (or civilization in general). Eisenstein states that " we still know very little about how access to printed materials affected human behavior". I agree with this statement. How can we prove the significance print media has had on civilization? It would be impossible seein how everyday print media evolves on some level. The affect it once had on society was much more significant in terms of the explosion of other media's such as T.V, Radio, and the internet, but still to this day print is used as the primary learning tool in everyday society whether rich or poor, Catholic or Islamic. This is a tradition that takes us all the way back to the advent of the printing press via Guttenberg.
Another argument that Eisenstein makes in this reading is how many forms of print such as the Bible, "were subject to contradiction.....all the text were liable to get corrupted after being copied over the course of time." That is one of the main reasons why I have strayed away from religion over the years. We as a people have become reliant on text that may or may not be original publications. For example, when reading the bible, one may hold certain truths to be law from the word because as a Catholic you are taught that the Bible is from the word of God and you must live your life according to these teachings. but with that said, if a text is suject to change and be rewritten over time, how can one, as a devoted catholic know that these are the words of God and his true teachings. In all fairness it would be impossible for written works from the beginning of civilization to be fairly recorded over time because it has to be interpreted by every language, generation, culture etc, but to say that would make relgion somewhat of a "Nostalgic" entity which people believe and follow.

In the end, I agree with alot of Eisensteins arguments but with my own personal prospective. Eisenstien views print media's rise as a complex but siginificant part of western civilization. She could not be any more correct in that conclusion. The rise of print is still devoloping everyday and we probably never know its effect on our world.