exploited the concept of the division of labor by employing a large team of workers, many of whom were illiterate, to churn out books at a rate never before seen in history. And he even employed elegant error-checking mechanisms to ensure that the type was always set properly: There was a straight line on one side of each piece of type so that the workers could see at a glance whether any letters had been set upside down.
Figure 6. Diffusion of the movable-type printing press over time. From Dittmar. “Information Technology and Economic Change: The Impact of The Printing Press.”
The Quarterly Journal of Economics
126, no. 3 (August 1, 2011): 1133–72, by permission of Oxford University Press.
Only by having the combined knowledge of all of these technologies does the printing press become possible and cost-effective. So while it’s true that geography—specifically, the distance from Gutenberg’s city of Mainz—can explain a great deal of the delay for when certain cities adopted the printing press technology, that’s far from the entire story.
The important factor was something more subtle: personal contacts. The cities that got the press first got it because Germans lived there, specifically Germans who had the necessary skills and technologies to make a printing press. These personal contacts allowed for the spread of this semiproprietary technology. If one is from a culture in common with someone else, with common language and traditions, you’re more likely to trust each other. This is exactly what happened here. Just as Jews and Huguenots built widespread trading and financial networks, the Germans used their own social ties that had been built on trust and apprenticeship to spread the technologies of the printing press.
This is the rule when it comes to how facts spread: social networks spread information. Of course, back in the day of the printing press, geography and social connectivity were harder to disentangle. As mentioned earlier, just a century prior to Gutenberg, when the Black Death swept across Europe, it spread at the same speed as the rate of movement in that century. But social ties are also vital to the spread of knowledge.
This can be seen by looking at the way the population sizes of cities affected the spread of the printing press. When Dittmar examined city size, he found that larger cities were much more likely to adopt the movable-type printing press technologies soon after their invention, compared to small cities. While only a third of citiesin Europe were early adopters, these cities held more than half the population of Europe. Which shouldn’t be surprising. Larger cities have more people, yielding more opportunities for there to be a social tie from one city to another. Just as we can look at the German ties, we can see how larger populations mean more ties. Ultimately, when trying to understand the how facts spread, it comes down to social networks.
It’s one thing to know that social ties lead to the spread of facts. That is almost intuitively obvious. But are there regularities to how this happens? Can we quantify how facts spread from person to person? Happily, there is an entire field devoted to understanding such networks, which is known as
network science
. Network science examines how connections operate, whether they are connections between people or computers, or even interacting proteins. And just as the mathematics of network science doesn’t care what is connected, it is also agnostic about what spreads across these networks. Whether the network is spreading innovations, pieces of news, germs, or pretty much anything else, network science can provide insight.
So it shouldn’t be surprising that network science has a great deal to say about the ways in which information and facts can spread, like diseases, from one person to another.
. . .
WE are all embedded within social networks. We have friends, neighbors, and relatives. They in turn have
Figure 6. Diffusion of the movable-type printing press over time. From Dittmar. “Information Technology and Economic Change: The Impact of The Printing Press.”
The Quarterly Journal of Economics
126, no. 3 (August 1, 2011): 1133–72, by permission of Oxford University Press.
Only by having the combined knowledge of all of these technologies does the printing press become possible and cost-effective. So while it’s true that geography—specifically, the distance from Gutenberg’s city of Mainz—can explain a great deal of the delay for when certain cities adopted the printing press technology, that’s far from the entire story.
The important factor was something more subtle: personal contacts. The cities that got the press first got it because Germans lived there, specifically Germans who had the necessary skills and technologies to make a printing press. These personal contacts allowed for the spread of this semiproprietary technology. If one is from a culture in common with someone else, with common language and traditions, you’re more likely to trust each other. This is exactly what happened here. Just as Jews and Huguenots built widespread trading and financial networks, the Germans used their own social ties that had been built on trust and apprenticeship to spread the technologies of the printing press.
This is the rule when it comes to how facts spread: social networks spread information. Of course, back in the day of the printing press, geography and social connectivity were harder to disentangle. As mentioned earlier, just a century prior to Gutenberg, when the Black Death swept across Europe, it spread at the same speed as the rate of movement in that century. But social ties are also vital to the spread of knowledge.
This can be seen by looking at the way the population sizes of cities affected the spread of the printing press. When Dittmar examined city size, he found that larger cities were much more likely to adopt the movable-type printing press technologies soon after their invention, compared to small cities. While only a third of citiesin Europe were early adopters, these cities held more than half the population of Europe. Which shouldn’t be surprising. Larger cities have more people, yielding more opportunities for there to be a social tie from one city to another. Just as we can look at the German ties, we can see how larger populations mean more ties. Ultimately, when trying to understand the how facts spread, it comes down to social networks.
It’s one thing to know that social ties lead to the spread of facts. That is almost intuitively obvious. But are there regularities to how this happens? Can we quantify how facts spread from person to person? Happily, there is an entire field devoted to understanding such networks, which is known as
network science
. Network science examines how connections operate, whether they are connections between people or computers, or even interacting proteins. And just as the mathematics of network science doesn’t care what is connected, it is also agnostic about what spreads across these networks. Whether the network is spreading innovations, pieces of news, germs, or pretty much anything else, network science can provide insight.
So it shouldn’t be surprising that network science has a great deal to say about the ways in which information and facts can spread, like diseases, from one person to another.
. . .
WE are all embedded within social networks. We have friends, neighbors, and relatives. They in turn have
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