With printing, widespread access to classical texts, including in the original ancient languages, fueled humanistic and Renaissance culture. The first forms of newspapers, posters, gazettes with a few sheets, which were far more widespread than books, were also born. The era of publishing also developed-since Gutenberg, both inventor and entrepreneur, destined to exert a profound…
Brief history of techno-cognitive revolutions
During the 18th century, the increasing availability of books and the emergence of an educated and critical public sphere fueled Enlightenment thought. The ideas of reason, liberty, tolerance and natural rights spread widely, becoming the theoretical basis for events and orders that celebrated the birth of modern Western democracies, beginning with the French Revolution and…
Marshall McLuhan, in his essay “The Gutenberg Galaxy” (1962), analyzes the profound impact that printing had on the mental and cultural structure of the West. According to McLuhan, the invention of printing not only revolutionized communication, but also radically changed the way human beings perceive and organize reality. Print, as a linear, sequential and visual…
The experimental scientific method is a further intellectual mutation, related to the introduction of certain cognitive technologies, particularly observation and measurement tools. An absolute protagonist in this field is Galileo Galilei, author of several inventions and innovations that led him to overcome the medieval principle of truth based on sacred texts and classical tradition, thus…
Beyond Galileo’s biographical story, we all know the subsequent achievements of the experimental scientific method, which literally changed the world and the lives of our species. Instruments such as the telescope, microscope and other observational technologies have significantly expanded the ability to observe natural and man-made phenomena. Measuring instruments, such as scales, thermometers, electrical devices…
Art, and particularly contemporary art, might be considered marginal among the great processes of human civilization. However, the role of art is crucial if we analyze the forms and evolution of human intelligence. Marshall Mc Luhan writes, “The artist is that person who in any field, scientific or humanistic, grasps the implications of his own…
Abstract art is also the basis of design, and of an aesthetic that has endowed the industrialization of goods and modern mass affluence with beauty. This passage has not been sufficiently explored, but it demonstrates the magnitude of the cognitive revolution of modern art and the impact it has had on our entire society and…
On the other front of the revolution described, not that of the painters but that of the photographers, quickly the new technique becomes established and gains a central role in modern society. For modern man it turns out to be true what is photographed. If a painter painted a battle months or years after its…
The 20th century is marked by the rise of mass media, which join the press with more inclusive forms of communication. Cinema established itself in France, then radio invented by the Italian Marconi, and later TV, synthesized these two inventions and dominated the second half of the century. In 1895 The Lumière brothers patented the…
The advent of the World Wide Web has generated a profound but still unfinished intellectual revolution, comparable in impact to the invention of printing. Since the 1990s, the Web has transformed the way humanity produces, shares and enjoys knowledge, contributing-along with the mass media-to the construction of a global consciousness. Events, ideas, crises and innovations…
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