Early modern time-space compression - Time-Space Compression: Historical Geographies - page 63

enormous e ects on the social and spatial structure of language. As the

market for topics in Latin became gradually saturated, vernacular languages
became increasingly common and popular. However, not every dialect was
printed; rather, one dialect—typically that of dominant elites, whether in
Tuscany, London, or Paris—became privileged over others, expanding into
national languages, annihilating local di

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erences in vocabulary and pronun-
ciation and integrating diverse groups linguistically into a common group.
These newly printed languages were fundamental for the emergence of
national consciousness

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first because they geographically connected speakers
of (for example) huge local varieties of “Englishes,” “Spanishes,” and
“Germans,” and made known to them the existence of those who shared the
same language group. Newly printed languages were thus fundamental to the
emergence of nationalist imagined communities and, in forging together dia-
lects into national languages, printing thus constituted a prime dimension in
the time-space compression that created modern nation-states.
Printing did more than simply accelerate the dissemination of knowledge,
ideas, and information, it also reinforced the emerging ocularcentrism of early
modernity. As Jay (1993) and Jenks (1995) noted, the rise of printing, the
reliance on the written word for communication, and the use of the telescope
and microscope to bring the distant and the invisibly small into view all con-
tributed to the tendency to equate seeing with knowing. Epistemologically,
far more than writing, printing suggested that words were things, situating
words in space far more than did writing and embedding language in the
process of manufacturing, which in turn accelerated its commodi

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cation.
The printing of maps began to accustom Europeans to visual, grid-based
representations of territorial order, helping to establish abstract space as the
dominant model of the early modern period. Boorstin (1983:277) notes that
“Just as the portable clock made the world's time accessible to everybody,
so when atlases became portable, millions could share a view of the world's
space.” Compared to writing, printing utilized the spatial organization of
knowledge far more widely and e

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ectively, generating visual surfaces with
abundant and intense meanings, with enormous consequences for human
perceptions of space and time:

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Before writing was deeply interiorized by print, people did not feel
themselves situated every moment of their lives in abstract computed
time of any sort. It appears unlikely that most persons in medieval or
even Renaissance western Europe would ordinarily have been aware of
the number of the current calendar year—from the birth of Christ or any
other point in the past. Why should they be? . . . What would be the point
for most people in knowing the current calendar year?

(Ong 1982:96)

first form of mass media, the cheap daily
newspaper. For example, The Times saw its

Printing also made possible the fi

fi first issue in England in 1785. By