We’ve Been Here Before: The Original Social Media

Viral content. Misinformation. Information bubbles. Ecochambers. Democratized knowledge. Speech suppression. Nothing new. Isn’t it fascinating that modernity provides us with tools and channels to publish content that reaches millions instantly?! Facts and “alternative facts” travel at the same speed, and we feel confused and overwhelmed. Humanity has been grappling with such side effects for a long time. Five centuries ago, a German goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg started a revolution that would change the circulation of knowledge for good - the printing press.

The First Information Revolution

In the mid-15th century, Europe witnessed the birth of the printing press with movable type. Before Gutenberg, making books was a labor-intensive job (copied by hand!), making them rare treasures that were accessible primarily to elites. A single Bible might take a scribe a year to produce. After Gutenberg came up with his innovation (somewhere around 1440), printing shops could produce 3,600 pages per day. By 1500, printing presses had produced about 20 million volumes. Talk about productivity - that’s more than all European scribes had created in the previous millennium. Combined. And the traditional job of scribe was made obsolete!

This technological leap had at its core several important innovations working together:

Movable metal type that could be arranged and reused
Oil-based inks that adhered to metal type
Wooden presses adapted from wine and olive presses (transferable tools?)
Paper production techniques borrowed from China via the Islamic world (transferable skills?)

Key insight here? The printing revolution required both - hardware and software - and was dependent on this ecosystem of complementary technologies. And similar to today’s tech transformations, its impact extended well beyond its original purpose.

The Original “Information Workers”

The printing press made books cheaper. It also transformed the entire knowledge ecosystem. Before printing, the primary "information workers" were monks and scribes who spent their lives copying texts. With printing, the labor market welcomed new occupations:

Printers who combined technical and business skills
Editors who prepared and standardized texts
Publishers who selected, financed, and distributed works
Translators who made texts available in different languages
Journalists who created the first newspapers and periodicals
Booksellers who connected readers with printed materials

Today's content creators, social media managers, SEO specialists, and digital marketers are the modern equivalents of these original information economy workers.

Historian Elizabeth Eisenstein described how "printers were the first to create new forms of employment that required mastery of a new kind of technical expertise... skills that had no precedent in scribal culture." This professional disruption mirrors today's AI, creating roles like prompt engineers and AI ethicists that simply didn't exist a decade ago.

The Social Media of 1517

When Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses criticizing Church practices in 1517, he couldn't have anticipated how quickly his ideas would spread. Within weeks, printers had “retweeted”, or rather reproduced his document across Germany. Within months, translations circulated throughout Europe. Luther himself later acknowledged, "The printing press is God's highest and extremest act of grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven forward."

This was history's first viral content—ideas spreading faster than authorities could control. The printing press created what we might call the original "social networks":

Pamphlets were the viral social media posts
Newspapers were the content aggregators
Letter exchanges between scholars worked like private discussion groups (similar to today’s academic literature)
Printed broadsheets were the original meme-sharing

Printing democratized who could participate in public discourse and was similar to today's digital platforms that have enabled social movements from the Arab Spring to #MeToo. As historian Andrew Pettegree notes, "Print created the first forum where ideas could be shared, debated, and transmitted without direct control by traditional authorities."

But this democratization had a dark side. Printing also enabled the spread of misinformation. The echo chambers that worry us today have historical precedents - the sectarian pamphlet wars of the 17th century, where communities increasingly consumed only content that reinforced their existing beliefs.

Workforce Transformation

The information revolution reshaped work. Period. Traditional roles changed:

Scribes transitioned into typesetters and editors
Illuminators became illustrators and engravers
Scholars shifted from memorizing texts to synthesizing knowledge across multiple sources
Teachers moved from oral instruction to textbook-based education

New occupations emerged:

Typefounders who created and sold metal type
Type designers who developed new letterforms
Paper manufacturers who supplied the growing industry
News gatherers who compiled information for periodicals

What's fascinating is how the nature of intellectual work itself has changed as a result. Before printing, the main activity and energy were spent on simply accessing texts. After printing, scholars could focus on knowledge analysis and synthesis. Information scarcity became information abundance. Information filtering became a skill. This represented a shift to work with more cognitive content.

Lessons for the Digital Age

The printing revolution provides several insights for today:

Strategy: Information Ecosystems. The most successful geographic regions during the printing revolution weren't necessarily those with the most advanced technology, but those that developed supportive ecosystems. Venice prospered by combining printing technology with liberal censorship laws, established distribution networks, and investment capital. It also didn’t hurt that it was a global trade hub!

Today's organizations need to build comprehensive digital ecosystems, not just adopt isolated AI tools.

Policy: Managing Information Flow. History shows that attempts to strictly control information typically failed. The Catholic Index of Prohibited Books (est. 1559) had the goal to restrict dangerous ideas but ultimately couldn't stop the tide of information. More successful adaptive approaches that engaged with new information channels rather than simply prohibiting them evolved.

Today, we face similar challenges in managing information flow. Organizations need to focus on balancing security and control with openness and innovation.

Programs: New Literacy. The printing revolution drove massive investments in literacy. Reading rates in Europe rose from ~10% to 50% between 1500 and 1800. This wasn't just about basic skills—it required new forms of literacy that were appropriate to a print culture.

Today's organizations need to focus on supporting the digital revolution which will require a focus on developing technical skills and also new forms of digital and AI literacy for all employees.

Measuring Transformation: Metrics Across Millennia

Throughout history, societies have measured progress using the tools and data available to them—from ancient urban expansion and trade patterns to today's digital transformation ROI and workplace productivity metrics.

Then:

Book production increased from thousands to millions per century
Price per book fell by approximately 80% within 50 years
Time to disseminate ideas across Europe dropped from years to weeks
Literacy rates rose from approximately 10% to 50% over three centuries

Now:

Information production has increased exponentially (90% of the world's data was created in the last two years). And AI will increase that even further (along with all the slop that is generated)
Digital content costs approaching zero for reproduction
Global information diffusion time is measured in seconds rather than weeks
Digital literacy is becoming essential across all job categories

Ancient Insights for Future Challenges

Perhaps the most valuable lesson from the printing revolution is the relationship between technology and truth. Initial optimism about printing's power to spread knowledge gave way to concerns about misinformation—what one 17th-century observer (Adrien Baillet) called "a vast chaos and confusion of books." Nothing new here!

Societies gradually developed new mechanisms for verifying information—peer-reviewed scholarly journals, editorial standards upheld by publishers, library systems to catalogue information, and even professional journalism that fact-checks information. These institutional innovations were as important as those technological.

Today, as we begin to question what we see, hear, and read (deep fakes, synthetic content, and AI-generated misinformation), we need to develop new and appropriate verification systems. Alternative truth should be allowed to exist.

Information revolutions are fundamentally human revolutions. While technology changed how information flowed, people determined what to do with that new capability. Some used it to spread enlightenment, others to foment hatred, some built educational systems, others created propaganda machines.

The same will be true with AI. The technology itself is neither savior nor demon—it's a tool whose impact will be determined by how we choose to use it, the social systems we build around it, and the human values we bring to its deployment. Use it wisely!

This is a post in our year-long series "We've Been Here Before." Subscribe to our newsletter to receive monthly insights about historical transformations and their lessons for the AI age.

We’ve Been Here Before: The Original Social Media - Printing Presses