Democracy of information

An Introduction
Today, if I want to know something, I Google it. If I have information to share I can post it on .org. If I want to kill some time, I can go browse through YouTube to find the latest funny videos. Virtually all of the information the modern world has to offer is right at my fingertips twenty four hours a day. Unfortunately, the world’s information was not always this free, in fact for a long time, almost nobody even had the information necessary to learn how to read and write. This is such a far stretch from where we are today that for many, it is very hard to imagine. When I say the information is “free” I mean two things. First, I am referring to the monetary value of information, it is free as in it costs almost nothing. Second, I am referring to the freedom information has, much like the democratic freedoms we enjoy here in the United States. But how did the information become as free as it is today? In order to answer that, you must understand the history of information. The first step in democratizing information ties closely to the church. The second step in the democratization of information involves a German print maker. The third and final factor in the development of free information comes with the birth of the internet. Throughout the last millennia, we have seen a great shift in ownership of information. Information has gone from being owned and controlled by the few to being owned, controlled, and even created by the masses.

The Catholic Church
The Catholic Church and the democracy of information have had a long and intertwined past. For a long time the Catholic Church owned information and they dominated because of it. Catholic masses were read in Latin, the bibles were written in Latin. Nobody but the Clergy knew Latin; this meant that nobody read the bible for themselves. The peasants would go to church every week despite not being able to read or understand anything that was written down or being spoken to them by the preacher. Because none of the common folks had any idea what was being said, it had to be “translated” for them. A member of the Clergy at the church and could tell the people almost anything he wanted to because he held the power of god, and he held it high so as to be sure nobody else outside the church could reach it. Religion is a deeply personal part of almost everybody’s lives and the church would use this to their advantage. By claiming to hold the key to god, they forced the people to come to them for salvation from god, and they made a profit of it. The Catholic Church sold to the extremely poor peasants, sheets of paper called indulgences. Indulgences were extraordinarily expensive sheets of paper that essentially said that you or a family member are freed from hell and will go to heaven to be with god. Nowhere in the bible does the word indulgence or any reference to salvation by paying the church exist. The Catholic Church basically made up the idea of indulgences in order to con the poor farmers and peasants out of what little money they did have. And the church could do this too; they could make this kind of stuff up and preach it to the people because the people had no idea what the bible really said. As you can see, the situation was very bad. Rich catholic preachers were stealing money from poor peasants in order to build grandiose churches and further their own personal wealth. Something had to change, but how, who would change the situation. The changing factor came from a man named Martin Luther. Luther was a part of the Clergy himself, a new member though. Luther had been a part of the Church long enough however; to realize that things were not right. Despite his short stay with the Catholic Church, Luther became disgusted with the church’s scamming ways and decided to take action. On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther posted what he called the 95 thesis on the door of the Schlosskirche (castle church.) The 95 thesis was a letter containing 95 things the church must do in order to end their era of corruption. The letter posted on the door caused a huge stir in the city and many people came to the church to read what was nailed to the door. That night, a man took the 95 thesis to his work shop where he compiled the 95 thesis into a pamphlet and began printing them immediately. Martin Luther’s 95 theses greatly irritated the church so they sent for his arrest and or execution (yes, the church could even arrest and execute people back then). Fleeing for his life, Martin Luther hid in his friend’s attic for nearly a year, all the while keeping himself very busy. While he was in the attic, Martin Luther hand translated every single line in the Latin bible to German, the language of the people. Luther was very knowledgeable about the Latin language, as he had to be to become a clergy member in the first place. This began the decline of the Church’s monopoly on information and began an era freedom and democracy for information. The people of Germany could now read the bible for themselves and did not require any external translation. This also ended the era of indulgence selling because people could see that the church had simply made the indulgence idea up for their own benefit. Removing the monopoly the Catholic Church held on information was the first of many steps to allowing information to be free and democratically controlled.

The Book
During the time that the Catholic Church reigned supreme and during their decline in power and the age Martin Luther, some things were extremely cheap while others were not. Lots of people were farmers; therefore things like eggs were extremely cheap at the time. During the same time period, not very many people were printers and book makers; therefore the price of books was ridiculously high. A single book could cost as much as the average person makes in three years! Lack of a workforce was not the only reason the cost of books was high though, the people of the time lacked the necessary tools to make books cheaply and efficiently. Actually, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the technology existed; it just hadn’t spread throughout Europe yet. The technology that was need to efficiently produce books was called the movable type printing press. The movable type printing press was invented in 1444 by a man named Johannes Gutenberg. Gutenberg invented the printing press and began printing Latin bibles known as Gutenberg bibles. These bibles were not readable by anybody except the clergy because they were virtually the only people who could read Latin; but these bibles did show that large books could be printed efficiently and in high quantities. It wasn’t until much later that Gutenberg’s invention was truly put to work, but when it was, it greatly reduced the price of books. After Martin Luther had translated the entire bible from Latin to German, it could be easily produced and sold to almost everybody for much less than three years worth of wages. When Gutenberg’s movable type printing press was paired with Martin Luther’s translated bible, the result was astounding. Now, no longer did the people have to even go to church, they had their very own bible that required absolutely nobody to translate it. Because books of all shapes and sizes could now be easily and efficiently produced, more books fell into the hands of more people, thus helping to further the development of democratically controlled information.

The Internet
As books became far more widespread, more and more people became literate and more people learned about religion, the arts, and science. Books however, are still a little bit pricey and it is very hard to find exactly the information you are looking for without having a huge library and spending hours poring through books to find a single quote, fact, or figure. Thus, the internet is born. Born from the necessity to communicate information from person to person or person to the whole wide world, the internet is created in the early 1960s initially as a tool for scientists to communicate with one another (no, Al Gore did not invent the internet.) At first the internet was small, it had less than a thousand web pages on it, almost nobody’s computer was connected to the internet, and very few people even cared about the scientific research that was on the internet. The internet slowly grew and grew and then it gained features that were relevant to everybody’s lives such as email. The internet suddenly exploded in during the 1990s and it seemed like the whole world was on the internet. Suddenly the prefix to every web query seemed very pertinent, www (World Wide Web.) After the boom, the internet had a second, mini boom. This period of time which experts agree is still ongoing as of this writing, is known web 2.0. Web 2.0 is fueled by amazing new websites that allow the people of the World Wide Web to have amazing freedoms. If anybody has any query about quite nearly anything they can use the highly advanced search engine google.com, to find it. Google will go out and look at almost every single website out there to find what you looking for. Instead of spending hours looking through books in a library for a random fact such as the exact speed of sound is, Google will find it for you in about 0.09 seconds (it even tells you how long it took.) Even more recently than the advent of , has come new WWW inventions such as YouTube and that allow YOU to contribute to the information on the internet. On youtube.com, anybody can take a video of themselves doing whatever they feel like and then post it to the internet for the entire world to see. Similarly, .org allows anybody with who has anything to share with the world, to write about it in an organized and searchable way so that anybody who is looking for any information can simply look up what was written by other people. Whether you are an expert on a specific topic or a fifteen year old kid doing a high school English project, what you have to say can be shared for all to see. Through internet technologies such as Google, [http://www.youtube.com YouTube, , and many others, the information of the world now belongs to the people of the world.

From the Few to the Many
In the early days, the Catholic Church held all the power, they held the information people wanted and needed about their religious beliefs and everything else, out of reach. Although sadly, the information was right in front of the early church goers, in was in Latin which could not be understood by the common folk. Then through the good works of people like Martin Luther and the technological advancements created by people like Johannes Gutenberg, the Catholic Church’s monopoly on the world’s information was slowly broken. The information was slowly translated into the language of the people and became more and more widely distributed as the speed of producing a book accelerated. All the while, the price of obtaining information was dropping rapidly. Then along came the advent of the internet. Suddenly people from opposite corners of the earth with the same interests or expertise could converse easily and share information and findings without ever leaving the comfort of their houses. And as the internet began to become more and more popular, the freedom of information exploded. What could take me an entire day to find in a book just twenty years ago became suddenly accessible in less than a fraction of a second. Not only did the information become accessible, I can now contribute to the information. I can be the author of my own account of the democratization of information, and I can share my work with the world, and better yet I can share it for free.

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