From the Printed Word to the Moving Image.

TECHNOLOGICAL innovations; COMMUNICATION; MASS media; JOURNALISM; PRESS

This article discusses the consequences of technological innovations in communications. Novelists were not alone in expressing concern about the effects of sensational journalism. Doctors became alarmed over the deterioration of the nation's mental health. A physician named Isaac Ray published a book entitled Mental Hygiene in 1863 in which he noted, among other worries, the adverse effects of crime reporting on the national psyche. To the historian of early modern science, probably the most important aspect of the double invention is that it led to a greater reliance on image and symbol and less reliance on words. Once it became possible to duplicate precisely rendered drawings of natural phenomena together with exactly repeatable diagrams, graphs, equations, and the like, scientific communications became less dependent on ambiguous texts whether in Greek, Arabic, Latin, or the vernaculars.