The Role of Printing in Contemporary Communication Media

Mass Communication is usually considered to begin with the beginning of printing from cast metal type in Western Europe in the Fifteenth Century, but the roots are much earlier and the flowering much later. In fact one can maintain with equal force that mass communication is a social outgrowth of the Nineteenth Century and its industrial revolution, or that it is a logical product of forces set into motion when groups of man-like animals first huddled together against the cold and danger of primitive times.