A World Without Email: Find Focus and Transform the Way You Work Forever (from the NYT bestselling productivity expert)

by Cal Newport

Postman uses this concept to argue, among other points, that the impact of the printing press is deeper than we realize. The standard narrative about this invention is that mass-produced pamphlets and books allowed information to spread faster and farther, speeding up the evolution of knowledge that culminated in the Age of Reason. Postman replies that the influence of the resulting “typographic” culture did more than just speed up information flow; it changed the way our brains processed our world. “Print put forward a definition of intelligence that gave priority to the objective, rational use of the mind,” he writes, “and at the same time encouraged forms of public discourse with serious, logically ordered content.”16 It was this new way of thinking—not just newly available information—that suddenly made intellectual innovations such as Enlightenment philosophy and the scientific method natural next steps. Gutenberg, in other words, thought he was setting information free, but in reality, he was changing fundamentally what information we treated as important.