Masters of the Universe, ca. 1526…2008
The portrait above left is Sir Thomas More done by Hans Holbein the Younger around 1526.
At the right, Steve Jobs.
More was the Privy Counselor to King Henry VIII, the number two guy in the country.
Jobs is the CEO of Apple.
More was the locus of the aggressive, humanist and progressive tradition in the Tudor court. He brought in intellectuals, musicians, writers and artists like Holbein. He also brought in technology.
Think of More as the Steve Jobs of 16th Century England.
In the painting, More is clasping a book. This is the iPhone of its time, the very cutting edge of technology.
It’s Holbein’s way of putting More on the cutting edge of change in a very public way.
Books, after all, had only come into the common parlance in 1452 with Gutenberg’s revolution in Mainz, Germany, a mere 70 years earlier. (70 years in those days was like a week today).
The appearance of books and the printed word did more to both empower Henry and his intellectually progressive court; although it did little for More in the long run, unfortunately.
But Gutenberg’s invention was worthless without the concurrent rise of literacy in Europe, particularly amongst the powered class.
This in itself was something of a revolution.
King John, signer of the Magna Carta, had been completely illiterate, despite signing the written document that empowered Parliament. Literacy was no requirement for power.
The appearance of the printing press changed the baseline requirements for power. By More’s time, literacy had become increasingly tied to power. More significantly, publishing had begun to be tied to the transmission of power.
Today iPhones and Blackberries have taken the place of books as icons of power.
And as print literacy was central to the exercise and extension of both ideas and power, now, as we enter screenworld, it is video and video literacy that will increasingly be central to the exercise and transmission of ideas and power in the 21st Century.
As it is today almost incomprehensible that a Monarch would be illiterate (and so depend upon scribes to write whatever they needed), as we enter Screenworld in full force, it will one day be equally incomprehensible that anyone in a position of power, or aspiration toward power, could be video illiterate.
