ABSTRACT
In the years directly after the invention of printing with movable type by Gutenberg around 1460, the new technology was only rarely used in the way it is in the modern mass media, i.e. for reporting and commenting on events of public interest or indeed influencing and shaping public opinion. Whereas there seems to have been some distinction between private and public matters (e.g. in letter writing), the notion of a public sphere in politics, culture, etc. appears to be a later development that was to a large extent a product of early modern notions of reasoning, criticism and the widespread establishment of media and sites of bourgeois raisonnement. Whilst there were broadsheets and pamphlets in the fifteenth century which dealt with political or juridical matters, these were small in number and generally speaking the public sphere did not exist. Early printed texts, therefore, cannot be viewed as an institution with a well-defined communicative role in the public sphere. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, however, things changed dramatically, if only for a short period. In the famous Reuchlin/Pfefferkorn controversy (1511/12) printed texts were used for the first time in order to assert influence in a matter of a public dispute (the question of how to deal with Jewish books and the Jewish tradition). Shortly afterwards, the years 1520–5 were marked by a dramatic increase in the number of printed pamphlets due to the beginning of Reformation polemics, from which time on production generally fell away again. Nevertheless, these early sixteenth-century pamphlets can rightly be viewed as the first appearance of what could be called the ‘mass media’.
