Communication Revolutions and the Crisis of Authority

Revolution through the lens of Martin Gurri

Introduction

In 1517, a German monk named Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to a church door in Wittenberg, challenging the Catholic Church's practices. Thanks to the recent invention of the printing press, his ideas spread rapidly across Europe, igniting the Protestant Reformation and reshaping the religious landscape.​

Fast forward to 2020, when a 17-year-old girl named Darnella Frazier recorded the tragic death of George Floyd on her smartphone. She uploaded the video to Facebook, and within hours, it went viral, sparking global protests against racial injustice.

Both events underscore the profound impact of communication technologies on society. Just as the printing press amplified Luther's dissent, social media amplified Frazier's eyewitness account, challenging established authorities and mobilizing public action.

Throughout history, sudden leaps in communication technology have upended social order and shaken trust in established authorities. Each new medium—from the written word to the printing press to electronic mass media—has radically altered how information flows, often outpacing society’s ability to adapt. The result, at first, is turmoil: old elites lose their monopoly on knowledge, public discourse fragments, and institutions founded on earlier information norms see their authority falter. Over time, however, society adjusts to the new medium, forging new norms and institutions that restore a measure of stability and trust.

In The Revolt of the Public, analyst Martin Gurri argues that today’s social media upheaval fits this historic pattern. He describes modern digital media as the “Fifth Wave” of communication, noting that information has surged in great “pulses or waves which sweep over the human landscape and leave little untouched”. Previous waves included the invention of writing, the alphabet, the printing press, and mass media in the 20th century. Each wave wrested control over information from an older elite. Today, the internet and social platforms have unleashed a tsunami of information that “overwhelmed traditional sources of information”, triggering a “collapse of trust” in governments, media, and other institutions​. Gurri’s thesis is that social media empowered the public to scrutinize and criticize elites as never before – “gatekeeping institutions ​lost their power to decide what passes as truth” – but this empowerment came without a corresponding ability to construct viable alternatives. The result is a public mostly in “repudiation mode,” adept at tearing down authorities but not replacing them.

Is this cycle truly new, or a recurrence of an old pattern? A look back at earlier communication revolutions suggests striking parallels. From ancient oral cultures confronting the written word, to medieval societies rocked by Gutenberg’s press, to 20th-century nations adapting to radio and television, each transition provoked social disruption and crises of authority. In the following sections, we examine each of these communication quantum leaps: how the new medium altered information flow, what social or political chaos ensued, and how a new equilibrium eventually emerged. Finally, we consider whether today’s internet-driven disorder might follow a similar arc toward adaptation – and what history may teach us about finding a new balance.

The Printing Press and the Upheaval of Print

If writing crept in over centuries, the printing press struck society like a bolt of lightning. When Johannes Gutenberg introduced movable-type printing in the 15th century, he triggered an information explosion. By making the mass duplication of texts feasible, printing “was probably the most disruptive of all” communication waves, Gurri ​notes. Once books could be produced by the hundreds rather than painstakingly copied by hand, information no longer trickled – it flooded. Within decades of Gutenberg’s first Bible (printed in 1450s Mainz), presses had spread to over 200 cities in Europe, churning out millions of volumes​, printing press info. One historian likened 15th-century Venice’s print industry to “Silicon Valley”, an early startup scene of rapid innovation and sometimes chaotic growth​.

The nature of print fundamentally changed information flow. Printing dramatically lowered the cost of sharing ideas and enabled near-instant dissemination across long distances (via trade routes and book fairs). As one account puts it, “Printing gave rise to a ‘start-up’ culture… Within a few decades, at least one printing press could be found in every sizable community… More books were printed in the five decades after Gutenberg’s invention than had been produced by scribes during the previous 1,000 years.” ​. The role of gatekeepers was upended: previously, church and state authorities could control knowledge by overseeing scriptoria or persecuting lone scribblers. Now, “the printing press decentralized the role of gatekeeper… In a scribal culture, maintaining control over ideas was straightforward. In a printing-press culture, control was harder.” Anyone with a press could publish pamphlets or books relatively cheaply, on any topic, with or without official approval.

The social and political disruptions were immediate and profound. Truth itself seemed to splinter: As The Atlantic’s Cullen Murphy observes, once “people can publish whatever they want, they do… the printing press made individual books more uniform and more numerous, but it also put the idea of universal truth up for grabs.”​ Inundated with printed matter, Europeans encountered a bewildering array of new ideas, claims, and narratives. A contemporary noted that with print, “you could find anything in a printed book—conspiracy theories, magic spells… You could just make something up and set it in type, and people would say, ‘I read it in a book.” The modern problem of misinformation had a Renaissance analog: authority no longer came from who spoke, but from the seemingly factual printed page, for better or worse.

Most famously, the printing revolution fueled the Protestant Reformation and the religious wars that followed. In 1517, Martin Luther circulated his 95 Theses criticizing Church practices; within weeks, printed copies had spread across Germany and beyond. “Luther wasn’t the first theologian to question the Church, but he was the first to widely publish his message,” historian Ada Palmer explains​. Thanks to print, what might have been a local dispute turned into a continent-wide schism. New Protestant ideas could not be silenced by burning a single heretic; there were always more pamphlets and translated Bibles appearing. Indeed, “before the printing press, censorship was easy. All it required was killing the ‘heretic’ and burning his handful of notebooks. But after the printing press, it became nearly impossible to destroy all copies of a dangerous idea… the more dangerous a book was claimed to be, the more people wanted to read it.”​ Attempts by Church and monarchs to control the press (through edicts like indexes of banned books and printing licenses) had limited success. They often backfired by increasing curiosity about forbidden ideas.​

The disruption extended beyond religion. Print empowered “fringe voices” of all kinds: radical sects, political dissidents, egalitarians, scientific theorists. By the eighteenth century, Enlightenment philosophers like Voltaire and Rousseau leveraged print to spread critiques of absolutism, helping give rise to what one contemporary called “public opinion – a preponderant power in Europe… before which tyrants of all kinds will tremble.” Indeed, historians credit the print-enabled public sphere with enabling the American and French Revolutions​. In short, the old feudal order of Europe—unified by one Church and governed by hereditary nobles—was destabilized by the print revolution’s barrage of new doctrines and information. Social cohesion was shredded along religious and ideological lines; trust in age-old institutions evaporated as people encountered alternative visions of society in pamphlets and books. As one scholar dryly notes, “No printing press, no Reformation.” And without the new print-driven Enlightenment ideas, the legitimacy of divine-right kingship was forever undermined.

Yet after a century and more of conflict, society eventually adapted to the print era. The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, for example, established a new order of sovereign nation-states, partly in response to the chaos of information-fueled religious wars. Over time, European societies developed mechanisms to live with the torrent of print. Governments made peace (begrudgingly) with a permanently expanded sphere of public debate—often by allowing a degree of press freedom and secular governance. At the same time, new institutions sprang up: newspapers emerged in the 17th century, providing regular, moderated news (as opposed to wild rumor); scientific academies and journals channeled the deluge of discovery into organized disciplines​. Crucially, literacy spread well beyond the elite. What was once scandalous (commoners reading the Bible or political tracts) became normal. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, mass literacy and a vibrant print culture were entrenched, supporting more representative governments and an informed citizenry (at least in theory). In sum, the printing press’s disruptive century eventually gave way to a new equilibrium: one of broader knowledge, diversified faith and politics, and institutions (like the free press and constitutional government) designed to manage a pluralistic, information-rich society.

Radio, Television, and the Mass Media Era

The next great leap in communications came with the electronic mass media of the late 19th and 20th centuries, telegraphy, radio, cinema, and television. These technologies again transformed information flows, this time with speed and sensory impact. Printed news could take days or weeks to circulate; a radio broadcast or TV newscast could reach millions instantaneously, with sound and later visuals that made distant events feel immediate. By the mid-20th century, the developed world had entered what Gurri calls the age of “industrial, ​I-talk-you-listen” media: a relatively small number of broadcasters or publishers could beam messages outward to an audience of unprecedented size. In many ways, this centralized the power of communication even beyond what print had allowed, but it also created new vulnerabilities and upheavals as society adjusted to the broadcast era.

In the early days of radio (1920s–1930s), there was a sense of entering uncharted territory. Suddenly, a single voice could speak into millions of homes at once. This had uplifting uses—Franklin D. Roosevelt’s radio “fireside chats” forged a new intimate bond between elected leaders and citizens—but it also enabled mass persuasion and propaganda on a scale never seen. “The power of radio propaganda came from its revolutionary nature,” notes one historical analysis; radio “allowed information to be transmitted quickly and uniformly to vast populations.”​ Totalitarian regimes eagerly exploited this: Nazi Germany, for instance, distributed cheap “People’s Receiver” radios and broadcast relentless propaganda, pioneering modern electronic mass persuasion​. In democratic countries, too, radio upended earlier information hierarchies. Charismatic outsiders who might have been marginalized in print gained huge followings via radio—from American populist preacher Father Coughlin in the 1930s to revolutionary leaders elsewhere. In an unregulated early radio landscape, misinformation sometimes spread wildly. A notorious example was the 1938 War of the Worlds radio drama: performed in a news-bulletin style by Orson Welles, it convinced some listeners that a Martian invasion was underway, sparking panic calls to police and newspapers​. The incident (overblown in retrospect, but iconic) revealed the public’s still-naïve trust in the new medium—if it’s on the radio, it must be true—and how easily that trust could be manipulated or misused.

Television further amplified these trends from the 1950s onward. TV combined the broad reach of radio with the visceral power of moving images. It became the primary source of news and entertainment for billions, reshaping culture and politics. Leaders now not only had to sound convincing; they had to look telegenic. (In the first U.S. televised presidential debate in 1960, the relaxed, camera-friendly John F. Kennedy was widely deemed to have bested a sweating Richard Nixon—marking the arrival of TV image craft in politics.) The most significant disruptions of the TV era came as people witnessed events in real time that previously would have been filtered or delayed. The Vietnam War, for example, has been called the “living-room war” because graphic TV coverage brought the conflict’s brutality into American homes nightly, undermining the government’s optimistic narratives. By 1968, after the Tet Offensive, public support for the war plummeted, and many felt “betrayed by their government for not being truthful about the war”, accelerating a collapse in trust. The same period saw televised congressional hearings on Watergate in 1973, which exposed White House crimes to a rapt national audience and led to President Nixon’s resignation. Not coincidentally, surveys show trust in government eroded steeply in the late 1960s and 1970s and never returned to 1950s levels. Mass media didn’t single-handedly cause that decline—real events did—but television ensured that institutional failings were dramatically revealed and cemented in the public consciousness.

Yet even as broadcast media disrupted older institutions (like weakening deference to government or print newspapers), over time new norms and controls emerged to tame the chaos. Governments learned to manage radio/TV messaging (through public broadcast services, press regulations, or in authoritarian cases, outright state control of the airwaves). Democratic societies implemented rules like the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine (1949) in the U.S., which required broadcasters to present balanced viewpoints on controversial issues, aiming to prevent one-sided propaganda and maintain public trust. Broadcasters themselves professionalized; news became an institution with codified ethics in many countries. By the mid-20th century, a relatively stable media ecosystem existed: a few major TV networks and radio stations had near-monopolies on information dissemination, and while this concentration had downsides, it arguably provided a shared national narrative. In Gurri’s terms, 20th-century elites enjoyed a “semi-monopoly over information” which buttressed their authority​. For example, when legendary CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite delivered a critical editorial on the Vietnam War in 1968, President Johnson reportedly said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” Such was the singular influence of mass media gatekeepers in that era.

Social cohesion during the broadcast age was paradoxical. On one hand, people were brought together by simultaneous experiences (everyone listening to the same radio address or watching the moon landing live). On the other hand, the content of those shared experiences could either build trust or sow fear. By the 1980s, most societies had reached a détente with mass media: institutions embraced television for public outreach (think of moonshot PR or televised parliamentary debates), and the public came to view TV news and major papers as generally credible (even as skepticism remained in some quarters). The tumult of the early broadcast era gave way to a world where, for a time, elites and mass media were aligned and public trust, though lower than before, was manageable. That calm would not last—but it was a distinct phase in the cycle.

The Digital Tsunami: Internet and Social Media

Entering the 21st century, humanity was hit by what Martin Gurri calls a “cataclysmic expansion of information”—the advent of the internet, followed by the rise of social media and smartphones. If the printing press was a bolt of lightning, the internet was a tsunami. By Gurri’s calculation, “in the year 2001, double the amount of information was produced than had been produced by the entire human race from the cave paintings until now. 2002 doubled 2001.”​ In other words, information was growing exponentially, and it was largely thanks to digital networks that allowed anyone to create and share content globally. This fifth wave of communication has in many ways combined the disruptive characteristics of all previous leaps—scale, speed, decentralization, visual richness—and magnified them. The result, as in earlier eras, has been a collapse of traditional authority and social cohesion before our eyes.

The nature of social media’s challenge to institutional order is two-fold. First, it empowers once-marginal voices and enables leaderless mass movements; second, it fragments the public into echo chambers with no consensus on truth. On the empowering effect: today a lone blogger or an outraged citizen with a smartphone can reach millions on Twitter or YouTube without any mediation. This has produced what Gurri calls the “revolt of the public,” where “the public in large numbers can challenge, and sometimes defeat, the monstrous Leviathan of modern government. And insignificant people can bring down privileged elites.”​ We saw it in the Arab Spring (2011), where protests coordinated via Facebook and Twitter toppled long-standing dictators in Tunisia and Egypt. We see it in whistleblowers and ordinary individuals suddenly wielding agenda-setting power by leaking information or mobilizing online outrage. Importantly, many of these movements are spontaneous and leaderless. Analysts note that recent mass protests—from the Occupy Wall Street encampments to the Hong Kong demonstrations—deliberately eschew hierarchy. They are amorphous “hashtag” movements that unite around shared anger rather than a clear program. As Gurri observes, these eruptions are often “weak in organization, leadership, and coherent ideology… divided into mutually hostile war-bands—but brought together and energized by a shared sectarian loathing of… the status quo.” In effect, social media can rapidly unite disparate individuals in negative consensus (what they are against), but it is far harder to marshal positive consensus (what to build instead).

Meanwhile, the information fragmentation is unprecedented. Social networks and online forums have created echo chambers where each group has its own sources of “truth.” Mainstream institutions, governments, national media, and scientific bodies have lost their monopoly over information and narrative. Gurri explains that 20th-century institutions had legitimacy partly because they controlled the information stage; in contrast, “a tsunami of digital content has swept away that control and that legitimacy”​. When authority figures speak now, their messages are one item in a cacophony of voices. Official narratives are instantly fact-checked, parodied, or contradicted by alternative accounts circulating online. This has led to a crisis of trust: large segments of the public simply disbelieve whatever “the establishment” says, be it a government report or a network newscast. For example, conspiracy theories like QAnon flourish in the social media age by offering a complete counternarrative to mainstream news, and millions have subscribed to such theories, rejecting any information from legacy institutions as tainted. As one Vox analysis summarized, “people stopped believing in the institutions charged with communicating the truth… the gatekeeping institutions lost their power to decide what passes as truth in the mind of the public.” We now live in a “post-truth” or “many-truths” environment, where trust is hyper-localized (to one’s tribe or online community) and societal consensus is hard to achieve.

The social and political turbulence of the past decade is the direct result of this digital revolution. Virtually every week, some new eruption on social media roils politics: a viral video exposes police brutality and sparks protests; a hashtag campaign “cancels” a celebrity or pressures an institution; leaked documents upend diplomatic relations; misinformation accelerates a public health crisis. Traditional authorities struggle to respond. Governments and media find themselves more often in reactive mode, trying to debunk rumors or placate online mobs. We have seen surges of populism in democracies worldwide—Brexit, the election of unconventional outsiders like Donald Trump, the spread of anti-establishment parties—fueled in part by social media mobilization and messaging. These movements, as noted, often have rage but lack long-term organizing frameworks. Gurri points out that if today’s revolting public “were more like the Bolsheviks and less like QAnon, they’d take over… They’d start passing laws. They would topple the regime. But… what we have is this collision between a public that is in repudiation mode and these elites… stumbling around like zombies” without legitimacy​. In other words, the clash between empowered networks of citizens and hollowed-out institutions has produced standoff and dysfunction rather than constructive change.

Will the digital era eventually find a new equilibrium, as past eras did? History offers hope that it might—but also caution that the adjustment may be protracted and painful. The printing press led to a hundred years of religious war before Europe arrived at a stable order; the internet’s convulsions may likewise take decades to resolve. There are signs that adaptation is underway: societies are grappling with ideas like regulating social media (for instance, stricter moderation of harmful content, or antitrust actions against tech giants) and improving digital literacy among the public. Just as previous generations-built schools and libraries to harness the flood of print, our generation may build new norms for verifying information (fact-checkers, community norms on platforms) or new institutions better suited to the internet age. Gurri suggests we will have to “reconfigure our democratic institutions for the digital world we now inhabit. ”​ Exactly what form that takes remains uncertain. Optimists believe the internet’s democratic promise can be redeemed by smarter governance and citizen engagement; pessimists worry the sheer scale of the digital “fifth wave” makes it qualitatively different, potentially eroding shared reality permanently.

Conclusion: Adaptation and Renewal?

Looking across these cycles, a common narrative emerges. Communication revolutions initially erode old structures of social cohesion and trust, as new voices and information overwhelm the established order. Authority figures are delegitimized—be they oral-tradition elders, the medieval Church, 20th-century governments, or today’s experts—when they lose control of the information landscape. Society enters a period of chaos and contestation, where it’s unclear who or what can be believed. This is often accompanied by surges in conflict: the upheavals can be cultural (the Reformation), or physical (riots, rebellions, even revolutions).

However, history also shows that societies eventually adapt. Human beings do not remain forever in anarchy; we seek new equilibrium. After the initial shock of a communication leap, people gradually develop new mental habits, and institutions evolve (or new ones arise) that incorporate the changed reality. The printing press forced the creation of a public sphere and secular states. Radio and TV led to professional journalism and regulatory frameworks to curb the worst abuses. It’s possible that the internet, after its stormy youth, will likewise see the emergence of new norms of digital responsibility and perhaps new trusted institutions (for example, public-interest social networks or improved international norms for cyber information warfare).

Crucially, adaptation often requires innovation in governance. After print shattered religious unity, the innovative concept of religious tolerance and freedom of expression eventually allowed pluralistic societies to function. Now, after social media has shattered informational unity, we may need innovations like citizen assemblies, participatory fact-checking, or other democratic reforms to rebuild trust. Gurri and others emphasize that the solution is not to try to stuff the genie back in the bottle—censorship or a retreat to pre-digital conditions is neither feasible nor desirable. Instead, the challenge is finding ways to integrate the public’s newly amplified voice into constructive outcomes. The public has proven it can veto and protest (often via viral hashtags and mass outrage). The next step is to channel that energy into governance, so that discontent can be translated into policy or institutional change, rather than permanent gridlock.

In the end, communication technologies are double-edged swords. They empower society even as they destabilize it. The printing press empowered people to read and interpret for themselves, undermining blind faith in authorities; eventually it also empowered new knowledge and democratic revolutions that propelled humanity forward. The internet has empowered billions to speak and connect, undermining old gatekeepers; it too may yet yield positive transformations once the turbulence passes. “The medium is the message,” Marshall McLuhan famously said, meaning each medium reshapes society in its own image. We are still discovering the message of the internet age. But history assures us that while the interim may be rocky, adaptation is possible. Our task is to accelerate that adaptive process—learning from the past to create a future where digital communication coexists with social cohesion and trusted institutions. Every previous information revolution ultimately enlarged the sphere of human freedom and knowledge. If we can weather the present storm, the current revolution may do the same.

Addendum: Further Reading and Key Concepts

● Martin Gurri – The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium (2014; updated 2018): A former CIA media analyst, Gurri explores how the digital explosion of information has undermined elite authority worldwide. He introduces the idea of five historical “waves” of information (writing, alphabet, print, mass media, internet) and argues that the current wave has led to a nihilistic “revolt” of the public. Gurri’s work provides the core framework for this article’s analysis of social media’s impact​mauldineconomics.com​vox.com.

● Marshall McLuhan – Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964): A seminal work in media theory, famous for coining “the medium is the message.” McLuhan argues that each communication medium (from print to electronic media) fundamentally shapes how we think and organize society, regardless of the content it carries. His insights help explain why the form of a new medium (e.g. the internet’s interactivity) can be more disruptive than any particular message​vox.com.

● Walter J. Ong – Orality and Literacy (1982): A scholarly examination of the differences between oral cultures and literate cultures. Ong explains how the advent of writing (and later print) changed human consciousness, social structure, and memory. This provides valuable background on the oral-to-written transition, supplementing the anecdote of Socrates’ critique of writing​historyofinformation.com.

● Elizabeth L. Eisenstein – The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979): A groundbreaking historical study on the impact of printing in early modern Europe. Eisenstein details how print facilitated the Protestant Reformation, the scientific revolution, and the rise of modern thought. Her research (referenced by Cullen Murphy in The Atlantic) underscores the disruptive “startup” culture of 16th-century printing and its long-term effects on knowledge and authority​theatlantic.com​theatlantic.com.

● Neil Postman – Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985): A critique of television’s effect on public discourse. Postman argues that TV turned news and politics into entertainment, weakening the seriousness and trust in public institutions. This work offers perspective on the mass media era, showing that concerns about media-driven declines in discourse predate the internet (e.g., the TV era’s “soundbite” culture foreshadowed social media dynamics).

● Cullen Murphy, “What the Internet Can Learn from the Printing Press” (The Atlantic, Jan 2020): An accessible essay drawing parallels between the aftermath of Gutenberg’s invention and today’s digital disruptions. Murphy highlights historical anecdotes (like the explosion of bizarre content in early print) that mirror our present challenges with misinformation​theatlantic.com​theatlantic.com. This piece is a good entry point for general readers to see the cyclical nature of media upheavals.

● Pew Research Center – “Public Trust in Government: 1958–2022” (data report): A compilation of U.S. survey data showing the decline of trust in government after the 1960s​pewresearch.org. This provides empirical background for the claim that the mass media era (especially Vietnam/Watergate period) saw a permanent drop in institutional trust, linking media coverage to public opinion shifts.

Notes: Feel free to send me corrections, new ideas for articles, or anything else you think I would like: cameronfen at gmail dot com.

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