Radicalism in Print Culture

Nowadays, people take for granted how easily they are able to access any kind of information they desire. It just takes the click of a mouse, a couple of keystrokes on Google, and voila! All of your questions are answered; however, this was not always the case. We are fortunate enough to have affordable supercomputers available whenever we need to access information, but what about in the past?
About 500 years ago there lived a man named Martin Luther. He was a German priest who played an important role in the Protestant Reformation, wonderful things in and of themselves, but more important to this blog entry: he translated the Bible from Latin into a language that everyone could understand. This was revolutionary. He made the Holy Book accessible to the common person. Previously to his translation, only the highly educated (those who could speak Latin) were able to read the Bible, leaving the commoners to just trust their religious leader's interpretation of the words. Now, this isn't exactly a technology, but imagine that you were living in those times, and all of a sudden you had a Bible available to you to read. It's rather moving stuff.
Fast forward to the present day, and we have things like the Gutenberg Project and SOPA. Project Gutenberg was brought into place in order to "encourage the creation and distribution of ebooks." It involves volunteers digitalizing cultural works and making them available to anybody who wants them. Not long ago, this would have sounded like a crazy idea. Ebooks? Who needs those. Good old paper books have never let us down.
But this is not so.
With the release of the iPad, the Kobo ereader, and countless others, eBooks are becoming more dominant in today's society. Projects like Gutenberg are greatly increasing the accessibility of works, making information available to everyone that wants it for 'as free as possible.' That, my friends, is incredible.
On the other hand, we have the dreaded monster, SOPA, or the Stop Online Piracy Act. Without getting into the technical details (not that I know much of those, anyway), let's just say that SOPA would give the US government LOADS of power when it comes to the internet. Sites like Youtube could be  shut down because of one link to a site that could be considered "dedicated to stealing of US property." Now, one in their right mind might just think "But isn't this moving backwards? Aren't we all willing to share information?" and the answer to that is "thus is capitalism." If SOPA were to be passed, our access to information might decrease drastically, especially considering how dependant people are on the internet.


 In the digital age, our access to information is almost infinite. Chat rooms, forums, social networks, search engines. All of these things can facilitate learning if used in the right way. But one must also be careful to note sources and make sure information taken is legitimate. There is a reason Wikipedia isn't a valued source, after all.