WiFi at the Monastery

6 bedrooms, 3 baths, built in 1274.  Good condition.

This week we are living at Renscombe Farm in the village of Worth Matravers on the south coast of England.

The house was once a monastery, built in the 13th Century. The original Abbey of Cerne.

The walls are are stone, as are the floors and the rooms are small. I can stand in the halls, but Lisa, at 6 foot, has some problems with head-banging.

What the Abbey does have, however, is WiFi, which is why I am able to write this.

When King Edward I, (my wife’s great great great many times over grandfather) confirmed the ‘grant of wreck’ to the Abbot of Cerne in 1274, monasteries such as this were the only refuges of learning and literacy in Europe.

The monks here spent their time painstakingly hand writing (or rather copying) religious manuscripts, (mostly bibles), when they were not farming or raising livestock.

It is hard to imagine that some 750 years ago, places like this were islands of literacy in a world of almost complete ignorance.

The vast majority, in fact pretty much all the rest of the population lived in intellectual darkness, including, more often than not, the royalty as well.  Reading and writing were highly rarified activities and publishing books incredibly complex and expensive.

Then, in 1452, Gutenberg arrived with his printing press – a cheap way of publishing and distributing ideas – any ideas, by pretty much anyone.

Within 50 years, Gutenberg and his invention destroyed a world that had been in existence, and quite stable, for more than 1,000 years.

Almost incomprehensible. Yet it happened. And institutions like this were rendered worthless almost overnight.

Today, we are on the leading edge of a revolution the likes of which the world has not seen since Gutenberg, but also quite similar.  The power to generate, publish and distribute ideas has, until now, been in the hands of our own kind of monasteries – The New York Times, ABC News, CNN.

Now, another piece of technology, the web, is rendering newspapers and TV networks as worthless as these monasteries.

Those institutions that once held a virtual monopoly on the ability to create and distribute content will soon be as hollow and empty and anachronistic as this monastery is today.

And maybe, one day, someone will spend a week in 30 Rockefeller Center and write about how once, media came from piles of stone like this. Hard to believe.