The Radical Press

In the chapter on "Class Consciousness", E. P. Thompson underlines the importance of print media and literacy to the spread of working class consciousness in the early 17th century England. According to Thompson, newspapers and pamphlets became tools of propaganda and a means of forging an oppositional consciousness. Thompson notes that "from 1830 onwards a more clearly defined class consciousness, in the customary Marxist sense, was maturing, in which working people were aware of continuing both old and new battles on their own" (p.712). It is with their hard won erratic education and their own experiences that the working class formed an idea of the organization of the society, leading to the development of a political consciousness.

I found this relationship between the spread of literacy, print media, and the rise of class consciousness interesting in the light of Benedict Anderson's argument in Imagined Communities : Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Anderson attributes a more "conservative character" to the spread of literary and print capitalism in the 18th century Europe by aligning it exclusively with the emergence of 'national consciousness.' Anderson notes that 'print capitalism' or the "convergence of capitalism and print technology on the fatal diversity of human language created the possibility of a new form of imagined community..." (p.46).

According to Thompson, the availability of print media (which paradoxically was facilitated by the rise of capitalism as Benedict Anderson notes) enabled the development of the Radical press and the dissemination of an oppositional consciousness. The awareness that "Knowledge is Power" made the artisans " profoundly suspicious of an established culture which had excluded them from power and knowledge and which had answered their protests with homilies and tracts" (p.727). The working class thus was able to form their own "imagined community" as an exploited and marginalized group to fight their own battles via print capitalism. (However, this does not necessarily exclude them from having a "national consciousness").

In today's a 'hyperreal, media saturated world," print media plays a complex and an ambiguous role. The proliferation of media channels, Internet, and satellite TV can lead to unification and the forming of a particular identity/consciousness or can create fragmentation, isolation, and disharmony.