Aside from the Duke, the rest of the world was enjoying the Renaissance and Enlightenment. The Protestant Church usurped some of the power of the Catholic Church by using printing as a means to distribute its common-language bibles in a rapid way. Where it once took six months to produce a single bible by hand, the printing press could now crank out one complete bible every day. The eventual success of the printing press allowed formal scholarly communication to develop through the journal. The first such journal was the Journal Des Scavans, a publication of France's Royal Academy of Science.
With the introduction of daily newspapers in the 19th century, the final phase of literate society, mass literacy, was enabled. It is now possible for the entire population to become literate, and for society to depend upon this mass literacy. With the power to reach hundreds of people at once, printing threatened the reign of governments and of the Roman Catholic Church. With the widespread public acceptance of the printed page came its censorship and control by the powers that be. The church published its Index Expurgatorius of banned reading material, while Germany, Britain, and other nations reacted to the `menace' of printing by imposing other controls and limits upon it.
Considering Naisbitt's quote in Megatrends, we can see that writing is an original technology that is amplified through printing. Printing allows more people to share in common a body of knowledge. According to Naisbitt, this technology will follow the path of least resistance and a new technology will evolve from the printed word: