Review Essay On Paolo Sarpi And The Uses Of Information

A Closer Examination of Paolo Sarpi and the Uses of Information in the Seventeenth-Century Venice
Paolo Sarpi was a scholarly friar who was a driving force in trying to change government policy concerning the distribution of information and played a significant role in the politics of seventeenth-century Venice. Through his political ties and extensive information networks, he managed to make known his thoughts on just how powerful information could be in the proper as well as improper hands. Looking at Sarpi’s scholarly and political contributions during this time period serve to show that he was a profound and progressive thinker whose ideas on the happenings within Venice and beyond revolved around three major themes of communication studies: that media allows us to “experience” distant events as they occur via information networks, that media, such as the avvisi, influences thought, psychological organization, and social and institutional organization, and that the media are never neutral as shown by propaganda charged political writings (Black, Chunn, Edwards and Heyer 2).
The reference article, Filippo De Vivo’s paper Paolo Sarpi and the Uses of Information in the Seventeenth-Century Venice, is structured very much like a standard essay in that it has an introduction, thesis, supporting paragraphs for the points brought up by the thesis, and a conclusion. The title of De Vivo’s paper is an accurate depiction of what the subject matter pertains to which is about Paolo Sarpi and the uses of information in Venice during the seventeenth-century. Background information regarding Venice and its information network start the paper off. It is then established that information that was once only available to the elite classes such as merchants and politicians was then made available to the masses as a saleable commodity in the form of newsletters called avvisi (De Vivo 37). His network expanded beyond that which was available to the common people and he had...