ON THE PROCESSES OF GLOBALIZATIONIN THE SOCIO-CULTURAL RETROSPECTIVE (FROM THE HISTORY OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF GERMAN LANGUAGE LITERATURE)
The article attempts to describe in terms of globalization the development of German literature in the 16-17 centuries - in the period of fundamental changes in the life of society under the influence of powerful sociocultural processes of transition from the Middle Ages to the early New Age. The focus is on the appearance of typography in Germany in the 15th century, and its distribution in the 16-17 centuries, as a new media mode of communication that contributed to the formation of a dynamic socio-cultural environment and the transformation of German literature into an instrument of public activity. Early typography is retrospectively evaluated as the globalization process of “reclaiming” the life of society on new grounds. Important elements of this process were the appearance of mass small-format literature and the first printed newspapers as prototypes for future regular periodicals. The processes that took place in Germany in the 16-17 centuries were not locally limited, but were of a supra-territorial and supranational nature. Thanks to typography there was a gradual destruction of the monopoly on information, which possessed feudal and class instances. The value of early typography as a global phenomenon is the “launching” of the mechanism for implementing a whole complex of transformations in different areas of activity. The article proves the point of view, according to which the “effects” associated with the spread in the modern society of the Internet and new technologies are comparable with the influence that the printing press invented in Germany had on the development of civilization.