"Did the printing media undermine the scholars?"
"One of the criticisms of the ottoman empire was its unwillingness to really compete in the printing press industry. Many scholars at the time did fear the printing media might undermine the authority of the scholars as they feared that the masses would go to printing press rather than to them to find about knowledge.It seemed at the time that the scholars did view the printing media as something similar to how baudriallard viewed the television as something as a non-functional. However it is notable that the printing media didn't actually undermine the scholar to the extent of which the scholars expected. The actual opposite happened. The same happened with the internet and now A.I. where the scholars were not really undermined by these particular forms of technology which opened the doorway to larger forms of information such as PDFs, docunents, archives which people in the past dreamed of having access to."
"Despite the hostitlity that many scholars had towards the printing press, many chose not to be 'luddites' on this matter where the deobandis and the salafi movement in the subcontinent attempted to use the printing media as a method of spreading knowledge and refutations of each other. What instead happened contrary to what the scholars expected, their reputation, their authority and their skillfulness became much more repected whrn it became more known to the masses via the usage of the printing press."
"In the case of the internet, the masses had obtained access to much more knowledge and they spread that information via DNS and web servers and in this case scholars associated with the salafis became more respected when it was mainly salafis using the web servers as a means of spreading Islamic knowledge during the 1990s and the early 2000s."
"Whilst we haven't seen entirely observed the consequences of A.I. with the use of openai and deepseek, so far it doesn't seem that the authority of the scholars have been challenged so far. A.I. is actually different to websites when you could argue you were taqlid when you were following a fatwa on a website which was owned by a scholar. In the case of a.i., it is apparent that the user is not doing taqlid of scholar and what he is doing is blind following a machine but since we are still in the early stages of the introduction of A.I., it's important to remember that people do recognise the errors of A.I. i.e. 'cyber hallucinations' which has been observed in several industries and even academics and it is used similarly as some sort of search engine."
"The question is why these particular forms of technology such as printing, interner and A.I., hasn't really undermined scholars. These particular forms of technology give the masses access to large amounts of information that it is difficult to process such that people who are able to process large forms of information still take the 'easy' method. Meanwhile people who aren't able to process large forms of information tend to use this for vices which has slithered through the current western culture today. In other words, scholars and experts are seen as formidable in the stormy techological era."