So what's the new printing press? (Score 1)

If the printing press was so important because of its ability to spread knowledge quickly and cheaply, then the Internet fits that bill. The technology that will allow the internet to grow to fill that role is optical networking. Joe McGarvey argued this point at the Net Economy in this article. There was also a decent New Yorker article on the subject but I don't know if that's available online. Hardware makers are more important than software coders in this current renaissance. Gutenberg didn't write any books himself but his invention allowed others' work to be more widely spread.