Conclusion

The Encyclopédie is an excellent example of how the Church and French government played a role in the censorship of printed books to suppress the transmission of certain knowledge to readers. During this time period, if these authorities felt threatened by a widely accessible written book, they had the power to completely restrict the public from that work. This occurred with the Encyclopédie because the free-thinking approach to learning and knowledge transmission conflicted with the Church’s ideals.

Since the Encyclopédie is a printed collection of books, there are several elements that are gained from a “new media encounter”, being its translation into a digital format. It is no longer at the same risks it was in a printed format. The articles can’t be physically destroyed or damaged, meaning that the information will last much longer in a digital archive. Also, with technological tools, it is possible to navigate the Encyclopédie with a search function, which exists in The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert, Collaborative Translation Project. This makes the information more quickly accessible and allows for more precise searches. Finally, the essence of the collection would not be lost in a digital format either. The Encyclopédie was designed to be a tool that could be used to learn new information at any time, where all knowledge was always accessible. This is maintained in a digital format, where the experience of ‘looking something up’ is still present with online encyclopedias, such as Wikipedia. With the internet, information is just as accessible from a digital encyclopedia as the entire Encyclopédie collection on a bookshelf would be.