The Hidden Center of the "Gutenberg Galaxy" - 0 views
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McLuhan and the Gutenberg Galaxy
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What if the social changes that result from these technologies are intended , rather than unintended
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Marshall McLuhan wrote a good deal about the "Gutenberg Galaxy" - the 'constellation' of changes wrought on European society after the German of that name figured out how to turn a winepress into a holder for movable type - in other words, a printing press - in the 15th century.
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changes in the political, religious, and social landscape.
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Gutenberg's press also made possible the Protestant Reformation - because, as Martin Luther came to realize, the wide translation and printing of the Bible meant "every man be a priest."
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It's certainly hard to see how any of the changes which followed
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could have occurred without the widespread literacy and education that the printing press made possible
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what is now happening to our society in our second "Gutenberg revolution" - namely, the rise of electronic media
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But what if there were a hidden center to the "Gutenberg Galaxy?"
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fostering our current phase of technological change
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cultural determinism of technology
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And then, the Renaissance
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The Dawn of Writing
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obvious changes made possible by writing
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technology of writing was ascribed to some mythic "culture-bringer" - Ogham, Thoth, Quetzelcoatl, etc
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Most people are not aware, however, what writing had undone.
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writing may have destroyed man's own prodigious mnemonic talents
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Art of Memory also involved using tools and images
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The written word makes possible the autonomous survival of knowledge - with an oral tradition, it disappears when the oralists have all been killed
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The spoken word is intimate
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writing is impersonal, does not carry emotional intonations
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earlier technological revolution - one that occurred perhaps five millenia ago - the birth of writing
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throughout the great breadth of the Dark and Middle Ages, literacy was not very widespread.
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Was the printing press purely serendipitous? It does seem to have arrived at the right place at the right time.
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mysterious traditions of the printers' and papermillers' guilds
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heretical content of many of these watermarks
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Bayley suggests it was Huguenot refugees that brought papermaking and the printing art into England
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"Gutenberg revolution" as quite a Gnostic coup - destroying the literacy monopoly of both the Catholic Church and the feudal state
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Today, the Arrival of the Electronic Word
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any people are openly saying it: print is dead, the era of the printed word and the book is fading, and thus a new kind of literacy - "teleliteracy," ("the grammatology of video,") the reading of the moving image and multimedia barrage before us - is being propagated
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death of civilization itself, since in their eyes we seem to be leaving the printed text behind and returning to the moving image or fetish
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immediacy, presence, and participation lost through writing and print
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whether some of the changes electronic media will bring were not intended,
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would not think for you, but would help you think better and function as a "Knowledge (gnosis? ) Machine."
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hypertext meant that the world's knowledge could be seamlessly woven together, much like the integrated unified system of knowledge imagined by the mystic Ramon Lull.
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could be used to facilitate "Community memory" and community activism. It meant access to information