The Gutenberg Parenthesis by Jeff Jarvis review - why print culture is key to the futur... - 0 views
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he Gutenberg Parenthesis is a term coined by Danish scholar Lars Ole Sauerberg, who proposed that the history of literary culture as we had hitherto known it – the 500-plus years from the invention of Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press in the mid-15th century until around the turn of the millennium – would come to be regarded as a mere blip.
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Digital technology would transform our cultural institutions by undermining their core foundation: the intellectual property and moral authority bound up in individual authorship. The future of knowledge production would be collective and collaborative – entailing, in essence, a return to the oral tradition of the world before print.
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In The Gutenberg Parenthesis, US journalist Jeff Jarvis considers this thesis and its possible implications. He is anxious that we should retain what was good and useful about analog-era gatekeeping structures, which played an important role in “recommending quality, certifying fact, supporting creativity. What must we create to replace these functions?”
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At the turn of the 17th century we have “the birth of the modern novel, the conception of the essay, the development of a market for printed plays, and the debut of the newspaper – all occurring within years of each other”.
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“Print cemented the story … as the core institution of culture around the world”, informing everything from journalism and political propaganda to creative writing. A print culture built on linear narrative and the sequential ordering of content is gradually giving way to something altogether more chaotic.
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But he is no catastrophist, and even suggests it might do us good to reject the seductions of narrative and embrace new forms that are more truly reflective of life’s messy complexity.
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Jarvis believes sensible technocratic solutions will help us ride out this epochal shift. We need to “establish flexible frameworks for oversight, collaborating with technology companies, their communities, regulators, civil society, and researchers.”
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“To fight to eradicate bad speech is a distraction,” he writes. “In the history of Gutenberg’s age, what worked instead was the creation and expansion of institutions dedicated to nurturing, supporting, and sharing the best of what came of print: editing, publishing houses, criticism, and expansion of libraries and disciplines of humanities and arts in universities and schools.”