The Gutenberg Galaxy is a classic in the study of the media or communication, but for being a book about communication it was really hard to understand. McLuhan writes it in the "mosaic" style, which is nice because of the short chapters with pithy titles like "Civilization gives the barbarian or tribal man an eye for an ear and is now at odds with the electronic world." But he assumes a really deep knowledge of academic and classical literature that I just do not have. References to Shakespeare, Joyce, and Pope just went over my head. Another criticism I have is that the book is not very empirical and generalizes a lot about different countries, and usually just determines everyone is in a preliterate, oral culture unless they're in New York of London basically. The man says that Russa, Ireland, the Old South are oral cultures I mean come on. And he says that "The miseries of conflict between the Eastern and Roman churches, for example, are a merely obvious instance of the type of opposition between the oral and visual cultures." What the hell are you talking about man? That is not obvious to me at all.
The book is a classic for introducing concepts still used today, like "surfing," which became used for surfing the web, the "global village," and the idea of "the age of information." I found the most engaging parts of the books to be the ones where he talks about unique aspects of writing and reading in how they impact our thinking through the way we gather information through our senses. McLuhan goes in depth on the difference between hearing information and seeing it on the page, and between seeing it handwritten on the page versus typed on the page. He discusses four eras, which layer over one another: oral, handwritten, typed, and electronic. No one era replaces the others, but adds a new way for humans to consume information.
McLuhan quotes extensively from other authors to make his points. From J.C. Carothers, writing in Psychiatry (1959), McLuhan pulls that
When words are written, they become, of course, a part of the visual world. Like most of the elements of the visual world, thy become static things and lose, as such, the dynamism which is so characteristic of the auditory world in general, and of the spoken word in particular. They lose much of the personal element, in the sense that the heard word is most commonly directed at oneself, whereas the seen word most commonly is not, and can be read or not as one dictates.
I thought that was interesting, because when people now take in more information from reading, we read things that are not usually letters directed to us. Rather, most of what we read is in newspapers or books, in which the authors did not intend for any specific individual to read what is written, rather a large audience. In the pre-print or really the pre-manuscript era, most of what an individual heard was directed at them, or a group of limited size in which the speaker could see every individual they spoke to, and likely knew them. It would be on rare occasions when someone would attend an event at which a speaker could address a large enough crowd for the speech to be impersonal in the pre-writing era.
McLuhan points out that many individuals of the classical era, who lived in largely illiterate societies, did not choose to write things even if they, individually, could write. Socrates wrote nothing, and the "Middle Ages regarded Plato as the mere scribe or amaneusis of Socrates. And Aquinas considered that neither Socrates nor Our Lord committed their teaching to writing because the kind of interplay of minds that is in teaching is not possible by means of writing." I gather that McLuhan views speech as a more direct form of communication, since "speech is an outering (utterance) of all our senses at once," whereas "writing abstracts from speech."
Part of that abstraction is the idea that (and I haven't heard this elsewhere) people used to read aloud in the age of the manuscript before type became popular. Apparently medieval manuscripts were written without spaces or punctuation, so it was necessary to read aloud to get a feel for what was being said. Moreover, that is why medieval monks had cells--so that they could read aloud without disturbing one another. I am a little skeptical, but that is very interesting if that is the case. The result would be that we remember words on the page thinking of what we have seen, whereas the manuscript reader would have an oral or aural memory of what they read aloud.
Something I thought about is that maybe the printing press is to Catholicism as the internet is to Evangelicalism. The printing press had a massive influence on Catholicism by bringing the gospel into the vernaculars of Europe, the result being a huge rebellion against the Catholic Church and the rise of Protestantism. I wonder how the rise of electronic media and social media will affect religions today. To me, electronic media seems likely to rapidly diffuse "control" over religious texts, allowing laypeople to interpret them in diverse ways and "influence" others with new and divergent interpretations. McLuhan talks about how type created new religious emphasis on literalism, and a willingness to put faith not in "experts" who could interpret the holy book, but in the book itself. For the reader of the Bible in AD 1000, it would feel more human than the reader of the typed Bible 500 years later. The AD 1000 reader could see the strokes of the quill that wrote the manuscript, the spilled ink, and the human elements. But the reader in the age of the Reformation would see something mass produced and put more faith in the specific words that became authoritative. McLuhan writes that
The new homogeneity of the printed page seemed to inspire a subliminal faith in the validity of the printed Bible as bypassing the traditional oral authority of the Church, on one hand, and the need for rational critical scholarship on the other. It was as if print, uniform and repeatable commodity that it was, had the power of creating a new hypnotic superstition of the book as an independent of and uncontaminated by human agency. Nobody who read manuscripts could achieve this state of mind concerning the nature of the written word.
McLuhan continues to say that that very reproducibility of printed text would become responsible for everything that makes the West the West.
Something else interesting that the book brings up is perspective, in an artistic sense. Really, this book is an art history book in many ways, and spends a lot of time talking about art. One big part talks about the revolution in perspective, which is, for McLuhan, a result of type. In the manuscript age, the audile-tactile culture did not imagine that art should be seen from one specific point of view. They had already mastered sculpture, music, and architecture, but painting and the visual arts did not reach their modern form because the audience was meant to be able to look at art from different places. In the Renaissance, artists pioneered the vanishing point, and created two-dimensional art that required the viewer to see it only from the front.
McLuhan also says that print bears significant responsibility for the rise of nationalism "because by print a people sees itself for the first time. The vernacular in appearing in high visual definition affords a glimpse of social unity co-extensive with vernacular boundaries. And more people have experienced this visual unity of their native tongues via the newspaper than through the book." Print also encouraged people to write more in their vernaculars than in the Latin lingua franca. Print exposed to Renaissance humanists how far their own Latin was from classical precedent, and then decided to teach Latin through the written page rather than by speaking Latin. As teachers abandoned teaching in spoken Latin, pupils grew up only with a knowledge of written Latin, and did not speak it to each other. Once people no longer spoke to one another in Latin, it became superfluous to write in Latin, and the language was allowed to die. With this, vernaculars proliferated, and would end up having the above effect on building national linguistic boundaries.
McLuhan finishes the book by telling us that print "is a delirium. It is a transforming and metamorphosing drug that has the power of imposing its assumptions upon every level of consciousness. But for us in the 1960's, print has much of the quaint receding character of the movie and the railway train." But that the modern technologies of TV and radio will not be possible to fully understand until their era has passed. "A few decades hence it will be easy to describe the revolution in human perception and motivation that resulted from beholding the new mosaic mesh of the TV image. Today it is futile to discuss it at all."
Miscellaneous:
- I guess I've got to read some Harold Innis because McLuhan is obsessed with him. He says stuff like, "The present volume to this point [400 pages in] might be regarded as a gloss on a single text of Harold Innis" LOL.
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