The 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. 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.
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?”
Jarvis takes the reader on a detailed trawl through the history of print, beginning with the Gutenberg Bible, the earliest book produced using movable type in Europe. Less than a century later, Martin Luther published his Ninety-five Theses and changed the course of world history. 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”.
Then came electricity, the telegraph, and eventually word processing and offset printing, which heralded a new era of “printing by contact, not by force. Photocomposition, xerography, and postscript eliminated … the materiality of the text.” It’s a fairly dry and technical account, but there are some fun titbits along the way. A segment on typography pioneer John Baskerville features a marvellous line from his biographer, Simon Garfield, who quipped that Baskerville himself “proved to be a movable type” when his mausoleum in Birmingham was raided during the 1791 Priestly riots and moved in 1828 due to the expanding city.
The latter section of the book, in which Jarvis turns his attention to the future, is more essayistic, engaging with thinkers such as Marshall McLuhan, Elizabeth Eisenstein and Hannah Arendt. He notes: “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. Jarvis, who was born in 1954 and quaintly calls the internet “the net”, is discombobulated: “I see a rug being pulled out from under our understanding of the world: a crisis of cognition.” 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.
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.”
“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.” It’s a refreshingly sanguine take, although the notion of governments and tech industries working together in pursuit of such noble aims feels, perhaps, a little wishful.
• The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet by Jeff Jarvis is published by Bloomsbury (£18). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
