Gutenberg Parenthesis
About This Book
Jarvis follows the printed word from its earliest days to the digital present, and uses that history to draw out lessons for what comes next. For roughly five centuries, print shaped a way of thinking built on the ideas that written material is complete, lasting and authoritative. When print first appeared, it unsettled the established order as much as the digital shift is doing today, and the internet is now carrying us beyond the mindset print created. To understand the exit, Jarvis begins with the entrance. He traces industrial printing in the West to its origins and looks at how the technology was invented, how it spread and how it changed over time, along with the bureaucracy and censorship that accompanied it. He also shows how print gave rise to the idea of the mass, which underpins mass media, the mass market, mass culture and mass politics, and which came to dominate public life. Jarvis asks what the long history of our attachment to print can teach us. Might we be returning to a world that existed before mass media, one organized around conversation, and relearning how to hold that conversation with ourselves? The book's broader consequences bear on current debates about communication, authorship and ownership. Written on a grand scale, it is both a history of technology and a study of power.
ISBN: 9781501394829
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