The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet

Economically, mass media seek scale—that is, one product to serve as many people as possible; thus, deviance is expensive.

We are engaged in a ceaseless process of renegotiating our norms in a shifting reality. With more people at that negotiating table, there will be more conflict as some will demand to be heard, some will try to manipulate others, and some will claim to be canceled or censored when they may be challenged or educated. The internet thus far has been bu

By definition, mass media abhor diversity. Mass media as an institution imposes one image of the public on itself, which is fashioned, God-like, in the image of those who control media. The institution rejects that which does not conform as deviant: noise.

“Embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence, and rules of contradiction. In aesthetics, I believe the name given to this theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia. In the parlance of the theater, it

It is necessarily elitist in description: dismissive, paternalistic, insulting, sometimes racist. The mass, said Carey, “is a metaphor for the unknowable and invisible. We cannot see the mass. Crowds can be seen; but the mass is the crowd in its metaphysical aspect—the sum of all possible crowds.… It turns other people into a conglomerate. It denie

Democracy is designed for disagreement; the question is how effectively we debate and deliberate.

Consider the flow of a story today. The net turns the narrative form inside-out as web sites, blogs, and social-media feeds start in the middle, with the latest in tales and conversations on top of streams that may never end, whose beginnings cannot necessarily be found. Perhaps that is a truer representation of reality: life as messy process rathe

“We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”33

Too little has been invested in the more fruitful task, to build the institutions needed to help us sift through this grand abundance of speech, to find that and whom are worth hearing, to enable listening and learning.