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

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 bring to the net a long, unbroken history of racism, misogyny, mistrust, and fear. The net did not suddenly teach us to hate. Turn off the internet tomorrow and the hate will still burn.

“From an educational point of view,” said boyd, “this means building the capacity to truly hear and embrace someone else’s perspective and teaching people to understand another’s views while holding their own.”94

I propose to shift our focus away from the conversation we do not want to the conversation we do want, a conversation that finally includes those who had been excluded from mass media’s version of public discourse.

McLuhan’s questions were generally more interesting than his answers.” And that was the point of him.

David Weinberger, the smartest person in the room is the room itself: the network that connects everyone and their knowledge.3

Determinism robs the public of its agency, its choices, its responsibility, credit, and blame. Another form of the deterministic debate comes from those who wish to turn the causality around, contending that print did not cause literacy but instead that literacy caused print—implying that once the necessary conditions and societal and market demand

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.

Consider, then, the idea that the public conversation is just beginning to recover from half a millennium of creeping control by institutions, subjugation by the powerful, manipulation by malign actors, scarcity of voices, professionalization, and commercialization.