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

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

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

Realize, too, the damage media have done to the public conversation, setting us at each other’s throats, pitting red vs. blue and black vs. white, simplifying the debate, erasing nuance, damaging communities, and amplifying the already powerful.

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.

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

“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

“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

I take the counsel of researcher danah boyd, who warned that when we teach our children to be suspicious of everything they see, “we ask students to challenge their sacred cows but don’t give them a new framework through which to make sense of the world; others are often there to do it for us.”