In 1470, Latin grammarian Niccolò Perotti, much offended by a shoddy translation of Pliny, made what is said to have been the first call for censorship of the new technology of print. He beseeched the pope to appoint “some moderately learned man to examine and emend individual formes before printing. The task calls for intelligence, singular erudition, incredible zeal, and the highest vigilance.” In truth, what Perotti sought was not a censor. Instead, he anticipated the need for the institutions of editing and publishing, which would follow to ensure quality in print for half a millennium –until the scale of speech and crush of content today would grow too great for them.
In The Gutenberg Parenthesis, I examine society’s entry into the age of print to better understand so-called print culture and its presumptions in contrast with the age of networks, data, and thinking machines we now enter. Technology is not determinant. History does not repeat itself. Still, Gutenberg’s era holds lessons for us today as we decide what institutions of the past to defend, update, and replace in this new reality.
Elizabeth Eisenstein, a founder of the field of book history, chronicled the countless societal shifts that came with the advent of movable type and print, shifts that had a profound effect on academia and higher education: Scholars no longer had to travel to books; books could come to them. “Once old texts came together within the same study, diverse systems of ideas and special disciplines could be combined,” she wrote. Students could read for themselves as book-learning superseded learning-through-practice in apprenticeship. It took time for print – mistrusted at first due to its unfamiliar provenance – to take on authority through standardization. “Typography arrested linguistic drift, enriched as well as standardized vernaculars, and paved the way for more deliberate purification and codification of all major European languages,” Eisenstein observed – contributing in time to nationalism. Print created a reading public. It made law more “visible and irrevocable” and powered bureaucracies. It led to copyright as well as other means of control: censorship and licensing, not to mention the Vatican’s blacklist, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Print enforced a stronger sense of individuality through solitary writing and reading. As individual authority rose, Eisenstein said, “new forms of personal authorship helped to subvert old concepts of collective authority.” At the highest level, printing was not the cause but was at least a precursor to and perhaps a necessary precondition of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation and their Thirty Years’ War, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment.
What is most surprising to me about Eisenstein’s seminal work, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, is that the discipline of book history barely existed before. “I could not find a single book, or even a sizeable article, which attempted to survey the consequences of the15th-century communications shift,” she said of her first explorations. “Countless standard histories of Western philosophy, religion, and science, of political and economic theory, of historiography, literature or the fine arts pass over the topic entirely.”
We cannot wait centuries to study the internet and the age of data. We must examine them now, not as technologies but as the proper subjects of the humanities: of history, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, political science, ethics, philosophy, and the arts. At its start, print—like the internet today—was understood as a technology. But in time its mechanisms became familiar, taken for granted, and what was more impactful was what was done with the machine. A century and a half after Gutenberg, around 1600, came a tremendous rush of innovation using print: the creation of the modern novel with Cervantes, the essay with Montaigne, a market for printed plays with Shakespeare, and the newspaper. Another century on came a business model for print in copyright: creativity as property, a tradable asset. Not until the 19th century did the technology of print finally evolve alongside other technical advances – with steam-powered presses, stereotyped molds of typeset pages, paper made from abundant wood pulp instead of scarce fabric, and the Linotype, which at last eliminated the job of the typesetter – ushering in mass market and a new advertising industry to support it. Only in the 20th century did print face its first competitors: film and broadcast. The media of today took that long to evolve. All of which is to say that perhaps our own era of change is just beginning. We are only a quarter of a century past the introduction of the commercial browser. It is 1480 in Gutenberg years.
Today, online, we still reckon the future in the analog of the past as magazines and newspapers appear in familiar form online – and their presence on the web is largely banal, busy, and ugly with desperate advertising and clickbait. When might we witness such a rush of invention as came around 1600? Recently, I taught a course with Queens College Professor Douglas Rushkoff called ‘(re)Inventing the Internet’, a pilot for a program I hope to develop in Internet Studies. Our one assignment was to develop a proposal for the future of the net: say, a charter of online rights, a new regulatory regime, a design agenda for accessibility and equity, or inventive business models. I was surprised – but should not have been – to find that our master’s students, born with the internet, had difficulty envisioning an alternative view of the net before or after its centralized, corporate, capitalistic state today. That is all the more reason to teach students the history of both the internet and of print and media: to demonstrate that neither the institutions of print nor the present proprietors of the internet are forever. Our students and theirs in turn will be the ones to reconsider these institutions.
Publishing, mass media, the mass market, the mass itself, copyright, and advertising and its attention economy might be made obsolete as we – like Niccoló Perotti – seek new means to assure and support quality, authority, credibility, and creativity online. Evermore, publishers conceive of creativity as content, that which fills media, as today editors-in-chief are being replaced by “chief content officers.” But in The Gutenberg Parenthesis, I contend that content is a conceit of print’s age, increasingly commodified by abundant conversation online and soon by the infinite production of AI’s large language models. At the same time, the work of the author, made less solitary a century ago in film and television, now becomes yet more collaborative thanks to tools such as TikTok. Alphabetic text is augmented by the new symbology of emoji and memes. Communities too long not represented or served by old, white, male, moneyed mass media at last make homes online where they may connect, converse, share daily joys and sorrows, and launch movements, such as #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo.
Does the gradual closing of Gutenberg’s parenthesis mark as well the other side of an educational parenthesis, driving us to leave behind the lecture hall born of print and expectations of standardization and scale that came with industrialization? How might we free students from the bounds of a passing age – while urging them to preserve its value – and equip them to take control of their new tools to create inventions as bold as Montaigne’s and Cervantes’ genres, as groundbreaking as Shakespeare’s First Folio, as inventive as the first newspapers and magazines?
Jeff Jarvis is the author of The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet. He holds the Leonard Tow Chair in Journalism Innovation and directs the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, USA. He was creator and founding managing editor of Entertainment Weekly, TV critic for TV Guide and People, Sunday editor of the New York Daily News, a media columnist for The Guardian, and president and creative director of Advance.net. He blogs at Buzzmachine.com and co-hosts the podcast This Week in Google.
