The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Human Typography is a 1962 book by Marshall McLuhan, in which the author analyzes the effects of mass media, especially the printing press, on European culture and human consciousness. It popularized the term global village , which refers to the idea that mass communication allows a mindset like a village to apply to the whole world; and Gutenberg Galaxy , which we may consider today to refer to bodies of recorded works of art and human knowledge, especially books.
McLuhan studied the emergence of what he called Gutenberg Man, a subject generated by a change of consciousness caused by the appearance of a printed book. Regarding the axiom, "Media is the message," McLuhan argues that technology is not just an invention employed by people but is a means by which people rediscover. The discovery of the movable type is a decisive moment in the change of culture in which all the senses take part of the general interaction to the visual tyranny. He also argues that the development of the printing press leads to the creation of nationalism, dualism, the dominance of rationalism, the automation of scientific research, the uniformity and standardization of culture and the alienation of individuals.
The movable type, with its ability to reproduce text accurately and quickly, extends the impetus towards homogeneity and repetition that has become evident in the emergence of the art of perspective and urgency from a single "point of view". He writes:
- the world of visual perspective is one integrated and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the variety of words spoken. So language is the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg's technology, and the first to bounce off in the era of electricity.
Video The Gutenberg Galaxy
Format buku - a mosaik
This book is unusual in its design. McLuhan describes it as something that "develops a mosaic or a field approach to its problems". The mosaic image built from data and quotes will reveal "causal operations in history".
This book consists of five parts:
- Prolog ,
- Gutenberg Galaxy ,
- Galaxy Reconfigured ,
- Bibliography Index ,
- Glossses Index Chapter .
The main section of the book, part 2, "The Gutenberg Galaxy", consists of 107 short "chapters", many of which consist of only three, two, or even one page. The large collection of these little chapters matches the mosaic image.
Apparently, McLuhan also has some ideas on how to search for books. Marshall McLuhan, guru of The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), recommends that the browser switch to page 69 of any book and read it. If you like the page, buy the book. "Such real arbitrariness fits with selecting a certain part (or part) of a mosaic and deciding whether you like it.Of course the McLuhan test can be applied to the Gutenberg Galaxy itself, doing so will reveal further insight into the purpose of his own book.
Prolog
McLuhan declared his book to be "The Singer of Tales companion by Albert B. Lord." The latter work follows from Homer's study of Milman Parry turning to the "study of the Yugoslave epic" to prove that Homer's poems are oral compositions.
Maps The Gutenberg Galaxy
Four historical period
This book can also be considered as a way of describing four historical epochs:
- Oral ethnic culture
- Script culture
- Gutenberg Galaxy
- Electronic age
To break between the time periods in each case the occurrence of new media is responsible, handwriting ending the oral phase, printing and electricity revolutionize culture and society afterwards.
Given the "handwritten" hint that terminates the "oral phase" one expects to "print" to end the manuscript phase and "vibrate" to end the Gutenberg era. The oddity of using "electrifying" is entirely appropriate in the context of McLuhan 1962. The Internet did not exist at the time.
McLuhan himself stated that the last part of his book may play a major role as the first part:
The last part of this book, "The Galaxy Reconfigured," deals with the clash of electrical and mechanical technology, or prints, and readers can find it as the best prologue.
Oral cultures culture
Oral tradition is not dead. At school or at home or on the street, where children are taught to learn by heart, to memorize, children's songs or poetry or songs, then they can be said to participate in oral traditions. The same thing often happens to children belonging to religious groups who are taught to learn to say their prayers. In other words, childhood is one of the human ages (in the Shakespeare sense) and is essentially oral ethnic culture. The transition from oral culture occurs when the child is taught to read and write. Then the child enters the cultural world of the manuscript.
McLuhan identifies James Joyce's Finnegans Wake as a key that unlocks something of the nature of oral culture. "
Of great importance to the Oral Culture is the art of memory.
Village
In commenting on the Soviet Union at the time, McLuhan put "advertising and community homework" on par with them so far "both care about access to the media and about the results." More remarkably, he asserted that "Soviet attention to the media of results is reasonable for oral societies where interdependence is the result of instant interaction of cause and effect in total structure, such as the character of the village, or since the electric medium, character of a global village. "
Script culture
The culture of manuscripts (literally handwriting) is often referred to by McLuhan as a scribal culture.
Medieval lighting, gloss, and sculpture are aspects of the art of memory, the center of the scribal culture.
Associated with this age is the Art of memory (in Latin Ars Memoriae).
Gutenberg Galaxy
Finnegans Wake: Joyce's Finnegans Wake (like Shakespeare's King Lear) is one of McLuhan's most widely used textbooks for weaving together the various strands of his argument.
Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce establishes the Tower of Babel as the Sleeping Tower, the assumption tower without a second thought, or what Bacon calls the government of the Idols.
Move type
The episodic and often rambling histories take the readers of pre-alphabetical human beings into the electronic age. According to McLuhan, the discovery of this type of move is greatly accelerated, intensified, and ultimately enables the cultural and cognitive changes that have taken place since the invention and application of the alphabet, in which McLuhan means phonemic orthography. (McLuhan is careful to distinguish the phonetic alphabet from logographic/logogramic writing systems, such as hieroglyphs or ideograms.)
The print culture, delivered by the Gutenberg press in the mid-fifteenth century, brings about the dominance of visual culture over aural/verbal. Quoting with the observation approval on the printed word nature of Print and Visual Communications by William Ivins, McLuhan commented:
In this section [Ivins] not only notes an increase in lineal, sequential, but, even more importantly, visual habits that homogenize the experience of print culture, and the degradation of hearing and other sensual complexities into the background. [...] The technology and social effects of typography encourage us to distance ourselves from recording interactions and, as it were, "formal" causality, both in our inner and external lives. Print is based on the separation of static functions and fosters a mentality that gradually rejects anything but a separating and sifting or specialist view.
The main concept of the McLuhan argument (later described in Medium is Massage ) is that new technologies (such as the alphabet, printing, and even speech itself) exert gravity effects on cognition, which in turn affect social organization: changing our perceptual habits ("visual homogenizing experiences"), which in turn affect social interactions ("cultivate a mentality that gradually rejects all but... special prospects"). According to McLuhan, the advent of printing technology contributes and allows most of the important trends in the modern period in the Western world: individualism, democracy, Protestantism, capitalism and nationalism. For McLuhan, this trend all resonates with the principle of print technology "the segmentation of actions and functions and the principle of visual quantification."
Electronic age
Global village
In the early 1960s, McLuhan wrote that the visual, individualistic print culture would soon be terminated by what he called "electronic interdependence": when electronic media would replace the visual culture with aural/verbal culture. In this new age, humans will move from individualism and fragmentation to collective identity, to the "tribal base". McLuhan's coins for this new social organization are global village .
The term is sometimes depicted as having a negative connotation in Gutenberg Galaxy, but McLuhan himself is interested in exploring effects, not making value judgments:
Rather than tend toward the vast Alexandrian library, the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as a childish piece of science fiction. And when our senses are out, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless we are aware of this dynamic, we will soon move into a panicked phase of fear, precisely in accordance with the small world of tribal drumming, total interdependence, and superimposed coexistence. [...] Terror is a normal state of every oral society, because in it everything affects everything all the time. [...] In our long struggle to recover for the Western world a unity of sensitivity and our thoughts and feelings are no longer prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we are prepared for the fragmentation of the human soul by the print culture.
The key to McLuhan's argument is the notion that technology does not have per se moral bending - it is a very individual shaping tool and, by extension, self-concept and realization of society:
Is it not clear that there is always enough moral issues without also taking a moral position on the basis of technology? [...] Print is an extreme phase of the alphabetical culture that determines or separates humans in the first instance. Print enhances the visual features of the alphabet to the highest intensity of definitions. Thus print brings the individual power of the phonetic alphabet further from the culture of the text that could ever be done. Print is a technology of individualism. If men decide to modify this visual technology with electrical technology, individualism will also be modified. To file a moral complaint about this is like cursing the latch to take off a finger. "But", someone said, "we did not know it would happen." But even superficiality is not a moral issue. It's a problem, but not a moral issue; and it's a good idea to clean up some of the moral fog that surrounds our technology. That's good for morality.
The moral validity of the effects of technology on cognition is, for McLuhan, a matter of perspective. For example, McLuhan contrasted the alarm and great disgust that more and more books were raised in the last 17th century with modern attention to "the end of the book." If there is no universal moral punishment inherited in technology, McLuhan believes that "there is only a catastrophe arising from the unconsciousness of causality and the inherent effect on our technology."
Although the World Wide Web was created 30 years after the The Gutenberg Galaxy was published, McLuhan may have created and of course popularized the use of the term "surfing" to refer to rapid, irregular and multi-directional movement through heterogeneous. body documents or knowledge, for example, statements such as "Heidegger surf-board alongside electronic waves as a triumph when Descartes rides mechanical waves." Paul Levinson 1999 book Digital McLuhan explores ways that McLuhan's work can be better understood through the lens of the digital revolution. Later, Bill Stewart's 2007 website "Living Internet" explains how "McLuhan insights create a global village concept, interconnected by the electronic nervous system, part of our popular culture long before it actually happened."
McLuhan often cites Walter Ong's Ramus, Method, and Decay of Dialogue (1958), which has prompted McLuhan to write The Gutenberg Galaxy . Ong wrote a very favorable review of this new book on America . However, Ong later outraged his praise, by describing McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy as "an obscene survey, indifferent to some scientific details, but uniquely valuable in showing the sweep and depth of cultural and psychological changes contained in part of illiterate to print and so on. "McLuhan himself says of the book," I do not care to get the praise of [Gutenberg Galaxy].It seems to me a book that should be written a century ago.I hope someone else has written it. a useful start for rewriting Understanding the Media [NAEB 1960 report] that I'm doing right now. "
McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy won Canada's highest literature award, Governor-General Award for Non-Fiction, in 1962. The selection committee chairman is a McLuhan colleague at the University of Toronto and an intellectual sparring partner, Northrop Frye.
See also
- Media ecology
- Technology technician
Notes and references
Reading links
- McLuhan, Marshall (1962). The Gutenberg Galaxy: typography gentleman . Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press. p.Ã, 293. ISBNÃ, 978-0-8020-6041-9.
- McLuhan, Marshall; Quentin Fiore; Jerome Agel (1967). The medium is massage, stock inventory . New York: Ginko Press. ISBN 978-1-58423-070-0.
- Joyce, James (1964) [1939]. Finnegans Wake (third edition). London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-21735-9.
External links
- University of Toronto, Marshall McLuhan's Program in Culture and Technology {2008-08-07}
- Isabel Morisse and Uwe Lehman, Marshall McLuhan Project {2008-08-07}
- Isabel Morisse and Uwe Lehman, Marshall McLuhan Project, Philosophy, Gutenberg Galaxy , 4 historical times {2008-08-07}
- About the Library of Congress {2008-08-07}
- John Sutherland, "Do not hesitate to explore", The Guardian , Saturday 12 August 2006 {2008-08-08}
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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