eBook - ePub
The Gutenberg Parenthesis
The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet
- 328 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
About this book
A 2024 CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE
PROSE AWARDS MEDIA AND CULTURAL STUDIES FINALIST 2024
The Gutenberg Parenthesis traces the epoch of print from its fateful beginnings to our digital present – and draws out lessons for the age to come.
The age of print is a grand exception in history. For five centuries it fostered what some call print culture – a worldview shaped by the completeness, permanence, and authority of the printed word. As a technology, print at its birth was as disruptive as the digital migration of today. Now, as the internet ushers us past print culture, journalist Jeff Jarvis offers important lessons from the era we leave behind.
To understand our transition out of the Gutenberg Age, Jarvis first examines the transition into it. Tracking Western industrialized print to its origins, he explores its invention, spread, and evolution, as well as the bureaucracy and censorship that followed. He also reveals how print gave rise to the idea of the mass – mass media, mass market, mass culture, mass politics, and so on – that came to dominate the public sphere.
What can we glean from the captivating, profound, and challenging history of our devotion to print? Could it be that we are returning to a time before mass media, to a society built on conversation, and that we are relearning how to hold that conversation with ourselves? Brimming with broader implications for today's debates over communication, authorship, and ownership, Jarvis' exploration of print on a grand scale is also a complex, compelling history of technology and power.
PROSE AWARDS MEDIA AND CULTURAL STUDIES FINALIST 2024
The Gutenberg Parenthesis traces the epoch of print from its fateful beginnings to our digital present – and draws out lessons for the age to come.
The age of print is a grand exception in history. For five centuries it fostered what some call print culture – a worldview shaped by the completeness, permanence, and authority of the printed word. As a technology, print at its birth was as disruptive as the digital migration of today. Now, as the internet ushers us past print culture, journalist Jeff Jarvis offers important lessons from the era we leave behind.
To understand our transition out of the Gutenberg Age, Jarvis first examines the transition into it. Tracking Western industrialized print to its origins, he explores its invention, spread, and evolution, as well as the bureaucracy and censorship that followed. He also reveals how print gave rise to the idea of the mass – mass media, mass market, mass culture, mass politics, and so on – that came to dominate the public sphere.
What can we glean from the captivating, profound, and challenging history of our devotion to print? Could it be that we are returning to a time before mass media, to a society built on conversation, and that we are relearning how to hold that conversation with ourselves? Brimming with broader implications for today's debates over communication, authorship, and ownership, Jarvis' exploration of print on a grand scale is also a complex, compelling history of technology and power.
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Please note we cannot support devices running on iOS 13 and Android 7 or earlier. Learn more about using the app.
Yes, you can access The Gutenberg Parenthesis by Jeff Jarvis in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Half-Title Page
- Dedication
- Title Page
- Contents
- Part I The Gutenberg Parenthesis
- 1 The Parenthesis
- 2 Print’s Presumptions
- 3 Trepidation
- Part II Inside the Parenthesis
- 4 What Came Before
- 5 How to Print
- 6 Gutenberg
- 7 After the Bible
- 8 Print Spreads
- 9 The Troubles
- 10 Creation with Print
- 11 The Birth of the Newspaper
- 12 Print Evolves: Until 1800
- 13 Aesthetics of Print
- 14 Steam and the Mechanization of Print
- 15 Electricity and the Industrialization of Media
- 16 The Meaning of It All
- Part III Leaving the Parenthesis
- 17 Conversation vs. Content
- 18 Death to the Mass
- 19 Creativity and Control
- 20 Institutional Revolutions
- Afterword: And What of the Book?
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Colophon
- Copyright