The Gutenberg Parenthesis

eBook, 328 pages

English language

Published June 28, 2023 by Bloomsbury Academic.

ISBN:: 978-1-5013-9484-3

(1 review)

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 – …

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.

2 editions

xylogx reviewed Gutenberg Parenthesis by Jeff Jarvis

An Interesting Read

3 stars

An interesting premise, that the age of print came with an open parenthesis with the introduction of the printing press and went with a closed parenthesis with the coming of the internet. This approach is powerful since it allows one to draw parallels about how society changed at the dawn of print and how it is changing with the sun-setting of the age of printed media. That said, Jarvis’ writing style is a bit clumsy and he struggles to hold a narrative thread throughout the story, jumping around at times and leaving the reader lost in the wilderness. The book leans a little too heavily on the parenthesis construct, which seems like a missed opportunity because there were some other really interesting bits of research and knowledge that could have stood on their own. While I found it intellectually stimulating, by the end I struggled to maintain attention.