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The Gutenberg Parenthesis
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The Gutenberg Parenthesis

The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet

Jeff Jarvis
Bloomsbury, 2023
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Half a millennium ago, Johannes Gutenberg created copies of the Bible on his new printing press in Mainz, Germany. Soon, the Bible and other publications spread across Europe and beyond. As historian Jeff Jarvis reports, this dramatic advance supplanted the role scribes had performed for centuries. The advent of printing with movable type and widespread publication was transformative in the West (China had forms of movable type much earlier). People became literate; books became affordable. Just as the availability of printed material revolutionized Western literacy and education, the digital age marks an equally radical passage worldwide. Print started losing ground when the internet ushered in a new era. The centuries between Gutenberg and Netscape Navigator were, in Jarvis’s term, the Gutenberg parenthesis. You’ve worked within it; are you ready to work after it?

Summary

The print era lasted more than 500 years in the West.

When German metallurgist and tradesman Johannes Gutenberg introduced his printing press in the mid-15th century, he inaugurated the so-called print revolution. Prior to the printing press and the printed book, people transmitted information for millennia using largely the same methods – handwriting and talking. As family members and friends met, they spread information verbally. Theatrical performances, community meetings, and religious rites also conveyed information. Most people were illiterate, and it took scribes a long time to handwrite book manuscripts, which were rare and expensive.

Even in the 15th century, printed books took less time and money to create than handwritten manuscripts. The advent of printed material meant that knowledge could exist in multiple, identical copies. This enabled people to transport almost all forms of knowledge from one place to another with ease. Printed books changed how people thought: Their perceptions became more linear. “The line…became the organizing principle of life,” as media theorist Marshall McLuhan explained.

The gradual decline of the print age and the beginning...

About the Author

Jeff Jarvis is the Leonard Tow Chair in Journalism Innovation as a professor emeritus at the City University of New York’s Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. He also wrote The Web We Weave: Why We Must Reclaim the Internet from Moguls, Misanthropes, and Moral Panic.

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