The End of Gutenberg

The quincentenary of Gutenberg's earliest publications, those of which we are certain, occurred in the midst of the television revolution of the 1950s and was accompanied by the commercialization of computing technology. We know from the studies of Walter Ong, and others, that literacy had already begun to change in the preceding decades, under the influence of radio and talking pictures. The printing press itself had done much to change the nature of literacy in its early centuries. It facilitated, though did not cause, the spread of silent reading, of standardized spelling and punctuation, mass literacy, and greatly expanded the descriptive power of illustrations, maps, and diagrams. In the early years of electronic media, the changes perhaps had less effect on reading habits, but provided both alternatives and competitors, and possibly changing some aspects of the way our brains dealt with written and visual information. 

Still, the world we knew in the last century had plenty of space for books as we had known them for hundreds of years. If, by the 1960s, we were beginning to conceptualize tablet-like devices for reading and writing, we still tended to think of them as pretty well rooted in the world of print. What we actually got was something a lot more complex. Think about Star Trek for a moment. They had computers, or specifically they had huge computers that were coterminous with starships and building complexes, they had some sort of tablets (PADDs) which just seem to be digital clipboards in the original series, but seem more adaptable in TNG, they had Tricorders, which seem to have had a lot of memory (based on what Spock was able to recover from his in City on the Edge of Forever), and they had Communicators. 

What they did not have was a single, unified device. Roddenberry and company simply could not conceptualize a device with more computing power than any machine that existed in the 1960s, that could fit in the palm of the hand, display any type of media, have built-in sensors and cameras, could be connected and communicate basically anywhere, and be cheap enough for almost anyone to afford. They continued to fail in this regard in the 1980s, but then so did the more advanced cyberpunk writers. William Gibson is humbled by the fact that he failed to anticipate wireless and cellular. He assumes students who study his early writings today will think that the need to be plugged in was a deliberate plot device. 

When we reach the next centenary of Gutenberg's invention, which is still a few decades away, we cannot anticipate what books will be. We truly do not know whether paper books will survive, recent trends indicate they might be alive and well for decades to come, or what kinds of other devices we might have. Will we sit and read with our glasses or contact lenses (in an odd visual parallel to people walking down the street with nearly invisible earbuds talking and gesticulating to thin air), or perhaps we will have implants that allow us to bypass the eyes all together. 

I really have no clue, but we can be sure that the changing technologies of reading will lead to more changes, more evolution of our minds, how we balance visual, auditory, and linguistic realms of knowing (not forgetting the tactile, and perhaps even involving taste, smell, and even proprioception) to allow us to experience the world differently. How we consume media, and the kinds of media we consume, has a lot to do with how we perceive the world, and what kinds of constraints are placed on our cognitive abilities. 

We have co-evolved with the written word for about 5000 years. Successive kinds of writing and media have colonized our brains and our minds. Just as language shaped us over millions of years, writing has shaped us for  fifty centuries. It became more than the exteriorization of memory that Plato had Socrates fear. It became the exteriorization of imagination, of logic, and of emotion. It is arguable that peoples using alphabets, abugidas, abjads, syllabaries, and logographic systems all produce different mental worlds, and represent a great deal of the differences we see in the world between major blocks of culture. We are only just beginning to understand how writing and reading have affected us as a species. Now we are having to learn to comprehend a world where writing and all other forms of communication are running together. We do not know what it will do to us. We do not have any idea where it will lead, but then who could have predicted where moveable type, or phonographs, paintings, photographs, maps, prints, movies, or any of the other communication technologies would change us. What is certain is that we are encountering the very end of Gutenberg's epoch. 

I will hazard a few predictions. Neuroscientists will see changes in the organization of the synapses and distribution of white and gray matter in the brain as our means of reading and consuming media change. Religious interpretations will change a great deal as holy books move beyond being stand-alone texts and are perceived in different relations to one another and through more and more media. That could lead to a backlash and a greater fundamentalism, to greater religious understanding, new religious movements, or, more likely, all three. Politics, policy, and law will be unable to keep up. Our current ideas of intellectual property and privacy will be radically changed, as the political and legal world struggles to cope. This will create dynamic tensions that may server to both stifle and encourage creativity. And just as the modern state was transformed as more and more men and women learned to read and write, and then had access to cheap media, so will the shape of the post-modern state be molded and carved into new forms.

The end of Gutenberg is not then the end of the world, nor of a given culture, but it is a major part of the path of our evolution.