The Gutenberg Parenthesis — The Age of Print and its Lessons for the Age of the Internet
by Jeff Jarvis 
Bloomsbury Academic, £20

JEFF JARVIS, Tow chair in journalism innovation at New York City University, tackles a fascinating subject: the development of printing in what he designates as the “Gutenberg era.”

He argues that history can be usefully divided into the pre-Gutenberg era, the Gutenberg era and the post-Gutenberg era, in which we are now living.

However, he, like most Western historians, ignores the fact that China developed the concept of moveable type 400 years before Gutenberg and produced the first printed book, although it was indeed the latter who turned printing into a viable commercial enterprise, which led to the transformation of Western societies.

In the pre-Gutenberg era there was no printed material and, in western Europe at least, almost all written texts were created by scribes attached to the Roman Catholic church which had a complete monopoly over the distribution of knowledge and information in written form. In the Far and Middle East, the situation was rather different. 

Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1440 came at an opportune moment, so that when Luther presented his translation of the New Testament in 1522, it could be printed and distributed widely. Arguably, this led directly to the destruction of the Catholic church’s monopoly on knowledge. 

Jarvis’s book offers little new in terms of our historical knowledge of the development of printing and its impact on human development, but it is insightful for those less familiar with this period.

He also makes rather a heavy meal of it, interrupting the narrative throughout with quotes from all and sundry which add little or nothing to his thesis.

He argues that the post-Gutenberg era we are now entering — the electronic age — is taking us into a very different world by creating new forms of communication.

He stresses, however, that we cannot do away with the past. Printing in the form of books will not be superseded or replaced although newspapers probably will be. Print and text will live on in the net age.

“The gradual closing of the Gutenberg Parenthesis grants us the opportunity to ask questions and discern lessons from the past,” he asserts.

In the past, conversation was commodified as media content; community and identity were forsaken amid the industrialised media’s contrivance of the mass.

Now, he says, we can speak as individuals to join with others in communities of our own devising.

Print is about power, about who may speak and who might hear. In the internet age speaking is easier and listening harder.

There was also a certain authority invested in print; many believed what they read to be the truth, but “print’s institutions,” Jarvis says, “cannot cope with the abundant speech and information of the day.” 

On the internet there is no authoritative voice, simply competing narratives.

The worldwide web’s inventor, Tim Berners Lee, famously said: “The web should empower humanity by launching transformative programmes that build local capacity to leverage the web as a medium for positive change.”

Although the web has opened up communications and access to information for everyone with access to a computer, and has introduced a superficial equality among all the voices, it has been increasingly hijacked by powerful service providers like Zuckerberg, Musk and Bezos whose only interest is raking in huge profits, and not providing a service to humanity.

Jarvis doesn’t really deal with the crunch issue of ownership in the world of the internet but resignedly says that “there will always be bad actors who exploit freedom of expression.” 

Attempts to censor or control: “is inevitably futile,” he says, “as the church in Rome finally had to learn. It is better to encourage, enable and support good speech, that is informed, productive, unique, useful, artful.” 

That is a lofty liberal viewpoint, but without tackling the ownership issue and successfully combatting the misuse of the internet by states and other powerful interests, those aims will remain utopian dreams.