The Gutenberg Parenthesis

Traces the epoch of print from its controversial beginnings to our digital present—and draws out lessons for the age to come.

Spanning more than five centuries, the age of print was a grand exception in history. Before print, knowledge and memory were collective and collaborative, with little sense of ownership over information. Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of movable type in the fifteenth century gave rise to a new worldview, shaped according to the completeness, permanence, materiality, and authority of the printed word. Today, as the internet ushers us away from 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 explores the transition into it. Tracking Western print to its origins, he explores its invention, spread, and evolution, as well as the bureaucracy and censorship that followed. Further, he reveals how print gave rise of the idea of the mass—mass media, mass market, mass culture, mass politics, and so on—that came to dominate the public sphere.

Brimming with broader implications for today’s debates over communication, censorship, authorship, ownership, and more, Jarvis’s exploration of print on a grand scale is also a complex, compelling history of technology and power.

Jeff Jarvis is the Leonard Tow Professor of Journalism Innovation and director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York. He is the creator and founding editor of Entertainment Weekly and his books include Geeks Bearing Gifts and What Would Google Do?, among others.