My world, if it could be said to be born about 1455 with the first book set in moveable type, may be said to have come to an end in Mumbai (Bombay) India in April, 2011. That month, the Godrej and Boyce company announced the closing of their manual desktop typewriter factory, the last such in the world.
These are bookmarks for an era, for the end of the Gutenberg Age, the age of print, and its replacement by an age so far without a widely accepted name. Electronic and digital in format, I call it the Visual age.
My writing life began with pens dipped in ink wells. Today I look at visual images on a screen. Only the Qwerty keyboard connects them and stories suggest that may be doomed.
My last book was bought on-line after a short discussion with a friend while sitting in a pub. I clicked two buttons, typed in a name, clicked in one more button, and presto, the e-book was in hand ready to read and discuss with the person opposite.
My childhood self would have been totally bewildered by the above paragraph. On-line? E-book? Near instantaneous purchase and delivery?
Who can doubt that we’re on the cusp of a new age, with undreamed-of possibilities ahead.
At the mini-level, some of them are going to be marvels, such as the increasing ease of access to information in an automated digital format, such as exemplified at the most primitive level by my e-book purchase.
Some are going to be horror shows, as witnessed by the collapse of language and the creation of “stream of consciousness” messaging as substitutes for understandable English and sober second thought in the new contextless electronic means of instant communication – from Facebook to tweeting. This also substitutes entertainment for information and politics.
Unfortunately, much of the future is simply as unknown to us today as the transformative effect of the moveable type printing press was to those present at the birth of the print age.
Did Gutenberg realize that his press’s greatest political and religious influence in the early days would come mainly through pamphleteering? Did he understand the importance to the scientific process of producing identical copies of a book not littered, as preceding script books had been, with scribal errors inevitable to the manual copying of manuscripts by scribes of varying skills and knowledge? Both are unlikely. In short, new technologies can have unintended consequences.
Marshall McLuhan, who understood before most that we were entering a new age — but then proceeded to obscure the point – argued, and I quote Wikipedia here, that “print technology changes our perceptual habits (‘visual homogenizing of experience’), which in turn affects social interactions (‘fosters a mentality that gradually resists all but a…specialist outlook’).”
Wikipedia, incidentally, mirrors the two-faced nature of the coming culture perfectly. Ease of access is matched by editor-controlled quality of information; brevity collapses into simplicity, breadth of reach hides narrowness of choices.
However, one thrust of McLuhan’s deserves emphasis. New technologies, like printing presses and Visual media, “exert a gravitational effect on cognition, which in turn affects social organization.”
Elizabeth Eisenstein made much the same point in a different way in her “The Printing Press as an Agent of Change” a book unfortunately with few companions in its analysis of the power of technology to allow new ways of thinking.
The word “allow” is chosen deliberately. No determinism exists; people will make the choices. The Chinese, for instance, who had Francis Bacon’s three technologies that “changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world” – printing press, explosive powder, and compass — never developed them in a modern sense.
But one element of the changes of ages is most critical, and from my — by definition limited — Gutenberg perspective, it is also the most dangerous.
The Visual world is a passive world; it is a world of acceptance and without imagination. It is the difference between conjuring in one’s own mind what the words on a book page are telling you versus the screen imposing its world upon you, making you accept its construct rather than creating your own.
It is the world of the newspaper and book, “cool” medium where reflection and repeat induction are possible, versus the “hot” medium of texting and television, where the passion of the second is everything, to be caught and lived instantly or missed entirely.
It might well prove also to be the world of the Orwell totalitarian viewscreen, where history becomes ephemeral, re-constructed daily without questioning.
On the bright side, probably the scribes of late 1400s Europe felt much the same way.
