The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet

Society is relearning how to hold a conversation with itself. After more than 500 years, we are well out of practice. Consensus holds that the public conversation today is in shambles: nasty, brutish, uninformed, overwhelming, and loud—a waste of bits, pixels, and breath. Misinformation, disinformation, harassment, and hate are far too prevalent, t

For half a millennium, the mediators of media—editors, publishers, producers—controlled the public conversation. Now we may break free of their gatekeeping, agendas, and scarcities—while at the same time risking the loss of the value these institutions have brought in recommending quality, certifying fact, and supporting creativity. What must we cr

Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which humans communicate than by the content of the communication.”26 “Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.”27

I propose to shift our focus away from the conversation we do not want to the conversation we do want, a conversation that finally includes those who had been excluded from mass media’s version of public discourse.

By definition, mass media abhor diversity. Mass media as an institution imposes one image of the public on itself, which is fashioned, God-like, in the image of those who control media. The institution rejects that which does not conform as deviant: noise.

Since the rise of Trumpists, Brexiteers, and populists around the world, huge resources have been poured into hiring tens of thousands of content moderators, writing machine-learning algorithms, passing laws, and building regulatory bureaucracies to rid the internet, if not the world, of lies and idiocy, fake news and disinformation. What a fool’s

McLuhan’s questions were generally more interesting than his answers.” And that was the point of him.

David Weinberger, the smartest person in the room is the room itself: the network that connects everyone and their knowledge.3

Print, its culture and economy, gave birth to the concept of content: that writing, ideas, and creativity are commodities to fill a product, a publication, which can be sold. Print led us to the notion of creativity as asset, to the law of copyright and the doctrine of intellectual property, building a fence around the commons that was conversation