by Joe Miller,
Director of Development
One of the unexpected joys of this job is that library patrons occasionally stop by with book recommendations. Sometimes someone will even drop off one of their own books for me.
I was especially thrilled when Neal Krakover left his copy of Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy for me.
I met Neal last fall, when we spent a couple of hours discussing our shared background studying political philosophy while breaking down the set from the Drama Workshop’s annual show at the Opera House.
I hadn’t read The Gutenberg Galaxy, though I am broadly familiar with McLuhan’s work.
McLuhan—a philosopher and media theorist who worked in the middle of the 20th century—is best known for coining the phrase, “the medium is the message.”
McLuhan’s basic insight is that every act of communicating consists of two distinct messages. There’s the content of the communication—the actual concepts being conveyed. And then there’s also the character of the communication—the shape it takes, based upon the medium in which it is transmitted.
The content plus the character make the message.
Consider the humble alphabet. There’s a good argument that it is the basis of Western civilization as we know it.
With just 52 letter symbols, 10 number symbols and 32 special characters, we can communicate every possible thought in the English language! Add a few accent marks, and you can use the same symbols to communicate every possible thought in French, Spanish, German, Italian, Turkish and a hundred plus other languages, too!
That relatively small number of symbols made the moveable type printing press practical. And the printing press, in turn, completely rebooted Western culture.
McLuhan points out that it’s not a coincidence that the Renaissance (mid-1400s), the scientific revolution (early 1500s) and the Enlightenment (late 1600s) came in quick succession following the invention of the printing press in 1440.
Print enables cheap, efficient transmission of knowledge across space and time. Print makes it possible to replicate experiments (the foundation of the scientific method) and to build on innovations (the foundation of engineering).
While The Gutenberg Galaxy is mostly about print, much of McLuhan’s work focuses on electronic communications—not surprising, given that his career largely overlaps the rise of radio, television and film. (McLuhan lived from 1911 to 1980.)
McLuhan’s work is a staple for scholars studying the networks enabled by the internet.
In applying what he calls a “McLuhan absolutist” lens to the medium of social networks, Gordon Brander argues that facts and shared truth don’t exist in a network-based culture.
On Brander’s reading, facts are a product of print. “Books,” he writes, “are permanent, unalterable, and shared, like a fact.”
Social networks, on the other hand, lack any sort of permanence. They live only in the present and exist only to amplify a few basic emotions—ones conveniently represented in the handful of like, laugh, love emojis we use in reacting to posts.
I don’t want Brander to be right. The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously wrote, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”
And that’s not just true because of the printing press and books.
Right?
Only, we do see signs that a shared universe of facts is slipping away.
Nearly every day, I see social media posts claiming that climate change is a hoax (it’s not), that vaccines cause autism (they don’t), that genetically modified crops are bad for you (they aren’t), that the 2020 election was stolen (it wasn’t) and that we’re nearing an irreversible climate catastrophe (we aren’t).
We dismiss evidence that contradicts our beliefs as fake news, as conspiracies perpetrated by scientists and media elites or by greedy corporations.
Is this dissolution of shared truth an inherent feature of the internet? Was the very idea of a shared truth just an artifact of the printing press? Maybe the idea of a shared set of truths is the exception, not the rule. Brander points out that the oral tradition that preceded print didn’t have a shared conception of facts, either.
I find these questions especially fascinating because I have a foot in each world. I did my PhD work on John Stuart Mill, one of the last of the Enlightenment thinkers.
And I wrote a book-length work arguing for a different approach to writing scholarly content for the internet.
Does the very network I help to build pull the rug from under the primacy of logic, reason and facts that forms the bedrock of thinkers like Mill?
I don’t know. But I sure have enjoyed thinking about it this week, as I made my way through The Gutenberg Galaxy.
Thank you for the book, Neal.
And if others out there have a recommendation, stop by the library and let me know. Or drop me a line at joe@pocahontaslibrary.org
