Marshall McLuhan
The Gutenberg Galaxy

Outline of this Guide

1. Overview
2. Readings
3. Mcluhan's Style 
4. The Transition from Scribal to Typographic Culture
5. Mass Information Technology, and Applied/Segregated Knowledge
6. Questions
7. Bibliography

Overview

• Marshall Herbert McLuhan (1911-1980) Canadian professor of English.
• Noted lecturer and pop icon, most famous for the aphorism "the medium is the message."
• Explored the ways in which the printing press, and subsequently, electronic media, have changed society.

Readings

• The Gutenberg Galaxy (pp. 11-264)
• The Galaxy Reconfigured (pp. 265-279)

Mcluhan's Style 

• Mcluhan was very much an oral person, who liked to lecture and appear in interviews. The style of The Gutenburg galaxy is broken down into small chunks, much like magazine articles with headlines.

The Transition from Scribal to Typographic Culture

• Mcluhan analyzes many of the same cultural shifts from orality to literary that Ong did. Mcluhan, however, is more interested in the typographic side of the equation. He also writes from within the tradition of print literature about the tradition (whereas Ong wrote primarily about orality from outside the tradition, or in other words in print).
• The particular transition that Mcluhan analyzes at length is the shift from scribal to typographic technology. He reviews the many ways that scribal concepts of literature persisted into the age of print, and equates this to the way that the term "horseless carriage" was applied to the automobile.
• In a surprising turn, Mcluhan sees the printing press as the technology of the individual, in that it "detribalizes" or "decollectivizes" man.

Mass Information Technology, and Applied/Segregated Knowledge

• Mcluhan points out that printed books were probably the first items manufactered through "mass-production." Books more than anything else began the transition of society into an age of mass commodities.
• John Dewey is compared with Peter Ramus, in that both men rode new waves of educational technology, Ramus the wave of typography, and Dewey the wave of new electronic telecommunications. Both men struggled to get their contemporaries to accept the new technologies as effective and reliable teaching tools.
• The shift from an aural to a visual culture enabled applied knowledge in Mcluhan's view. Echoing Ong's analysis of Peter Ramus and his followers, Mcluhan describes how portable handbooks for instruction and textbooks enabled the merchant class for the first time to widely achieve an education and apply knowledge in commercial ways.
• The distancing effects of print had the effect of siloing information, segregating it into disciplinary niches that Mcluhan feels are actually illusionary.

Questions

• As both Ong and Mcluhan show, the transitional period from one information technology (oral to writing, scribal to typographic) features confusion of the role of the new technology with role of the previous one, and attempts to use the new technology inappropriately in the same manner as the previous technology. As we hear news of new technology for electronic ink (see citation in bibliography), the question arises as to whether or not we have even begun to understand what electronic technology is good for. If (as seems almost certain) we trying to impose inappropriate educational models from the typographic age on computers, should we instead try to consciously ignore the old models and go in radical new directions? What can we infer from the experience of the middle ages in deploying textbooks regarding the role of CBT (computer based training) in education today? Should we instead try to use computers in ways that seem subversive to established academic models?

Bibliography

Benedetti, Paul, and Nancy DeHart (Eds.)  Forward Through the Rearview Mirror: 
   Reflections on and by Marshall McLuhan.  Cambridge, Massachusetts : MIT Press, 1997.

Comiskey, Barrett, et al.  "An Electrophoretic Ink for All-Printed Reflective 
   Electronic Displays,"  Nature  16-Jul-1998, Vol. 394, # 6690, pp. 253-255.

Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and    
   Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe. Volumes I and II.  
   Cambridge University Press, 1980.

Marchand, Philip.  Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger.
   New York : Ticknor & Fields, 1989.

Stearn, Gerald Emanuel (ed.)  McLuhan, Hot & Cool.  New York : Dial Press, 1967.

Theall, Donald F.  The Medium is the Rear View Mirror: Understanding McLuhan.
   Montreal : McGill-Queen's University Press, 1971.