Schools, universities and training departments took shape in the age of mass printing initiated by Guttenberg and others in the Sixteenth Century CE. Jeff Jarvis, In The Gutenberg Parenthesis (2023), argues that this development opened a parenthesis (or bracket) which closed with the rapid spread of internet technologies in or around the year 2000. We are now in a post-text, perhaps post-literate age, which in many respects looks more like what preceded the parenthesis.
The phrase, The Gutenberg Parenthesis was coined by Lars Ole Sauerberg at the University of Southern Denmark and the idea was developed by Thomas Pettitt. It argues that the age of print — roughly 1600 to 2000 — was an interruption in the normal run of human communication.
Great Minds has been on this ground before: two episodes in May 2024 covered the invention of writing, and literacy and orality. This is a sequel, which addresses the impact on learning of low-cost publishing without gatekeepers, social media and AI. If the bracket really has closed, the consequence is not a curriculum change: it’s structural.
In this episode:
- What you would actually see in a medieval university
- Chaucer, Dante and Petrarch: authorship before print
- The riot of forms — broadside ballads, pamphlets, corantos, newspapers, the essay, the novel, etc.
- The arrival of silent reading
- Post-literate or post-print? The reading statistics, and the middle-class moral panic
- Why text-based assessment is the wrong test for a world of doing
- Is an LLM the most Gutenbergian object ever built? Derrida, tokens and decoders
Links and resources:
- Jeff Jarvis — The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023)
- Walter Ong — Orality and Literacy; and his doctoral work on Ramus
- John Amos Comenius — Orbis Sensualium Pictus (1658)
- Michel de Montaigne — Essais (1580) · Miguel de Cervantes — Don Quixote (1605)
- George Thomason — the Thomason Tracts, British Library
- David Goodhart — Head Hand Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century (Allen Lane, 2020)
- Donald Clark — Learning Experience Design, second edition
- Donald Clark — AI and Productivity (Kogan Page)
- Previously on Great Minds on Learning: the two Scribes episodes, May 2024 — the invention of writing, and literacy and orality
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