The Death of the Book

An excerpt from the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Most talk of the death of the book in that era was enthusiastically in favor.  In 1962, Marshall McLuhan had published an almost spookily prescient book titled The Gutenberg Galaxy.  It was, among other things, an extended critique of the culture of print.  Technology shapes our consciousness, McLuhan argued, and the development of the printed book in the mid-fifteenth century had inaugurated a reorientation of human experience towards the visual, the regimented, the uniform and instrumental.  Language, which had once been a wild, uncontainable affair between the oral and aural (think whisper, shout, and song, the playful market-square dynamism of dialect and argot) was silenced, flattened, squeezed into lines evenly arrayed across the rectilinear space between the margins.  Spellings were standardized, vernaculars frozen into national languages policed by strict academies.  Print, for McLuhan, was the driver behind all that we now recognize as modern.  Through it nationalisms arose, and other horrors: capitalism, individualism, alienation.  Time itself was emptied out—reduced, like the words on each page, to a linear sequence of homogeneous moments.  Print had stolen something.  Books had shrunk us.  They had "denuded" conscious life.  "All experience is segmented and must be processed sequentially," McLuhan mourned.  "Rich experience eludes the wretched mesh or sieve of our attention."

: Continue reading :

email

Post to Twitter Post to Facebook

Posted: April 22nd, 2011
at 8:45pm by mnp


Categories: et cetera

Comments: No comments



 

Leave a Reply