Gutenberg galaxy

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The term Gutenberg Galaxy was coined by Marshall McLuhan in his 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy ; it describes a world that is fundamentally shaped by the book as the leading medium :

“Printing tended to change language from a means of perception to a wearable commodity. Printing is not just a technology, it is a natural occurrence or raw material like cotton or wood or the radio itself; and like any raw material, it not only shapes the personal sense relationships, but also the patterns of communal interaction. "

- Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy , 1962

The system of scriptoria was replaced with the invention of the printing press. This meant a fundamental change in the libraries, the theater and the forums. Books, and thus knowledge, were now accessible to a much larger proportion of the people and this increase in available knowledge promoted debate and public opinion-forming. Before, few people were able to read, but access to literature also brought about a change in reading itself. Reading changed from reading aloud to reading quietly, a general literacy began that led to an educational explosion.

In the course of this literacy, thinking changed in addition to reading, and the scientific method prevailed over medieval thinking in images and metaphors. Complex processes were now split up and displayed linearly, in the form of writing. The typographical principles of uniformity, continuity, and linearity overlaid the complex forms of ancient feudal and oral society. The geographical distribution of printed works demanded and promoted the normalization and standardization of the language up to and including the development of national languages. McLuhan speaks of a break-up of the oral tribal organization towards total dominance of the eye.

The Gutenberg Age is also known as the "explosion" period. This means the expansion of the human being into space, but it is still characterized by a generally slow pace, by a delay in reactions to the actions. This delay will only be replaced by the "age of implosion", also known as the " electronic age ".

Discourses of the Gutenberg Galaxy

Contemporary media theorists such as Friedrich Kittler and Norbert Bolz take up this idea and speak of an alphabetical monopoly , for example . Kittler discusses the further development of discourse networks of the modern age based on his study Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 , where he characterizes the Gutenberg galaxy as a "sexually closed control loop".

According to his analyzes, the discourse system of Goethe's time - the writing system 1800 - was characterized by the features

The writing system in 1900 breaks with this system through the development of physiology , psychophysics and psychotechnology . This "overthrow of the discourse system of Goethe's time" enabled the development of mechanical memories for writing , images and sound .

The “three original technical media” of this early days are the phonograph , cinema and typewriter , which first differentiate the sectors of acoustics, optics and writing ( gramophone, film, typewriter , p. 79).

Media genealogy

McLuhan distinguishes four phases in the historical development of the media :

  1. The age before the printing press , which is characterized by orality ( orality ) and written form ( literacy ). A further distinction can be made here between the age of oral tribal culture (see Orality ) and the
  2. Age of the literary manuscript culture (see literacy and scriptography )
  3. The age of Gutenberg , which begins with Gutenberg's invention of printing with movable type in 1450 (see Typographeum );
  4. The age of Marconi , which begins with the invention of wireless telegraphy by Guglielmo Marconi in 1894.

End of the Gutenberg Galaxy

According to McLuhan, the advent of electronic media and the electronic networking of existing societies " into a single global tribe " marked the end of the book age; he prophesies a transformation of the world into an electronically created " global village ".

The sociologist Manuel Castells in his trilogy The Information Age (1996) follows McLuhan's argumentation and connects to the Gutenberg galaxy the McLuhan galaxy dominated by television ; For him, this epoch is characterized by an orientation of the various forms of publication on television: books were increasingly written with the ulterior motive of being able to become television scripts or themed TV characters or topics that were made popular by television. The McLuhan galaxy represents the end of the Gutenberg galaxy and forms the transition to the Internet galaxy , which in turn is largely synonymous with the construct that other authors call the Turing galaxy or the Berners-Lee-Andreessen galaxy, for example .

Contemporary media theorists such as Norbert Bolz assume that we are currently in a phase of transformation between the Gutenberg galaxy and a world that is shaped by a new paradigm; Conceptually, the successor world after the paradigm shift is called the Turing Galaxy , for example , which is shaped by new storage and transmission media , especially the computer . Virtuality and simulation theorists such as Paul Virilio also argue in this direction .

Other approaches tend to see network or rhizome structures as a guiding paradigm ( Félix Guattari / Gilles Deleuze ).

In turn, other media theorists such as Vilém Flusser started the upheaval with the emergence of technical images , especially with the development of photography around 1839.

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