Concept

The Gutenberg Parenthesis

The Gutenberg Parenthesis is the proposition that the print era was a bounded interval in the history of communication rather than its destination.

The proposition is that the five centuries between Gutenberg and the network were an interval rather than a destination. Fixity, authorship, originality, the bounded work, the archive, the correspondence theory of truth as an everyday working assumption — these look like permanent features of human knowledge, and they are better understood as artefacts of a particular technology for making words stay still.

Before the parenthesis opened, knowledge was performed, variable, composite and re-authored at every telling. As it closes, a good deal of that returns: text that flows rather than sits, works without stable editions, authorship distributed to the point of vanishing.

I use the frame for a specific purpose. It supplies the historical baseline against which tertiary orality can be recognised as a genuine third condition rather than a novelty of the present decade.

The term belongs to Lars Ole Sauerberg and Thomas Pettitt, who developed it at the University of Southern Denmark. It is regularly misattributed to Walter Ong, who did not use it, and to Jeff Jarvis, who later wrote a book under the title. I use the concept; I did not coin it.