The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man

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The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man

by H. Marshall McLuhan, H. Marshall McLuhan

4.11 of 5 stars 4.11 · rating details · 338 ratings · 29 reviews

Since its first appearance in 1962, the impact of The Gutenberg Galaxy has been felt around the world. It gave us the concept of the global village; that phrase has now been translated, along with the rest of the book, into twelve languages, from Japanese to Serbo-Croat. It helped establish Marshall McLuhan as the original 'media guru.' More than 200,000 copies are in prin...more

Paperback, 294 pages

Published March 1st 1962 by University of Toronto Press (first published 1962)

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Apr 14, 2013 Chiara rated it 4 of 5 stars

Basically what McLuhan argues in his book is that the invention and diffusion of Gutenberg's printing process marked the passage from a balanced kind of linguistic communication - where each sense was taken account of - to a tiranny of its visual component. Mobile characters, with their easy and quick reproducing capability, therefore, inadvertently brought us to cultural homogeneity and repetitivness.
This essay was first published in the early 60's and I found it an interesting and stimulating...more

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Jun 24, 2010 kingshearte marked it as unfinished · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, word-nerd-books

I didn't finish this book. It was enough of a slog that I figured I'd muddle my way through it, but intersperse other books along the way, but no. I suddenly came to the realization that I had no idea what I was reading. I'd made it almost 100 pages, and all I had retained from those pages was that he starts the book discussing King Lear, but I don't know why, and that people from literary cultures apparently see differently than people from non-literary cultures. That's all. It was one of those...more I didn't finish this book. It was enough of a slog that I figured I'd muddle my way through it, but intersperse other books along the way, but no. I suddenly came to the realization that I had no idea what I was reading. I'd made it almost 100 pages, and all I had retained from those pages was that he starts the book discussing King Lear, but I don't know why, and that people from literary cultures apparently see differently than people from non-literary cultures. That's all. It was one of those books where you understand all the words, but ultimately have no idea what the sentence they form actually says.

It doesn't help that McLuhan made extensive use of quotations from his source material. And when I say extensive I mean both in number and in size. In many cases, he quoted several paragraphs at a time. And since most of his sources are from research papers and the like, their intended audience is experts, and possibly interested and educated amateurs. They are not directed at the average layman, and by quoting so extensively instead of synthesizing, McLuhan did not make his book very accessible. I'm not normally one to advocate dumbing things down to the lowest common denominator, but your audience does need to be taken into consideration when writing a book that, as far as I know, was intended for general consumption.

Consider the following sentence: "Of course, it could be argued that a lyric disposition to applaud the audile-tactile gropings of child and cave art betoken a naive and uncritical obsession with the unconscious modes of an electric or simultaneous culture." (83) It's probably even less clear with no context, but I honestly have no idea what that sentence means. That was what really made me realize that if nothing I'm reading means anything to me, there's simply no point in continuing.

One thing I did find interesting is that, contrary to what Nicholas Ostler said about how writing systems have never changed speech patterns, McLuhan states directly, "writing affects speech directly, not only in its accidence and syntax, but also its enunciation and social uses." (48)

Anyway, I tried this, and found that I barely understood anything in it, so I'm leaving it. Sorry, Mr. McLuhan. I'm sure your book is as genius as everyone says it is. But it's too smart for me. (less)

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Apr 26, 2013 Debbie Morrison is currently reading it

Shelves: current-non_fiction

I'm enjoying this book a great deal so far. A challenging read, but worth it. Written by a Canadian scholar and published by the University of Toronto Press.

Book Description: "Since its first appearance in 1962, the impact of The Gutenberg Galaxy has been felt around the world. It gave us the concept of the global village; that phrase has now been translated, along with the rest of the book, into twelve languages, from Japanese to Serbo-Croat. It helped establish Marshall McLuhan as the original...more

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Jul 20, 2012 Josh rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: information-theory, nonfiction

Very insightful look at how information technologies shape all other aspects of culture. I didn't follow everything in the book, but I did get a lot of ideas. I originally got interested in this book when the World Wide Web was beginning. Although McLuhan wrote in 1960, what he saw about the electronic age beginning with the telegraph, radio, film, and TV has continued and intensified with the Internet. This book helped me see a lot of my assumptions about the way the world is based on print cul...more

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Oct 15, 2011 Timothy rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: information-studies, philosophy-theory

This was a fun and inspiring book, and there were points at which I would have considered just giving it five stars despite some of its obvious flaws and the fact that it is quite dated. I really like the way that McLuhan constructs his narrative by quoting other writers and commenting on the quoted material. I found this to be wonderfully transparent and to give a sense of the relative weight of each author in relation to McLuhan's thought. It sometimes felt like I was reading the most enjoyabl...more

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Aug 25, 2012 Stephen Wong rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Clearly a work of illumination and like a polished multi-faceted crystal something you can turn around in your hand to try to see more of its brilliance and its light, the reader will derive a sense of the measure of the ratio that has been lost/superseded by what McLuhan refers to as "visual stress" in the outering by the homogenizing technology of print of one of the senses, that is, the gaining of fixed perspective for the price of losing the collective conscious. It exemplifies its own outer...more Clearly a work of illumination and like a polished multi-faceted crystal something you can turn around in your hand to try to see more of its brilliance and its light, the reader will derive a sense of the measure of the ratio that has been lost/superseded by what McLuhan refers to as "visual stress" in the outering by the homogenizing technology of print of one of the senses, that is, the gaining of fixed perspective for the price of losing the collective conscious. It exemplifies its own outering, of course, by this same book's printed form. But it makes an attempt to defy its own formal straight-jacket with the structural experiment of the mosaic.

There are fundamental insights in the book which are going to demand a lifetime of understanding, including considerations of formal causality; the nature of literature, manuscript and type; seizing the unconscious that was created by the loss of awareness; the rise of nationalism and the split between economics and politics; theories of communication and the imagination; etc etc.

Because of the work's provenance pre-60s of the last century, it is easy to situate its cultural milieu to just before the psychedelic experiments of the youth generation of the time, where organization man (with reference to the work of Peter Drucker) was under protest in the counter-culture that followed, some aspects of which are still with us today, certainly in the West and in various forms manifesting in the tapping of a collective consciousness. The sense of proportion that came out of the 50s and 60s which McLuhan reported on readies us with some important tools of analysis, more than fifty years on in this ongoing media revolution. The hidden subversions in McLuhan, and what he helped to encourage, are going to stay with us longer in the malleability of our proceeding within the Gutenberg galaxy, as though at last we are given the choice of a pill to swallow and with which to wake up from some manifold, as the fish in DFW's water and as Neo in The Matrix.(less)

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Jan 02, 2013 Hans-Peter Merz marked it as abandoned

MML S. 141

"An age in rapid transition is one which exists on the frontier between two cultures and between conflicting technologies. Every moment of its consciousness is an act of translation of each of these cultures into the other."

Die Gutenbergdruckereien haben zweihundert Jahre lang kaum etwas anderes veroeffentlicht als die mittelalterlichen Handschriften. Originaere neue Literatur wurde erst ab dem 18. Jahrhundert geschaffen. Die Leserschaft vorher fragte nach den alten Texten in handliche...more

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Nov 08, 2008 Moments of Kabir marked it as to-read

Shelves: missing-knowledge

This is not "my review" but it is related to what people can learn and get from the book....

The global village
In the early 1960s, McLuhan wrote that the visual, individualistic print culture would soon be brought to an end by what he called "electronic interdependence": when electronic media replace visual culture with aural/oral culture. In this new age, humankind will move from individualism and fragmentation to a collective identity, with a "tribal base." McLuhan's coinage for this new social...more This is not "my review" but it is related to what people can learn and get from the book....

The global village
In the early 1960s, McLuhan wrote that the visual, individualistic print culture would soon be brought to an end by what he called "electronic interdependence": when electronic media replace visual culture with aural/oral culture. In this new age, humankind will move from individualism and fragmentation to a collective identity, with a "tribal base." McLuhan's coinage for this new social organization is the global village, a term which has predominantly negative connotations in The Gutenberg Galaxy (a fact lost on its later popularizers):
Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. [...] Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. [...] In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture.[31]
Note again McLuhan's stress on the importance of awareness of a medium's cognitive effects. He argues that, if we are not vigilant to the effects of media's influence, the global village has the potential to become a place where totalitarianism and terror rule.
Key to McLuhan's argument is the idea that technology has no per se moral bent -- it is a tool that profoundly shapes an individual's and, by extension, a society's self-conception and realization:
Is it not obvious that there are always enough moral problems without also taking a moral stand on technological grounds? [...] Print is the extreme phase of alphabet culture that detribalizes or decollectivizes man in the first instance. Print raises the visual features of alphabet to highest intensity of definition. Thus print carries the individuating power of the phonetic alphabet much further than manuscript culture could ever do. Print is the technology of individualism. If men decided to modify this visual technology by an electric technology, individualism would also be modified. To raise a moral complaint about this is like cussing a buzz-saw for lopping off fingers. "But", someone says, "we didn't know it would happen." Yet even witlessness is not a moral issue. It is a problem, but not a moral problem; and it would be nice to clear away some of the moral fogs that surround our technologies. It would be good for morality.[32]
The moral valence of technology's effects on cognition is, for McLuhan, a matter of perspective. For instance, McLuhan contrasts the considerable alarm and revulsion that the growing quantity of books aroused in the latter seventeenth century with the modern concern for the "end of the book." If there can be no universal moral sentence passed on technology, McLuhan believes that "there can only be disaster arising from unawareness of the causalities and effects inherent in our technologies."
Though the World Wide Web was invented thirty years after The Gutenberg Galaxy was published, McLuhan may have coined and certainly popularized the usage of the term "surfing" to refer to rapid, irregular and multidirectional movement through a heterogeneous body of documents or knowledge, e.g., statements like "Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave." Paul Levinson's 1999 book Digital McLuhan explores the ways that McLuhan's work can be better understood through the lens of the digital revolution.[33] Bill Stewart's Living Internet[34] describes how McLuhan's "insights made the concept of a global village, interconnected by an electronic nervous system, part of our popular culture well before it actually happened."
McLuhan frequently quoted Walter Ong's Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (1958), which evidently had prompted McLuhan to write The Gutenberg Galaxy. Ong wrote a highly favorable review of this new book in America.[35] However, Ong later tempered his praise, by describing McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy as "a racy survey, indifferent to some scholarly detail, but uniquely valuable in suggesting the sweep and depth of the cultural and psychological changes entailed in the passage from illiteracy to print and beyond."[36] McLuhan himself said of the book, "I'm not concerned to get any kudos out of [The Gutenberg Galaxy]. It seems to me a book that somebody should have written a century ago. I wish somebody else had written it. It will be a useful prelude to the rewrite of Understanding Media [the 1960 NAEB report] that I'm doing now."[citation needed]
McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy won Canada's highest literary award, the Governor-General's Award for Non-Fiction, in 1962. The chairman of the selection committee was McLuhan's colleague at the University of Toronto and oftentime intellectual sparring partner, Northrop Frye.[37]
(less)

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Oct 26, 2010 Wayne rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Fascinating study on the impact of the printed word. The author does wander a bit too close to the podium at times, but his deep scholarship opened my eyes. In particular I learned a lot about the fallacy of "resacralizing" our lives (Mircea Eliade's term) and what such an action would entail, that it would require a return to a world lived by all the senses rather than the one that has overcome the West, the world of vision. While it is odd to be reading a book about the negative impact of read...more

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May 10, 2011 Thadd rated it 5 of 5 stars

An astonishing book, a dry one, about the effects of the Gutenberg press, a device that shocked the church, brought about new religions, started wars and changed the human race. In different sections, the Greeks complain that more books will make readers lazy. Readers won't have to memorize a book because the presence of more books will make that unnecessary. In other sections, the author talks about the fact that Balinese plays, not books, teach the Balinese what is right and wrong.

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Mar 18, 2013 Eddy Allen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: arts-and-historical

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Apr 09, 2009 Andrew rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Read all the way through this a couple of times and just had it sitting around and picked it up to read random spots. Lots of great ideas about antique perspectives. Got me into don quixote. Its really impossible to talk about McLuhan without sounding trite. If you don't catch on right away just by every McLuhan book and listen to every McLuhan recording on ubuweb and watch Videodrome and eventually you'll be sucked in by his ideas and dialectic and you'll never be the same.

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Aug 08, 2012 Jeff rated it 5 of 5 stars

As with all of his works, this one, as well as "Understanding Media, The Extensions of Man", had a huge impact on me. They're not the easiest books to read, but they will give you a new appreciation of just how important experience retrieval is; which is to say the major means of how we store and retrieve experience over time has a tremendous impact on how we think of, and see, the world around us.

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Mar 05, 2011 Joe rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: philosophy

Yes, at first glance this book is an incoherent mess. The basic syntactical unit of the book is the two page micro essay and there are no clear chapter/subject divisions. McLuhan also introduces a number of idiosyncratic terms which he doesn't bother to define. But at around 100 pages things start to come together and McLuhan's commentary on the implications of movable type and the book as commodity(and the role of the written word in the articulation of nations, sophisticated economies, globali...more

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Dec 08, 2009 Jennifer rated it 3 of 5 stars

Either completely brilliant or total hogwash, I'm not qualified to say. Sometimes McLuhan sounds like he's simply wandered off on some flight of fancy, and his tendency to being in Shakespeare, Milton, or Blake as proof of his assertions ("Here in King Lear you can see how Shakespeare was discussing the ways in which print liquifies our sense of geographical and personal boundaries!") is baffling at times. But for all the fluidity and scatteredness of his style, there's no doubting he's expressi...more

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May 11, 2013 Steen Christiansen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: academics, embodiment, media, language

Classic study of the influence of media technology on human sensorium, specifically the printed word. A must-read.

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May 13, 2009 Boozebabyexperience rated it 5 of 5 stars

it's really funny to me, but the computer spellcheck doesn't recognized "Gutenberg" as a properly spelled word.

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Jan 22, 2012 Debbi marked it as to-read

Shelves: non-fiction, reference, sci-fi-fantasy

Recommended follow-up to "The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains".

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Dec 06, 2011 Rodrigo rated it 3 of 5 stars

Y pensar que aunque no lo incluye, diagnostica el futuro de los medios no impresos.

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Feb 04, 2013 Josh rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: thinking, research-media

Very good, and very dense. This is one to process slowly.

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Mar 06, 2011 Dan Trachtman rated it 2 of 5 stars

read half. Potentially good ideas buried in theory speak

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Apr 10, 2008 Andrew added it

Shelves: theeeeeeory

This is my first book-length foray into the world of Marshall McLuhan, and I feel very torn about this book. While it seems reductionist at points (setting up a number of not-necessarily-true binary oppositions), it seems to pretty much "get it right." I agree with his main statement that we are all "typographic people," and I think this is a good lead-in to further studies in media.

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Dec 05, 2011 Adam Sprague rated it 1 of 5 stars

I got this book to use as a main source for a research project I was working on this semester. Little did I realize, this book does not even have a list of searchable keywords or glossary. Given that the book is organized in what can only be described as a total mess, this book was useless to me.

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Feb 27, 2012 Andrew rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: linguistics

Kind of choppy in how each short chapter carries on the theme of the book. McLuhan cites plenty of examples along the course of history of writing and print to etch out a strong case for what he is most famous for discussing: the technology in which we encode and send messages as a society influences us and our civilization as well.

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Jan 11, 2008 Geoff Cain added it

This is one of those books that has had a deep and lasting influence on me. It informs much of my work in education technology.

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Jun 19, 2011 Andrew Bates is currently reading it · review of another edition

I'm forging through this when on break from work. It's kind of dense, but it's the step up from the Coupland biography I wanted.

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Dec 15, 2011 Paolo rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Un libro capace di spiegarti la nascita della società massmediologica e l'architettura gotica. Irrinunciabile.

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Dec 22, 2007 Peter rated it 4 of 5 stars

The book that really helped launch modern media studies in many ways.

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Feb 10, 2013 Zdenko Klun is currently reading it

Masterpiece.

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Dec 10, 2010 metralindol rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

a colossal placer

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“A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and
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“Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy. [p. 32]” — 6 people liked it

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