The Gutenberg Galaxy

Read as part of my (extended) week of McLuhan in the first week of march. Didn't finish this yet tho.

Bibliographic Deets
McLuhan, Marshall 1962. The Gutenberg Galaxy. University of Toronto Press, Toronto.

Overview

 * By far the most "academic" of McLuhan's writings, The Gutenberg Galaxy puts forward the claim that the print culture, marked by typography and identical text copying, changed Western man's paradigms of more than books. Written in the "mosiac" style, McLuhan moves quickly between points, generally citing literary texts for evidence of cognitive shifts in Western culture (i.e. from Shakespeare to Joyce). In need of deep later reading (summer?) this is McLuhan at his most controlled if not inspiring.

Book

 * The one I got from the Cambridge PPSIS library was a real beauty. Paperback first edition. With a clipping of an article about McLuhan in the 1966 New York Times.



Theory
From a page before the prologue:


 * "The Gutenberg Galaxy develops a mosaic or field approach to its problems. Such a mosaic image of numerous data and quotations in evidence offers the only practical means of revealing causal operations in history. The alternative would be to offer a series of views of fixed relationships in pictorial space. Thus the galaxy or constellation of events upon which the present study concentrates is itself a mosaic of perpetually interacting forms that have undergone kaleidoscopic transformation- particularly in our own time."


 * "Any technology tends to create a new human environment. Script and papyrus created the social environment we think in connection with the empires of the ancient world... Technological environments are not merely passive containers of people but are active processes that reshape people and other technologies alike."


 * "In our time the sudden shift from the mechanical technology of the wheel to the technology of electronic circuitry have represents one of the major shifts of all historical time"


 * And he says nations were created by print, but won't survive electronic circuits...

Content
To be revisited.

Part of At Cambridge where McLuhan studied at Tit Hall.