The Gutenberg Parenthesis: Oral Tradition and Digital Technologies

Published: April 13, 2010, midnight

b'Is our emerging digital culture partly a return to practices and ways of thinking that were central to human societies before the advent of the printing press? This question has been posed with increasing force in recent years by anthropologists, folklorists, historians and literary scholars, among them Thomas Pettitt, who has contributed significantly to elaborating and communicating the version of this question named in the title of today\\u2019s forum.\\n\\nThe concept of a \\u201cGutenberg Parenthesis\\u201d \\u2014 formulated by Prof. L. O. Sauerberg of the University of Southern Denmark \\u2014 offers a means of identifying and understanding the period, varying between societies and subcultures, during which the mediation of texts through time and across space was dominated by powerful permutations of letters, print, pages and books. Our current transitional experience toward a post-print media world dominated by digital technology and the internet can be usefully juxtaposed with that of the period \\u2014 Shakespeare\\u2019s \\u2014 when England was making the transition into the parenthesis from a world of scribal transmission and oral performance.\\n\\nMIT professors Peter Donaldson and James Paradis join Thomas Pettitt in a discussion of the value of historical perspectives on our technologizing human present.'