Gutenberg, Avatars of the Word, and The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace

Berglund Authority Level 3

Review by Jeffrey Barlow <barlowj@pacificu.edu>
Editor, Interface

Man, John. Gutenberg. How One Man Remade the World with Words. John Wiley and Sons, New York: 2002.

O'Donnell, James J. Avatars of the Word. Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass: 1998.

Wertheim, Margaret. The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace. A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. W.W.Norton & Company, New York: 1999.

For those of us interested in the Internet it usually seems that nothing is more important in a book than that it be recent. If while browsing we are caught by a catchy title but see that the book was published sometime ago, as were two of the books reviewed here (1998 and 1999) our tendency is to put them aside. How could they be anything but terribly outdated as quickly as events move in cyberspace? Yesterday's really big thing (push technology, for example) is tomorrow's dot com crash.

But there is some advantage in looking backward to see where we are going in the development of the Internet. Whereas the Internet itself is definitely new, it is not the first revolutionary development in media or communications. Each of these three books has something useful to tell us about previous such revolutions, and much can be learned about our own future from them.

The oldest of the three, as well as the one set farthest back in the past of communications is James O'Donnell's Avatars of the Word. O'Donnell's subject is the transition from papyrus rolls to the codex, or hand-copied book produced by scribes. This occurred in Latin Late Antiquity (300-600 A.D.). This may seem to many to be a relatively unimportant transition as both forms were essentially hand copies, only the "stuff" being written upon changed in form.

However, the implications of this change were vast. One measure of the change is that few of the scrolls themselves survive and none of the libraries in which they were collected. This is because scrolls were long and cumbersome, difficult to store, almost impossible to index, and very difficult to access other than linearly—by "scrolling" through them. But books could be shelved, indexed, have page numbers and concordances. And books, of course, could be printed.

O'Donnell's academic field is Classical Studies, but he was Vice-Provost for Information Systems and Computing at the University of Pennsylvania at the writing of this book. He draws upon his deep understanding of previous transitions in communications to illuminate our current one. He moves easily from discussions of the remote past to apt comparisons with current conditions.

For those alarmed about the revolutionary transformations created by the Internet, the general lesson of this text is something like: "Be calm, we have been through all of this before and reading and scholarship will survive."

The second work reviewed here, John Man's Gutenberg, takes up quite naturally where O'Donnell's work largely leaves off, with the development of printing. Man, too, has frequent recourse to comparisons with the impact of the Internet, and points out that, except for very few specialists, the only authoritative copy of the original Gutenberg Bible that can be accessed freely is available on the Internet < http://www.humi.keio.ac.jp/treasures/incunabula/B42/ > But his book is really a social history of Gutenberg's time and a history of the development of printing. While Man points out the many points at which printing may well have developed, both in Europe and in Asia, he identifies Gutenberg as:

... that rarity: a man seized by an idea, obsessed by it, imprinted by it, who also has the technical skill, business acumen and sheer dogged year-after-year grit to make it real. (Man 52)

We learn further from Man's book that much is yet to be understood about the development of printing: there is not even agreement as to how the basic process initially was accomplished.

While it was Gutenberg's printing of the bible that has come to symbolize the impact of printing, in fact there were earlier works printed by him. The first was probably the Ars Grammatica, a Latin textbook published about 1450. (Man 147).

Printing, we learn from Man, developed over a period of hundreds of years. But once Gutenberg had made the process profitable, it spread rapidly. From Gutenberg's one press in c. 1450, Europe had, by 1480, 122.

John Man's Gutenberg is a very worthwhile work. From it we learn about the technological history of printing, of the development of paper and typefaces, of the socio-political environment that both facilitated printing and the world that was subsequently created by printing. We come to understand Gutenberg, as well as many who were in a sense created by the printing press, such as Martin Luther. But above all we see that when the time for ideas has come, they are unstoppable and will develop with a rapidity that surprises all observers.

The last of these three books, Margaret Wertheim's The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, follows nicely in time after Gutenberg. Its subject is the Renaissance, one of the results of the development of the printing press. Wertheim, too, has much to say about the development of the Internet, based upon earlier historical precedent. Her subject initially seems extremely abstract: the relationship between human ability to conceive of space and our view of mankind itself. (Wertheim 37). Taking as her intellectual canvas the development of pictorial art during the Renaissance, Wertheim argues that our changing conception of space, whether the medieval Christian heaven, or the utopian dreams of a fully democratic cyberspace, all reflect our understanding of space itself.

The revolution affecting the Renaissance subjects of Wertheim's inquiry was not technological, like the development of the book or of printing, but conceptual: the realization that the earth was not the center of the solar system as Ptolemaic astronomy had it, but the sun itself, as Copernicus demonstrated. This, with related conceptual changes, had the effect of locating mankind in real space; angels no longer had a celestial home and man, not God, became the center of human thought. A result of this change was that Renaissance painters introduced a viewer-centered perspective into their art that, in turn, had the effect of assisting later scientists in visualizing space (Wertheim 105). This, Wertheim argues, was key to later scientific development.

As do O'Donnell and Man, Wertheim draws upon her understanding of one field, in this case Renaissance art, to better explain to us the many ways in which we are reacting to our own contemporary revolution, the development of the Internet, as did our intellectual forbearers react to their own eras of great change.

Any one of these three books is well worth reading for itself. But taken together, they permit us to draw upon the lessons of three important historical periods and the human intellectual reaction to their revolutionary developments. Taken together, they help us to better understand our own era and the challenges presented by the Internet.

Review article by
Jeffrey Barlow,
Editor, Interface