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Either way, there’s some intellectual common ground, both in facts and methodologies, that leads to the hypothesis-thesis-synthesis dialectic of Socrates or Hegel. In the textual Enlightenment world, someone making a good-faith argument musters unique or interesting data, or performs an experiment in the bad-faith case, they cherry-pick data that proves their point. Let’s step back again from our (soon-to-be former) reality to illustrate the past we’re rushing toward. How then does the open debate of democratic societies work in such a post-textual “oral” culture (where the “orality” is not the in-person oral tradition of storytellers and shamans, but an intermediated one of Snapchat stories and viral Facebook videos)? The idea here is that Gutenberg opened a parenthesis of textual, literate society, and Zuckerberg (and others) effectively closed it by promoting atomized experiences online. Given the persistence and ubiquity of digital media, it will be the best-documented period in American history, but nobody will agree on what happened.Īs always, some prophetic academics have seen this coming, titling this new media medievalism “the Gutenberg Parenthesis” (or in Marshall McLuhan’s coinage “the Gutenberg Galaxy”).
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There’ll be no authoritative history that more than one faction will trust a dozen factions will each have their own history. A history-less forgetfulness is the overarching product vision for Snapchat, whose posts-atomized and textless morsels of personal experience-are designed to disappear and never be consulted or searched.įuture historians will be no help in making sense of our era. Could any of us, if pressed, even construct a chronological ordering of Trump media cycles, or would we have only episodic memories of highlights, as we do when trying to reconstruct some long-ago period of life from memory? Twitter’s Moments product is a constant stream of just such transitory and disordered reactions to context-free events. Who thinks now of Cecil the Lion and the villainous dentist who shot him, whose practice was promptly ruined by an online mob? We’re too busy dealing with the third huge Trump scandal this week, which we’ll forget in due course thanks to next week’s school shooting. Our exhausting and constant absorption in a transitory but completely overwhelming media cycle is our own preliterate eternal present.
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What we politely call “fake news”-a formulation that presupposes some antecedent credible truth called “news” that we're now abandoning-is just the tribal folklore of a certain (and usually opposing) tribe. The New York Times and HarperCollins (and dare we say WIRED) of our day are the contemporary remnants of that coping mechanism. The voiceless gained a voice, sparking the violent and centuries-long turmoil of the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and the Thirty Years’ War, the sort of existential fractures we seem to be teetering on the verge of ourselves.īut how did 17th- and 18th-century Europeans manage to muddle through such disruptive change? How did something so potentially dangerous give birth to the Enlightenment and all its trappings of democracy and human rights? That required a centuries-long elaboration of norms around editorship, the protocols of scholarly and journalistic truth, and a publishing industry of gatekeepers. As with blogs and Facebook posts, the printing press meant written thought and communication, and its wide distribution, was no longer the exclusive province of an anointed clergy. Many, including me, have cited parallels between Gutenberg's invention of the printing press and the internet.