Gutenberg Parenthesis

Determination of the predominantly print era that is bookended by orality on one side and present digital communication on the other, emphasizing the impact, and possibly the closure of print culture on human knowledge and society
Hannah Armour 2026-05-22

Explication

The Gutenberg Parenthesis is a historical model which argues digital technology has facilitated a return to oral culture, following a period dominated by print culture heralded by the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg around 1440. Introduced by Lars Ole Sauerberg in 2007 and popularised by Thomas Pettitt in the same year, the term frames print culture as a temporary ‘parenthesis’ or an anomaly to the immediacy of oral communication. It suggests that the technological advances of the electronic era allow for digital culture to mimic the immediacy of orality, as “knowledge is again passed along freely, link by link, click by click, remixed and remade along the way” (Jarvis 4). 

In his use of the punctuated phrase “parenthesis”, Sauerberg alludes to the closing and opening of open communication and transfer of knowledge. With the invention of the printing press, information became private, closed, and singularly authored. On the other side, digitization has reopened information, promoting it as an ongoing process. The concept develops upon Walter Ong’s notion of ‘secondary orality’, introduced in his 1982 book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. In it, he argues this secondary orality is influenced by electronic technology like “telephone, radio, television and the various kind of sound tape” but is “essentially a more deliberate and self-conscious orality, based permanently on the use of writing and print, which are essential for the manufacture and operation of the equipment and for its use as well” (Ong 133). Ong argues that, like primary orality, secondary orality “has generated a strong group sense, for listening to spoken words forms hearers into a group, a true audience” (Ibid). In this return to a communal listening experience, Ong refers to Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), in which McLuhan argues “the new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village” (31). Sauerberg’s model builds upon secondary orality, arguing it marks a homecoming to an oral culture, in turn seeing print culture as a historical aside and an anomaly in human communication. 

The model enables the contextualising of this re-opening within the greater history of communication, providing a method of better understanding the electronic age and its re-introduction of oral culture.

See Also

• Born Digital - Media creation specifically for digital formats, utilizing the capabilities and features of electronic devices and software from their inception, rather than being digitized after creation
• Cybertext - Print or digital texts that require active participation from the reader not just to interpret the meaning of the text but also to navigate through it, for example by choosing alternative paths or entering data that alters the output
• Hyperreading - Form of non-linear reading enabled by digital texts, characterized by clicking on hyperlinks, skimming, and scanning, allowing readers to quickly gather information from multiple sources
• Platform Studies - Academic field that examines the underlying computer systems and technologies that support digital media and literature, focusing on their impact on creative practices and cultural expressions
• Platformization - Increasing influence of digital platforms in organizing social, economic, and cultural activities, shaping how digital narratives are created, distributed, and consumed
• Post-digital - Mindset or aesthetic that critiques the ubiquity of digital technology and culture, often by blending digital and analog practices in art and literature

Works Referenced

Jarvis, Jeff. The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and its Lessons for the Age of the Internet. Bloomsbury, 2023. 

McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. University of Toronto Press. 1962.

Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Routledge, 2005. 

Pettitt, Thomas. “Before the Gutenberg Parenthesis: Elizabethan-American Compatibilities.” Lecture, April 2007. Accessed online: http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit5/papers/pettitt_plenary_gutenberg.pdf 

 ---. “The Privacy Parenthesis: Gutenberg, Homo Clausus, and the Networked Self.” Lecture, April 2013. Accessed online: http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit8/papers/TomPettitt%20Paper.pdf

Further Reading

Armstrong, Stuart. Smarter Than Us: The Rise of Machine Intelligence. Machine Intelligence Research Institute, 2014. 

Borgman, Christine. From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure. MIT Press, 2000. 

Briggs, Asa, and Peter Burke. Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet. Polity, 2010. 

Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. W.W. Norton & Company, 2010. 

Cordon-Garcia, JoseAntonio, et al. “Towards a New Conception of Books and Reading: The Gutenberg Parenthesis.” In Social Reading: Platforms, Applications, Clouds, and Tags. Chandos Publishing, 2013, pp. 25–43. 

Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. MIT Press, 1992. 

Cressy, David. Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England. Cambridge, 1980. 

Hartley, John. “After Ongism: The Evolution of Networked Intelligence.” In Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Routledge, 2005, pp. 205–221. 

Jucker, Andreas S. “Mass Media Communication at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century: Dimensions of Change.” Journal of Historical Pragmatics, vol. 4, no. 1, 2003, pp. 129–148. 

Kernan, Alvin. Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print. Princeton University Press, 1987. 

Levinson, Paul. The Soft Edge: A Natural History and Future of the Information Revolution. Routledge, 1997. 

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McGraw-Hill. 1964. 

Naughton, John._ From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: Disruptive Innovation in the Age of the Internet_. Quercus, 2011. 

Rettberg, Jill Walker. “Blogs, Literacies, and the Collapse of Private and Public.” Leonardo Electronic Archive, vol. 16, nos. 2–3, 2007, p. 8. 

Robins, Kevin, and Frank Webster. Times of the Technoculture: From the Information Society to the Virtual Life. Routledge, 1999. 

Rose, Jonathan. “Rereading the English Common Reader: A Preface to a History of Audiences.” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 53, no. 1, 1992, pp. 47–70. 

Sawday, Jonathan, and Neil Rhodes, editors. The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print. Routledge, 2000. 

Shillingsburg, Peter. From Gutenberg to Google: Electronic Representations of Literary Texts. Cambridge University Press, 2006. 

Standage, Tom. The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s Online Pioneers. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998. 

Standage, Tom. Writing on the Wall: Social Media - The First 2,000 Years. Bloomsbury, 2013.

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