The Gutenberg Parenthesis: Oral Tradition and Digital Technologies. MIT World video
Posted by Celia Walter | 17 Jan, 2012...Thomas Pettitt makes the deliberately provocative case for a Gutenberg “Parenthesis” -- a period marked by the reign of the printing press and isolated from the largely oral culture that came before, and the digitally shaped culture emerging today. Pettitt, who finds an upside in society’s return to “something that resembles the past...
He finds “fundamental similarities between human kind’s oldest and pervasive media condition” (that of oral tradition), and the post-Gutenberg phenomenon of digital texts (not to mention sound and image). The entire history of media, Pettitt suggests, has been merely “interrupted by the age of print.”...
Responses from: Peter Donaldson and James Paradis
Link to video: http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/775 Run time: 1 hour 55 minutes and 10 seconds