Are we nearing the end of the “Age of Print”? And, if so, what comes next?

The age of print is of recent birth, in the grand scheme of things. The emphasis on literacy is historically situated in ways we find difficult to recognize. There were not always authors, publishers, editors, newspapers, etc., and we might be coming to the end of this age.  

Printing as a technology has brought with it all sorts of social, political, religious, and cultural effects that we now take for granted–that we know who the authorities are, that grammar is fixed, that spelling must be consistent, that our information must be curated for us. If the age of printing is coming to an end, then all of these are also called into question. If the web is our new technology, then we are just at the beginning of the age. Therefore, we might not be in the best position to understand its potentials and implications. What did print allow and what did it deny? What does the end of print mean for the ways in which we find and digest information about our world? What happens to our ability to come together as communities? What happens to our ability to communicate complex and subtle ideas?

Jeff Jarvis is one of the hosts of This Week in Google on the TwiT podcast network. He is the Leonard Tow Professor of Journalism Emeritus at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. Before joining the academic world, Jeff was a journalist with ink stained hands. Among other things, he was a columnist for the San Francisco Examiner, a TV critic for TV Guide and People magazines, and the founding editor of Entertainment Weekly. He is the author of several books, including What Would Google Do?, Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work, and, most relevant to our conversation today, The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet. He has a forthcoming work, The Web We Weave, as well as a book on magazines. He has been blogging at buzzmachine.com.

In this episode, we discuss the following thinkers/ideas/texts/etc.:

• The “recency effect”
• Jeff Jarvis, The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet (2023)
• Jeff Jarvis, What Would Google Do? (2007)
• Jeff Jarvis, Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live (2011)
• Jeff Jarvis’ podcast This Week in Google
• Jeff Jarvis’ blog BuzzMachine
• Raccoons attacking cybertrucks
• “lager” as a verb
• Problems with the academic publishing timeline
• Peter Donaldson (MIT), James Paradis (MIT) , and Thomas Pettitt (University of Southern Denmark) on “The Gutenberg Parenthesis”
• Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982)
• “second orality”
• Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge UP, 1980)
• Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message (1967)
• The medieval scriptorium
• “Hello, world”
• Ottmar Merganthaler and the Linotype
• Richard Zacks, “The 19th Century Start-Ups That Cost Mark Twain His Fortune” (2016)
• Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Your Head (2017)
• George P. Landow, Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization (2006)
• Ted Nelson, “Here I Stand, at Age 80” (2017)
• Tim Berners-Lee on “remaking” the digital world (2021)
• The World Economic Forum’s “AI Governance Alliance”
• James A. Dewar, “The Information Age and the Printing Press: Looking Backward to See Ahead.” RAND Corporation (1998)
• Jonathan Haidt and Jean M. Twenge, “This is Out Chance to Pull Teenagers Out of the Smartphone Trap” (New York Times, 2021)
• Ashley Crossman, “A Sociological Understanding of Moral Panic” (2019)
• Danah Boyd and Data for Society
• Children’s Internet Protections Act (2001, updated in 2011)
• Kid’s Online Safety Act (KOSA)
• Implications for abortion care nationwide with The Comstock Act
• Tony Rehagan, “Welcome to Post-Truth America” (2020)
• On the crisis of defunding the humanities in higher education
• Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951
• Jonathan Griffin, “Incels: Inside a dark world of online hate” (2021)
• James Carey, “Two Views of Communication: Transmission and Rebuttal” (1985)
• James Carey, Communication as Culture (1988)
• James Carey, Controlling People: The Paradoxical Nature of Being Human (2015)
• C.E. Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” (1948)
• The “Shannon and Weaver Model” in Communications Theory
• Walter Cronkite’s last television sign-off: “And that’s the way it is.”
• Clay Shirky (current Vice-Provost for AI and Education at NYU), Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations (2009)… and also an interview with Shirky on banning technology use in the classroom (2014)
• Steven McGuire, “It too years, but elite colleges are learning the value of institutional neutrality” (2024)
• Daniel Diermeier, “The Need for Institutional Neutrality at Universities” (Forbes, 2023)
• Mark McNeilly, “In Praise of Institutional Neutrality” (2024)
• Peter Wood, “The Illusion of Institutional Neutrality: A Mercifully Short Refresher” (2024)
• History of Harper’s Magazine
• André Brock, Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Media and Communications at Georgia Tech and Advisory Board Member of the Center for Critical Race + Digital Studies
• Meredith Clark, author of We Tried To Tell Y’all (forthcoming, Oxford UP, December 2024)
• Jonathan Flowers, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at American University 
• Charlton McIlwain, Vice-Provost for Faculty Engagement and Development, and Professor of Media, Culture, and Engagement at NYU, and author of Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, from AfroNet to Black Lives Matter (2019)
• Theodor Adorno, Critical Models Interventions and Catchwords (1963)
• Universities tearing down encampments
• Our Season 5, Episode 153 interview with Regina Rini about “Artificial Personhood”
•  “horseshoe theory”