Gutenberg Parenthesis

Description

"Is our emerging digital culture partly a return to practices and ways of thinking that were central to human societies before the advent of the printing press? This question has been posed with increasing force in recent years by anthropologists, folklorists, historians and literary scholars, among them Thomas Pettitt.

The concept of a "Gutenberg Parenthesis"--formulated by Prof. L. O. Sauerberg of the University of Southern Denmark--offers a means of identifying and understanding the period, varying between societies and subcultures, during which the mediation of texts through time and across space was dominated by powerful permutations of letters, print, pages and books. Our current transitional experience toward a post-print media world dominated by digital technology and the internet can be usefully juxtaposed with that of the period--Shakespeare's--when England was making the transition into the parenthesis from a world of scribal transmission and oral performance." (http://www.buzzmachine.com/2011/06/17/the-storyteller-strikes-back/)