So, I registered for this, despite having read The Awl since the wee numbers; I was tempted to register today by the INDIGENOUS GRASSES. But. It was this issue! The culture of print! Being misunderstood by great thinkers!
I confess to being neither a McLuhan scholar, nor a Wikipedia editor, nevertheless, I suspect that McLuhan is wrong, which would throw cogs in the whole train of thought above. What I am is a print scholar (and maker). Anyway. My evidence of McLuhan's wrongness is that in The Gutenberg Galaxy, though he does refer to and quote William J. Ivins' (curator and founder of the Prints Department at the Met) book, Prints and Visual Communication (published in '53, but based on many earlier lectures), he seems to intentionally ignore Ivins' main, somewhat revolutionary, point. McLuhan posits cultural transformation due to moveable type, and cites Ivins' remarks about same--however, Ivins took care (in the preface, even, where one lays out the basic precepts of one's arguments) to illustrate the fact that most people overlook the more radical (and far earlier) cultural transformation wrought by exactly repeatable visual statements (not text, but image). Said transformation, though informative and invaluable (example: illustrations of poisonous plants being more precise than text descriptions), was also non-linear (example: The Rhinocerous engravings--kind of hypertexty, actually, as an image), and more of a collective spirit than one of ownership.
Yeah. So typography is not equal to "print", internet--got it? Also, text in print existed long before moveable type; it was edited by crafting new blocks to insert into portions of old ones. Thinking Gutenberg was THE print revolution is Western bias, as well. I guess McLuhan has his place, but given that he seemed to ignore pre-existing thought on visuality and information transmission, I would hope more people would question his essential points.
For the record, Walter Benjamin also chaps my hide, what with his hoo-ha about Aura (traditional non-photographic prints are multiple originals, not multiple copies; the multiple is not equal to photography, internet, got it?), and McLuhan and Benjamin almost always show up in the same brains and papers. So I could just be being more hipster than thou about this. I think more folks should read Ivins, instead of, or in supplement to, those two. His book is available for free at the Internet Archive
( http://www.archive.org/details/printsandvisualc009941mbp ).
Now that I am sufficiently mortified by the length and crankiness of my comment, I shall retire to imagine INDIGENOUS GRASSES quietly filling my home. I shall probably also keep away from The Awl for an unspecified length of time due to embarrassment.
On Wikipedia And The Death Of The Expert
So, I registered for this, despite having read The Awl since the wee numbers; I was tempted to register today by the INDIGENOUS GRASSES. But. It was this issue! The culture of print! Being misunderstood by great thinkers!
I confess to being neither a McLuhan scholar, nor a Wikipedia editor, nevertheless, I suspect that McLuhan is wrong, which would throw cogs in the whole train of thought above. What I am is a print scholar (and maker). Anyway. My evidence of McLuhan's wrongness is that in The Gutenberg Galaxy, though he does refer to and quote William J. Ivins' (curator and founder of the Prints Department at the Met) book, Prints and Visual Communication (published in '53, but based on many earlier lectures), he seems to intentionally ignore Ivins' main, somewhat revolutionary, point. McLuhan posits cultural transformation due to moveable type, and cites Ivins' remarks about same--however, Ivins took care (in the preface, even, where one lays out the basic precepts of one's arguments) to illustrate the fact that most people overlook the more radical (and far earlier) cultural transformation wrought by exactly repeatable visual statements (not text, but image). Said transformation, though informative and invaluable (example: illustrations of poisonous plants being more precise than text descriptions), was also non-linear (example: The Rhinocerous engravings--kind of hypertexty, actually, as an image), and more of a collective spirit than one of ownership.
Yeah. So typography is not equal to "print", internet--got it? Also, text in print existed long before moveable type; it was edited by crafting new blocks to insert into portions of old ones. Thinking Gutenberg was THE print revolution is Western bias, as well. I guess McLuhan has his place, but given that he seemed to ignore pre-existing thought on visuality and information transmission, I would hope more people would question his essential points.
For the record, Walter Benjamin also chaps my hide, what with his hoo-ha about Aura (traditional non-photographic prints are multiple originals, not multiple copies; the multiple is not equal to photography, internet, got it?), and McLuhan and Benjamin almost always show up in the same brains and papers. So I could just be being more hipster than thou about this. I think more folks should read Ivins, instead of, or in supplement to, those two. His book is available for free at the Internet Archive
( http://www.archive.org/details/printsandvisualc009941mbp ).
Now that I am sufficiently mortified by the length and crankiness of my comment, I shall retire to imagine INDIGENOUS GRASSES quietly filling my home. I shall probably also keep away from The Awl for an unspecified length of time due to embarrassment.
Oh, also--Wikipedia: it's handy!