The Gutenberg Galaxy
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The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (University of Toronto Press) is a 1962 book by Marshall McLuhan.
This book popularised the terms global village and Gutenberg Galaxy. McLuhan analysed the effects of various communication media and techniques on European culture and human consciousness.
McLuhan studies the emergence of what he calls Gutenberg Man, the subject produced by the change of consciousness wrought by the advent of the printed book. Apropos of his axiom, "The medium is the message," McLuhan argues that technologies are not simply inventions which people employ but are the means by which people are re-invented. The invention of movable type was the decisive moment in the change from a culture in which all the senses partook of a common interplay to a tyranny of the visual. He also argued that the development of the printing press led to the creation of nationalism, dualism, domination of rationalism, automatisation of scientific research, uniformation and standardisation of culture and alienation of individuals.
Movable type, with its ability to reproduce texts accurately and swiftly, extended the drive toward homogeneity and repeatability already in evidence in the emergence of perspectival art and the exigencies of the single "point of view". He writes:
- the world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age.(136)
Contents |
[edit] The format of the book—a mosaic
The book is unusual in its design. McLuhan described it as one which "develops a mosaic or field approach to its problems" (first line of the unnamed preface on "page 0"). The mosaic image to be constructed from data and quotations would then reveal "causal operations in history" (page 0).
The book consists of a Prologue (page 1), The Gutenberg Galaxy proper (pages 11-263), The Galaxy Reconfigured (pages 265-79), a Bibliographic Index (pages 281-9), and an Index of Chapter Glosses (pages 291-4).
The main body of the book consists of 107 short chapters, many of which are of one, two, or even three pages in length. Such a large collection of small chapters does fit the picture of a mosaic.
[edit] Hypothetical size of the Gutenberg Galaxy
It is possible to estimate a hypothetical size of the Gutenberg Galaxy. In 2004/2005, the British Library claimed it held more than 97 million items, including 13.3 million monographs [1]; the Library of Congress, approximately 130 million items, including "more than 29 million books" [2].
Given an estimated average book size of 6 MB for a purely textual book containing 1 million words, the Library of Congress in this case would take up 174,000,000,000,000 bytes (174 × 1012 bytes = 174,000 GB = 174 TB) of text. Assuming the same book size of the monographs in the British Library (13.3 million), the result is 79,800,000,000,000 bytes or 79.8 TB. Ignoring duplicate holdings (probably high, in the order of 25–50%), the combined size of the Gutenberg Galaxy by this method would be around 0.25 PB, or around 1,000 hard disks of 250 GB each.
One contention of these calculations is that the definition of "book" is open to debate.
