HU520: A Review of Deibert's Chapter 4

Deibert, Ronald J. (1997). Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia:

Communication in World Order Transformation, New York: Columbia U. P., pp. 94-110.

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Print and the Medieval to Modern World Order Transformation: Changes to Social Epistemology

What are the Medium's Multiple Messages?

• Examines three elements of social epistemology: (paraphrasing Ruggie) "...the rise of the modern [rule] resulted in part from a change in the mental equipment that people drew upon in imagining and symbolizing forms of community itself underwent fundamental change" (94).
• Element One: Individual identity
  • individualism: autonomous, nonsocial moral being very unique in human history (Dumont). it's not a given that people think of themselves this way. Versus believing in the "Chain of Being."
  • the bellatore, the oratores, & the laboratores (those who fight, pray, and labor) (96).
  • most grant this change results from towns, commercialism, individualist thrust of Protestantism
  • print important in this process (Lyon on 98): sovereign voice--singe author. A book is a closed set (Ong). Copyright came into being--1557 Stationers' Company incorporated in London to ensure printer-publisher rights (not author's?).
  • Manuscript medium's message: intertextuality holds sway. No word for plagiarism in Latin. Before print, to enforce copyrights was to remain unread and certain obscurity.
  • Drive for fame, immortality became motivational force (Eisenstein)
  • Reading print also reinforced sense of individualism: solitary reflection, private, individual point of view.
• Spatial biases
  • movement toward more rigid, linear demarcations of political space: before people thought of "Christendom" or on the other hand, the local space, valley, region you lived in. But then came European Maps! Space entirely filled, mutually distinct, contiguous territorial spaces.
  • Science: Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics, changes in cartography, rediscovery of the Ptolemaic cartography (the world from a point outside of the globe), mathematical coordinates to define places on that globe, realism in art versus the symbolism of the Medieval period.
  • Mass production and distribution of maps.
  • visual scanning of printed documents versus speaking and hearing

Anne Wysocki's piece in Kairos is a first attempt to reclaim some of the graphical terrain that print culture has made commonsensical and thus invisible to most of us.

• ... innovations new to the printed text, such as alphabetical ordering, sectional divisions, and indexes further complemented an abstract rational cognitive orientation favoring uniform spatial order and linearity" (103).

Operating systems standard software, html, sgml, postscript

Images of factories, power lines, suburbs, coal mining, paper production, of screen size, or interface design . . . . These are the ????

• Imagined Communities (see Fictive ??? for more on this issue): the nation
  • fuse the notion of the distinct national language; standardized spelling, grammar, punctuation; proper names for nations;
  • centralizing state monarchies
  • common conceptual currency and complex divisions of labor (106)
  • universities started taking over the language disciplining functions and became the centers of cultural ideology
  • "The Word had to stripped of it's divinity" (107).
  • Newspapers become the vehicle for and an "analog to the nation" (108).
• all these part of the mentalités collectives that helped order and orient social, private, and political behavior.
• finishes with substantial summary of Part 1.

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