The Gutenberg Galaxy

What Hacker News says

1. _wire_Dec 2025
   Time to "train" on Marshall McLuhan:

   See The Gutenberg Galaxy (book) (1962)

   McLuhan's Wake (documentary movie, narrated by Laurie Anderson) (2002)

   Re Wake: Listen to the accompanying full interviews with McLuhan's colleagues from which the documentary is drawn.

   thread
2. eddarossMay 2024
   I've recently read The Gutenberg Galaxy by McLuhan and I can recommend it for everyone interested in the topic. He analyses how the invention of printing press influenced society, culture, and human consciousness. I liked his idea that the shift from oral to written communication has fundamentally changed the human consciousness.
   thread
3. whoisburbanskyJan 2021
   Solidly agree on all points, just wanted to plug a podcast favorite of mine, Philosophize This!, for a less daunting introduction to McLuhan's ideas [1] than "go read a couple hundred pages of fairly dense media theory books."*

   1. https://www.philosophizethis.org/podcast/episode-149-on-medi...

   * Of course, I enjoyed the podcast episode so much that I did end up going on to read The Gutenberg Galaxy and The Medium Is the Massage [sic], and wholeheartedly recommend both.

   Show morethread
4. dredmorbiusDec 2019
   My own thinking on this has evolved very considerably over the past five years or so. That's included a comprehensive and ongoing exploration of the fields of media, communications, epistemology, and several others, related to this. I'd long seen computers as technology, largely independent of social implications. I now see these as utterly inextricably linked, and with implications that are anything but predictably benign.

   Costs being difficult to assess does not mean impossible, and the notions of probability and risk are central to all finance, investment, and insurance. Uncertainty is NOT an absolute lack of knowledge.

   Among the principles that becomes apparent is that changes in informational regimes have profound impacts upon societies, and that this is a pattern which can be traced back through history to the invention of writing itself, and via indirect anthropological evidence likely to the emergence of speech.

   The principle transcends humans themselves -- a leading theory for the Cambrian Explosion is that it was a consequence, effecively, of structuring and communications mechanisms within organisms developing, and allowing the creation of complex body plans, and not merely single-celled organisms or masses or colonies of cells.

   For media, see especially Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change and Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy. The link between mass media and totalitarian, fascist, authoritarion, and nationalist sentiments has long been observed (Hannah Arendt, Dwight MacDonald, the Frankfurt School, Edward Herman & Noam Chomsky, Adam Curtis).

   I've been impressed by the insight, or occasionally, lack, of awareness of the potential perils of comprehensive data archives by pioneers within the data field.

   Paul Baran, co-inventer of packet-based networking, wrote "On the Engineer's Responsibility in Protecting Privacy" (https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P3829.html) in 1968, some 51 years ago. In it he remarked on both the risks, and industry attitudes:

   There are many amongst us who would not hesitate to build equipment to compromise the privacy of any given individual provided the price is right. These are the whores of industry. They would not hesitate building systems and devices contrary to the public interest; their only concern is the buck.

   The full paper, and in fact, all of Baran's RAND publications, are online in full-text, following my request to RAND. I remain grateful to them for this.

   Baran was also interviewed for a 1966 BBC documentary:

   "Well, he who has access to information controls the game. This is very dangerous. I think both your country and mine have never trusted the government completely. We do so for good reason. Here we have a mechanism that could be abused. Here we have a mechanism that would allow the creation of a dictator. . .

   I've yet to see an expression by anyone in Congress about this new type of danger. In fact, we see proposals for centralizing information, we see proposals for rushing ahead into new, more efficient computer information systems, and very little thought is being given to the dangers of the misuse of these systems. . . I ask a lot of people about privacy, why they valued it, and I was surprised by the number of people who said "Well, I don't do anything wrong. Why should I worry about privacy?" And then, on the other hand, I think there's a more wise group that says, 'Privacy is really the right to be wrong, then go on and live the rest of your life, without having it mark you forever.' I tend to think this latter view is the view we should hold.

   https://invidio.us/watch?v=FwaDvJYZTVk&t=29m31s

   Another view was expressed by AI pioneer and Nobel Laureate (economics) Herbert Simon:

   "The privacy issue has been raised most insistently with respect to the creation and maintenance of longitudinal data files that assemble information about persons from a multitude of sources. Files of this kind would be highly valueable for many kinds of economic and social research, but they are bought at too high a price if they endanger human freedom or seriously enhance the opportunities of blackmailers. While such dangers should not be ignored, it should be noted that the lack of comprehensive data files has never been the limiting barrier to the suppression of human freedom. The Watergate criminals made extensive, if unskillful, use of electronics, but no computer played a role in their conspiracy. The Nazis operated with horrifying effectiveness and thoroughness without the benefits of any kind of mechanized data processing."

   https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a9e7/33e25ee8f67d5e670b3b7d....

   There is, of course, one slight problem with Simon's argument: The Nazis did make heavy use of mechanised data processing, provided and supported by IBM. Edwin Black documents this meticulously in his book IBM and the Holocaust:

   https://ibmandtheholocaust.com

   Show morethread
5. tremeJul 2018
   Mcluhan's work would be right up your alley then.

   Medium is the Massage; Gutenberg Galaxy would be my top 2 recommendation given what you wrote.

   thread
6. decasteveSep 2017
   Marshall McLuhan's "Gutenberg Galaxy" and "Understanding Media". Buckminster Fuller's "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth" (and other books and essays of his).
   thread