User:Lieven Van Speybroeck/Graduation Project/Thesis/Outline

The Quantification Galaxy

Abstract

In 'The Gutenberg Galaxy. The Making of Typographic Man', Marshall McLuhan traces the ways in which forms of experience and mental outlook have been modified, first by the phonetic alphabet and then by printing. The book is a philosophical and theoretical meshwork that describes how the history of literacy is characterized by the gradual visual substitution for auditory methods of communication which ultimately resulted in a definitive authority of the visual sense. Apart from looking at the past and present (1962), the renowned Canadian philosopher and media-theorist also casts a brief glance at the future. It is a vision of the world as a 'Global Village', an electrified interrelated network populated by retribalized man. Audio-tactile technologies have broken the state of visual predominance enhanced by print, causing a relapse into a culture where our ordinary perceptions and habits of action have recreated in us the mental processes of the most primitive men. Half a century later we can check this vision against reality, as the 'Electric Age' is in full swing and electronic media have penetrated everyday life up to a point where imagining a world without them has become impossible. Has the spell of visual hypnosis and sensory anesthesia been broken? Are we primitive post-literate beings living in a terrorizing global auditory network of possessive interdependence? Yes and no. This thesis entails to re-address some of the futuristic speculations raised in The Gutenberg Galaxy and apply them to the time they were reserved for. The most significant effects of print and electronic technology, as described by McLuhan, serve as a guideline for this analysis. Particularly the advance in quantification – the translation of non-visual relations and realities into visual terms – will be elaborated extensively. The internet is well on its way to finalize the electrified, interrelated network that radio and television started. The globe has never been this small before indeed. But even though the auditory methods of communication have (re)gained in importance, the Electric Age requires a kind of literacy that transcends the level of visual stress inherent to print culture by far. This writing attempts to illustrate that.

Outline

not up to date anymore - will be reworked in the coming days!

Introduction

• Brief overview of the history of literacy, characterized by a gradual visual substitution for auditory methods of communication brought about by the intensified process of technologizing the word by means of respectively script, print and electronics.
• Does the 'Electric Age' require a new kind of literacy that implies the visual mediation of all senses? Focus on the development of the typographic medium as a framework to support this thesis.

Separation, segmentation, speed

• Separation:

a. the invention of the Gutenberg press marked the definitive division between medieval and modern technology. It could be considered as the mechanical reduction of the scribal art (first mechanical reduction of any handicraft?), that intensified the visual faculty to the point of splitting it away from the other senses. From then on, imagination tends more and more to refer to the powers of visualization. This results in a homogenization of experience and the relegation of auditory and other sensuous complexity to the background.

- notion of organic and mechanical nature of technology? McLuhan vs Van Weelden - opposite views.

b. print made categorization possible through the separation between writer-reader/producer-consumer/individual-public/ruler-ruled (unlike manuscript culture). This created a huge shift in terms of power and control.

• Segmentation: the printing process became the paradigmatic (assembly-line) model for the industrialized manufacturing and distribution of most products. The idea of interchangeable parts and easily reformed subunits is a straight derivative of moveable type. Relation with perspective/pictorial space: the repeatability and uniformity of the letter and the fixed point of view were a necessary preliminary to create a system that transforms an image into something that has to be read instead of looked at.

- McKenna read-look dichotomy

- Ong: sophisticated use of space for visual organization + textual organization of conscioussness

- McLuhan: modern science of applied knowledge: consequence of exactly repeatable visual statements

• Speed: the concept of moveable type with its uniform patterns and linear movement fosters speed. Connection to cinema: the reader of print is in a position similar to the movie projector, as he reads a series of imprinted letters before him 'frame by frame' at a continuous speed in order to create meaning out of them.

- reading: skimming, glancing, racing, swift -> intensified with screen-reading (scrolling, diagonal reading, ...)

Typographic materiality

• from flat, static, organic, homogeneous towards spatial, dynamic, virtual, heterogeneous
• importance of layout: adoption/replacement of gestural, audio-tactile characteristics
• reading from screen - reading from paper: different approach

- lost tactile characteristics of printed matter compensated by (visual) simulation on screen?

- note: general lack of consideration regarding the significant differences between the functionalities and characteristics of e-reading devices (such as the Kindle) and tablets (such as the iPad). !Unbound Book -> Reading devices: more and more backlit screens / multi-purpose devices -> moving further away from the characteristics of the printed page (not the case with e-readers).

• role of portability of the book: codex - screen

-> 'breaking' library monopoly

-> increasing individualism

The electronic conflict

- Ong: second orality: oral principles introduced in a visual-oriented culture?

- visual authority:

- statistics / data-visualizations

- visualization as categorization > discrimination (Overseers of the poor - Gilliom)

- increasing drive to visualize non-visual relations & realities (quantification)

~ visual simulation/translation of other senses — the visual as perceptual mediation for touch, sound, taste, smell

- importance/ubiquity of screens (De Cauter)

- typography (software!) – materiality (different from print characteristics)!

- 3D / Virtual Reality devices / videogames / augmented reality

- substitution of senses: can we 'train' the eye to perceive touch, sound, taste, smell?

- McLuhan: characteristics of hot and cold media (television as a tactile medium)

Post-literacy?

Going towards a state of "post-literacy"? A cultural state where reading and writing have become obsolete/unnecessary because of new media technology that re-unifies the senses? Or a tendency to reconstitute the interplay of senses within one sense rather then re-establishing a unified sensorium, thereby intensifying the visual predominance.

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