Southfield, MI, January 26, 2024 –(PR.com)– Fulton Books author Kevin Reed Donley—who has worked in the graphic arts, publishing, and printing industries in the Detroit area for over forty years—has completed his most recent book, “As if by Chance: Sketches of Disruptive Continuity in the Age of Print from Johannes Gutenberg to Steve Jobs”: a fascinating look at the evolution of printing technology since the time of Gutenberg and the resonating relevance of this history for the modern digital age.
Born and raised in Point Pleasant, New Jersey, author Kevin Reed Donley graduated from Rutgers University with a degree in Bachelor of Arts in Graphic Design in 1982, after which he relocated to Detroit to start his professional career. In 1997, Kevin became a certified business planning executive with the National Association for Printing Leadership Management Institute at Northwestern University.
The author is active in the Detroit and Michigan graphic arts and printing community and has also been an active participant in the national and international technical standards initiatives of the printing industry. Donley is a speaker on printing business and technology topics, having addressed audiences at colleges and universities and industry events for more than three decades. In 2008, he launched a blog called “Multimediaman: Know the Past, Create the Future” at multimediaman.net and published studies of major innovators in the history of print technology as well as reviews of contemporary developments in new electronic and digital media.
“This book discusses these two bookends in the age of print,” writes Donley. “It follows the transitions and stages of innovation in printing between the fifteenth and twenty-first centuries and shows how the inventors responsible for this progress are bound together in a chain of revolutionary technical change called disruptive continuity.
“While the works of Gutenberg and Jobs are separated by more than five centuries, there are striking parallels and differences between these two innovations. They both sparked the quantitative expansion of literacy and the spread of knowledge around the world. However, the emergence of electronic publishing—especially in its present-day social media forms—has brought a vast increase in the consumption of information while also heralding a qualitative transformation that places the tools of wireless and mobile multimedia publishing into the hands of billions of people on earth.
“Much in the same way that there was a historical lag between Gutenberg’s invention and the full impact of printing on the world, so too in our own time, the long-term societal consequences of electronic publishing have yet to be realized.”
Published by Fulton Books, Kevin Reed Donley’s book will provide readers with a comprehensive look at the transformations of the printing industry over the centuries, incorporating new innovations that correspond with fundamental technological, economic, and cultural needs of society.
Readers who wish to experience this engaging work can purchase “As if by Chance: Sketches of Disruptive Continuity in the Age of Print from Johannes Gutenberg to Steve Jobs” at bookstores everywhere, or online at the Apple iTunes store, Amazon, Google Play, or Barnes and Noble.
Please direct all media inquiries to Author Support via email at support@fultonbooks.com or via telephone at 877-210-0816.
My mother, Dr. Corrine Louise Russell Donley, would have been 88 years-old last Tuesday. Her birthday fell exactly sixteen weeks after I learned that she had died peacefully in her sleep sometime in the early morning hours of December 19, 2023.
I consider myself extremely fortunate to have seen her for the last time one month earlier on my own birthday. It was on a Saturday, and I planned a trip from Southfield, Michigan to her retirement community in Stow, Ohio and spent the day with her.
It was a memorable visit because we went to the Cleveland Museum of Art to see an impressionist exhibit that was especially important to her. We also went out for dinner and had a long talk. That experience on my 64th birthday is special to me because it is a memory that highlighted my mother’s most enduring qualities and, looking back on it now, reminded me of who she really was.
In thinking about my mother’s life, I can tell you she was a beautiful blond with piercing blue eyes and that she was an exceptionally talented and gifted musician and pianist. I can also tell you she was a dedicated homemaker and loving mother who, along with her husband of 29 years and my father, Loren D. Donley, raised me and my three siblings, Mark, Dana and Cheryl.
I will tell you my mother was an organizer of people and things, and she maintained an At-A-Glance day planner her entire life. She was meticulous with money, and, because of that, we were able to take long trips during the summers while my parents were off from school and their teaching jobs.
My mother loved to knit and, when we were kids growing up, it was not uncommon for her to knit clothes for us or to see her sitting at the sewing machine making things for us to wear, even though, when we were old enough to know the difference, we didn’t want to wear them in the first place.
Finally, I will share that she was an outstanding public school elementary and special education teacher who went on in academia to receive her doctorate and excel both nationally and internationally in the specialized field of applied behavior analysis.
All these things are true. However, it is also true that these attributes and accomplishments, as important as they are, only partially tell the story of who my mother was and why she came to have such drive and seemingly endless compassion and empathy for others.
Corrine Louise Russell was born in East Liverpool, Ohio on April 9, 1936, to Mildred Louise Shenton Russell and John Louis Russell. My grandparents were very young when they started their family, and my mother was their first child. She was born during the Great Depression and the conditions of life in East Liverpool—a small industrial town on the Ohio River across from the northern-most point of the West Virginia panhandle—were harsh.
East Liverpool was founded in the late 18thcentury by Irish settlers who named it after Liverpool, England. During its glory days in the late 19th century, East Liverpool was known as “Crockery City,” because more than 100 pottery factories were in and around the town, some of which were across the river in West Virginia and others further east in Pennsylvania.
The Thompson Pottery on the Ohio River in East Liverpool, 1910
The pottery industry settled into this region of The Upper Ohio Valley because there was a plentiful supply of clay in the area that was suitable for making dishes. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the pottery businesses became so successful that people of Irish, English, German, Italian, Greek, Jewish and African-American descent came to East Liverpool for work.
For example, my great-great grandfather, Samuel Shenton, was a potter who had emigrated from England to East Liverpool in 1869. Samuel began working as a dish-maker in his native town of Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire at age 9 and, along with many of his fellow workingmen, decided to make the trip across the Atlantic to seek a better life in America. When he arrived at age twenty-nine, Samuel was already an expert dish-maker and one of the first white-dish makers of East Liverpool.
Samuel became a Master Workman and member of the Knights of Labor. He was a highly respected member of the East Liverpool potter’s community because of his activity during the strikes and lockouts of 1884. This was before the establishment of the 8-hour workday and the conflict between the potters and the employers was centered on how machines were being used to eliminate jobs. Samuel was blacklisted by the employers in East Liverpool and forced to relocate for 18 years in another town in Ohio where they did not know who he was.
Obituary of Samuel Shenton, July 24, 1840–February 9, 1917.
All four of Samuel’s sons became potters and dish-makers, including Byron Shenton, my mother’s grandfather, who lived in Kittanning, Pennsylvania, a pottery town along the Allegheny River where my grandmother Mildred Louise was born.
In 1942, after the US entered World War II, Mildred Louise and John Russell had difficulty finding work and they decided to pack up my mother and her sister, my Aunt Joan, and move the family to Cleveland. It was there that John took a job as an electrician in a military aircraft factory and Mildred became a taxi driver.
When the war ended, the Russell family moved back to East Liverpool. However, the pottery industry was by this time decimated by the Great Depression and overseas dishware competition. The local economy never returned to that of its prewar years. Due in part to these circumstances, Mildred Louis and John divorced and there were times when my mother was sent to live with grandparents or aunts and uncles and did not see her parents for long stretches of time.
The hardship associated with the economic decline of East Liverpool impacted many families during those years. My mother told me that President Roosevelt’s New Deal programs—which brought jobs, Social Security and other government aid to the area—was so popular among the people of East Liverpool that a classmate of hers was given the name “Welcome FDR,” when he was born. They called him Welkie.
Corrine Louise Russell at age 12
As a child, my mother was precocious, and she developed a remarkable determination to overcome the poverty she was growing up in. She described to me some of the homes of East Liverpool residents which were essentially shacks made with random boards covered with tin can shingles and with dirt floors. She spoke compassionately about how some local people suffered from illiteracy and a lack of health care and dental care and from tobacco and alcohol abuse.
She told me about the house on Morton Street that the Russell family had moved into when she was 12. The home was nearly at the top of the hillside on which East Liverpool stood and you had to drive up extremely steep streets to get to it. The home initially had an outhouse and, when a bathroom was finally added, it was a box on stilts that was attached to the outside of the upper level. When entering the bathroom, she told me, she could see the ground below through a gap in the floor between the two structures.
Meanwhile, life in East Liverpool was fraught with many difficulties and obstacles for a young girl. She told me many times that, when speaking to others about her plans to do great things with her life, she was told more than once, “You won’t amount to anything. You’ll be barefoot and pregnant by the time you’re 16.” She also told me about abuses she suffered as a girl which were unfortunately common and the result of the poverty and backwardness that existed in the community.
While her experience was by no means entirely unique, the memories of what life was like in her childhood stayed with my mother. However, she never let those things keep her from educating herself and pursuing her goals. She did not allow the negative aspects of her upbringing to become a justification for what she could not do or to live a life of bitterness about how she was mistreated or how she never received the support she deserved as a child growing up.
Instead, these challenges and disappointments became her springboard; they became a source of energy and determination to set high expectations and strive to overcome all obstacles to meet them. She also used them to dedicate herself to helping others overcome their disadvantages and disabilities.
My mother was part of a generation of young women who, in the post-war years, benefited from access to public education and the expanding role of women in the workplace and society. Meanwhile, as part of that generation, my mother had a deep-going social awareness and concern for those less fortunate than her. She wanted to make a difference in the lives of others and this led her into special education, where she became a pioneer in the classroom and one of the first in the field to use music therapy for the handicapped and people with intellectual disabilities.
And this is what brings me back to our trip to the Cleveland Museum of Art on my birthday last November. One of the most important experiences I had growing up as the son of Corrine Louise Russell Donley was that she taught me and helped me learn about fine art. I recall when going on trips with the family during the summer that we would make stops to visit art galleries and exhibits.
At the time, like many children, I did not understand what she was doing. I would complain about having to go to the galleries and ask, “Mom, do I have to go with you to the museum?,” and she would always say, “Yes, you do.” She never let up on this.
By the time I was in high school, I knew about the paintings of modern artists like as Jackson Pollack, Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso. I was also familiar with the works of American painters like Andrew Wyeth, Winslow Homer, Grant Wood and Norman Rockwell. Today, my wife Denise and I have my parents’ print of Winslow Homer’s “The Country School” hanging on the wall in our living room. That painting was positioned for decades over the piano in the living room of the Donley household in Point Pleasant, New Jersey.
The Country School, Winslow Homer, 1871
Anyway, I developed an appreciation for the periods and methods of the artists and, by the time I was ready to leave home for college, I had formulated my own interest in fine art painting and, it turns out, this was a factor in my decision to pursue graphic arts as a career choice. I have my mother to thank for this.
The important exhibit she wanted to see in Cleveland was called “Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work and Impressionism.” It was the first exhibition to feature the impressionist Degas’ paintings and sketches of Parisian laundresses which he had made over his long career beginning in 1850. The exhibition also included paintings of laundresses by other artists, such as Picasso, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec and Daumier, who were inspired by Degas and his focus on these Parisian women.
Degas, who is most well-known for paintings of ballet dancers, horse races and upper middle class life in Paris, was drawn to the laundresses. A perpetual and visible presence in the city, the women could be seen at all times of the day washing clothes in the river, carrying heavy baskets of laundry or ironing in the many shops that were open to the street.
The laundresses were among the most marginalized, poorly paid and exploited people in Paris. Their job was arduous and dangerous, as they carried out strenuous and repetitive work while being exposed to chemicals and diseases. A remarkable aspect of Degas’ paintings of the laundresses of Paris is that he concentrated on images of these women while they were at work.
Woman Ironing, Edgar Degas, 1869
The Cleveland Museum of Art was not especially busy on my birthday, and we were able to find the special Degas exhibit easily. When my mother and I came upon the featured and most famous painting in Degas’ laundress series, we stopped there for a long time to observe it. The painting, entitled Woman Ironing, was painted by Degas in 1869 and the subject is based on a model named Emma Dobigny whom the artist had befriended.
The painting is remarkable because it has additional lines drawn of Dobigny’s arms as if they are in motion while she irons a gray muslin dress on the table. The expression on her face is one of exhaustion but also, as she stares straight at the artist, she seems to be saying, “Yes, this is difficult work, but I am strong, and I will not stop until it is complete.”
As I think about what we saw in that painting, I am now realizing what was going through my mother’s mind in that moment. Corrine Louise Russell Donley was nearing the end of her life. She had suffered several serious heath events that forced her to use a walker, and, in this instance, I was pushing her through the museum in a wheelchair. What my mother saw, as we looked at the Paris laundress, was someone with whom she identified.
Although she did not and could not have known on that day she would be gone in one month, my mother was determined, and I know she was thinking about all the things she had yet to do and how much more she had to give to the world. She was thinking, “I have come through many challenges, had a long life and accomplished important things. However, my work is not done yet.”
Sketches of Disruptive Continuity in the Age of Print from Johannes Gutenberg to Steve Jobs
Johannes Gutenberg and Steve Jobs
Johannes Gutenberg and Steve Jobs
While reviewing nearly six centuries of print technology—through the lives and inventions of significant industry innovators—it became clear that the invention of printing by Johannes Gutenberg on the one side, and the breakthrough of desktop publishing by Steve Jobs on the other, are bookends in the age of print. While it has long been acknowledged that the hand-held type mold and printing press are the alpha in the age of manufacturing production of ink-on-paper forms such as books, newspapers, magazines, etc., the view that desktop publishing is the omega of this age is not necessarily widely held. When viewed within the framework of disruptive continuity, it can be shown that the innovations of Gutenberg and Jobs manifest similar attributes in terms of their dramatic departure from previous methods as well as their connection to the multilayered processes of cultural changes in the whole of society in the fifteenth and twentieth centuries.
The advent in 1985 of desktop publishing—a term coined by the founder of Aldus PageMaker, Paul Brainerd—is associated with Steven P. Jobs because he contributed to its conceptualization, he articulated its historical significance, and he was the innovator who made it into a reality. With the support of publishing industry consultant John Seybold, Jobs went on to integrate the technologies and brought together the people that represented the elements of desktop publishing: a personal computer (Apple Macintosh), page layout software (PageMaker), page description language (Adobe PostScript) and a digital laser printing engine (Canon LBP-CX). He demonstrated the integration of these technologies to the world for the first time at the Apple Computer annual stockholders meeting on January 23, 1985, in Cupertino, California, a truly historic moment in the development of graphic communications.
It is a fact that the basic components of desktop publishing had already been developed in the laboratory at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) by the late 1970s. However, due to a series of issues related to timing, cost and the corporate culture at Xerox, the remarkable achievements at PARC—which Steve Jobs had seen during a visit to the lab in 1979 and inspired his subsequent development of the Macintosh computer in 1984—never saw the light of day as commercial products. As is often the case in the history of technology, one innovator may be the first to theorize about a breakthrough, or even build a prototype, but never fully develop it, while another innovator creates a practical and functioning product based on a similar concept and it becomes the wave of the future. This was certainly the case with desktop publishing, where many of the elements that Jobs would later integrate at the Cupertino demo in 1985—the graphical user interface (GUI), the laser printer, desktop software integrating graphics and text, what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) printing—were functioning in experimental form at PARC at least six years earlier.
What became known as the desktop publishing revolution was just that. It was a transformative departure from the previous photomechanical stage of printing technology on a par with the separation of Gutenberg’s invention of mechanized metal printing type production from the handwork of scribes. Desktop publishing brought the era of phototypesetting that began in the 1950s to a close. It also eventually displaced the proprietary computerized prepress systems that had emerged and were associated with Scitex in the late 1970s. Furthermore, and just as significant, desktop publishing pushed the assembly of text information and graphic content beyond the limits of ink-on-paper and into the realm of electronic and digital media. Thus, desktop publishing accomplished several things simultaneously: (1) it accelerated the process of producing print media by integrating content creation—including the design of text and graphics into a single electronic document on a personal computer—with press manufacturing processes; (2) it expanded the democratization of print by enabling anyone with a personal computer and laser printer to produce printed material starting with a copy of one; (3) it created the basis for the mass personalization of print media and; (4) it laid the foundation for the expansion of a multiplicity of digital media forms within a decade, including electronic publishing in the form of the Portable Document Format (PDF), e-books, interactive media and, ultimately, contributed the global expansion and domination of the Internet and the World Wide Web.
Just as Gutenberg attempted to replicate in mechanized form the handwriting of the scriptoria, the initial transition to digital and electronic media by desktop publishing carried over the various formats of print, i.e., books, magazines, newspaper, journals, etc., into digital files stored on magnetic and optical storage systems such as computer floppy disks, hard drives and compact disks. However, the expansion of electronic media—which was no longer dimensionally restricted by page size or number of pages but limited by data storage capacity and the bandwidth of the processing and display systems—brought the phenomenon of hyperlinks and drove entirely new communications platforms for publishing text, graphics, photographs and audio and video, eventually on mobile wireless devices. Through websites, blogs, streaming content and social media, every individual can record and share their life story, can become a reporter and publisher or participate in, comment on and influence events anywhere in the world.
The groundbreaking significance of desktop publishing, which straddled both the previous printing and the new digital media ages, can be further illustrated by going through the above description by Will Durant of the impact Gutenberg’s invention and substituting the new media for printing and the other contemporary elements of social, intellectual and political life for those the historian identified in the 1950s about the fifteenth century:
To describe all the effects of desktop publishing and electronic media would be to chronicle well more than half the history of the modern mind. … It replaced all informational print by republishing it online as text or in more complex graphical formats like PDF, with methods for managing versions and protecting authenticity so that scholars and researchers in diverse countries may work with one another through video streaming and virtual reality tools, allowing entry of new information and data to be gathered, published and shared in real time as though they were sitting in the same room. … Online electronic media made available to the public all of the world’s manuals and procedural instructions; with the development of international collaborative projects such as Wikipedia, it became the greatest tool for learning that has ever existed, at no charge and available to all. It did not produce Modernism or the information age, but it further paved the way for a new stage of human society that had been promised by the American and French revolutions, based on democracy and where genuine equality exists as a fundamental right for everyone. It made the entire library of literature, music, fine and industrial arts, architecture, theater, athletic competition and cinema instantly available anywhere and at any time in the palm of the hand and prepared the people for an understanding of the role of mythology, mysticism and superstition in history by demonstrating the application of a scientific and materialist outlook in everyday life. It ended the monopoly of news by corporate and state publishers and the control of learning by educational institutions managed by the prevailing ruling classes. It encouraged the streaming of live video by anyone to the entire world’s audience of mobile device owners that could never have been reached through printed media. It facilitated global communication and cooperation of scientists and enabled the launching of the international space station and the sending of multiple probes to the surface of Mars and beyond. It affected the quality and character of all published literature and information by subjecting authors and journalists to the purse and taste of billions of regular working people in both the advanced and lesser developed countries rather than to just the middle and upper classes. And, after speech and print, desktop publishing, online and social media provided a readier instrument for the dissemination of nonsense and disinformation than the world has ever known.
Up to the present, the new media has not yet displaced print the way print eventually replaced the scribes. It is likely that printing on paper will continue to exist well into the future in a similar manner that the ancient art of pen-and-ink calligraphy has continued to exist alongside of print for centuries long after the last scriptorium was shut down. Meanwhile, electronic media such as e-books have contributed to a resurgence of printed books and, after the initial fascination with the electronic devices such as Amazon’s Kindle, the popularity and thirst of the public for books has increased, particularly following the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. While the forced separation of people from each other has driven up the use of digital tools such as online video meetings, events and gatherings, the self-isolation of reading a printed book has suddenly peaked again.
Considerable effort has been made to replicate the experience of reading print media in electronic form. The advent of e-paper—the simulation of the look and feel of ink-on-paper which was pioneered at Xerox PARC in the 1970s (Nick Sheridon, Gyricon)—is an attempt to adapt two-dimensional digital display technologies to mimic the reading experience of the printed page. Since then, studies have shown that paper-based books yield superior reading retention to that of e-books. This is not so much because of the appearance of the printed page and its impact on visual perception as it is the tactile experience and spatial awareness connected with turning physical pages and navigating through a volume that contains a table of contents and an index.
In 2012, during a presentation at the DRUPA International Printing and Paper Expo in Düsseldorf, Germany, Benny Landa, the pioneer of digital printing who developed the Indigo Press in 1993, said the following:
I bet there is not one person in this hall that believes that two hundred years from now man will communicate by smearing pigment onto crushed trees. The question on everyone’s mind is when will printed media be replaced by digital media. … It will take many decades before printed media is replaced by whatever it will be … many decades is way over the horizon for us and our children.
Since Landa’s talk at DRUPA was part of the introduction of a new press with a digital printing method called he called nanography, he was emphasizing that we need to live and work in the here and now and not get too far ahead of ourselves. Landa’s nanographic press is based on advanced imaging technology that transfers a film of ink pigment to almost any printing surface which is multiple magnitudes thinner than either offset or other digital presses. By removing the water in the inkjet process, the fusing of toner to paper in the xerography and the petroleum-based vehicles that carry pigment in traditional offset presses, nanography dramatically reduces the cost of reproduction by focusing on the transfer ultra-fine droplets of pure pigment (nanoink) first to a blanket and then to the substrate. The aim of nanography is to keep paper-based media economically viable by providing a variable imaging digital press that can compete with the costs of offset lithography and accommodate the needs of the hybrid digital and analog commercial printing marketplace.
While print volumes are in decline, society is not yet ready to make a full transition to electronic media and move entirely away from paper communications. This is a serious dilemma facing those working in the printing industry who are trying to navigate the difficulties of maintaining a viable business in an environment where print remains in demand—in some segments it is growing—but overall, it is a shrinking percentage of economic activity. With greater numbers of people and resources being redirected to communications and marketing products in the more promising and profitable big tech and social media sectors, the printing industry is being starved of talent and economic resources.
Rather than trying to put a date on the moment of transition to a post-printing and fully-digital age of communications, the more relevant question is how it will be accomplished. Landa had it right when he said that today most people believe that two hundred years from now, man will no longer communicate by “smearing pigment onto crushed trees.” When the character of print media is put in these terms, the historical distance of this analog form of communications from the long-term potential of the present digital age becomes clearer. Still, no clear vision or roadmap has yet been articulated for what is required for civilization to elevate itself beyond the age of print.
It is difficult to discuss the moment of a complete progression of human communication methods from Gutenberg to Jobs without reference to the work of the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan. Although McLuhan’s presentation lacked a coherent perspective and tended to drift about in what he called the “mosaic approach,” he made numerous prescient observations about the forms of media and the evolution of communications technology. Sharing elements of the theory of disruptive continuity, McLuhan focused in on the reciprocal interaction of the modes of communication—spoken, printed and electronic—with the broader societal economic, cultural and ideological transformations in world history. He emphasized the way these transitions each fundamentally altered man’s consciousness and self-image. He also recognized that there was presently a “clash” between what he called the culture of the “electric age” with that of the age of print. During an interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1965, McLuhan explained how he saw technology as an extension of man’s natural capabilities:
If the wheel is an extension of feet, and tools of hands and arms, then electromagnetism seems to be in its technological manifestations an extension of our nerves and becomes mainly an information system. It is above all a feedback or looped system. But the peculiarity, you see, after the age of the wheel, you suddenly encounter the age of the circuit. The wheel pushed to an extreme suddenly acquires opposite characteristics. This seems to happen with a good many technologies— that if they get pushed to a very distant point, they reverse their characteristics.
Among McLuhan’s most significant contributions are found in his 1962 work, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographical Man. He discusses the reliance of primitive oral culture upon auditory perception and the elevation of vision above hearing in the culture of print. He wrote his study, “is intended to trace the ways in which the forms of experience and of mental outlook and expression have been modified, first by the phonetic alphabet and then by printing.” For McLuhan, the transformations from spoken word culture to typography and from typography to the electronic age extended beyond the mental organization of experience. In the Preface to The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan summarized how he saw the interactive relationship of media forms with the whole social environment:
Any technology tends to create a new human environment. Script and papyrus created the social environment we think of in connection with the empires if the ancient world. … Technological environments are not merely passive containers of people but are active processes that reshape people and other technologies alike. In our time the sudden shift from the mechanical technology of the wheel to the technology of electric circuitry represents one of the major shifts of all historical time. Printing from movable types created a quite unexpected new environment—it created the public. Manuscript technology did not have the intensity or power of extension necessary to create publics on a national scale. What we have called “nations” in recent centuries did not, and could not, precede the advent of Gutenberg technology any more than they can survive the advent of electric circuitry with its power of totally involving all people in all other people.
As early as 1962—seven years before the creation of the Internet and nearly three decades before the birth of the World Wide Web—McLuhan anticipated the historical, far-reaching and revolutionary implications of the information and electronic age on the global organization of society. Although he eschewed determinism in any form, McLuhan pointed to the potential for electronic media to drive mankind beyond the national particularism which is rooted in the technical, socio-historical and scientific eras connected with the age of print. McLuhan later used the phrase “global village” to describe his vision of a higher form of non-national organization driven by the methods of human interaction that were brought on by “the advent of electric circuitry” and “totally involve all people in all other people.” For McLuhan, the transformation from the typographic and mechanical age to the electric age began with the telegraph in the 1830s. The new media created by the properties of electricity were expanded considerably with telephone, radio, television and the computer in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. McLuhan also wrote that the electronic media transformation revived oral culture and displaced the individualism and fragmentation of print culture with a “collective identity.”
McLuhan’s examination of the historical clash of the electronic media with the social environment of print culture and his prediction that a new collective human identity will be established from the transition to a global structure beyond the present fragmented national identities is highly significant. It points to the coming of the societal transformations that will be required for electronic media to thoroughly overcome print media as a completed historical process. In a similar way that Gutenberg’s invention spread across Europe and the world and planted the seeds of foundational transformation—in technology, politics and science—that developed over the next three and a half centuries, we are today likewise in the incubator of the new global transformation of electronic media. With this historically dynamic way of understanding the present, the worldwide spread of smartphones and social media to billions of people, despite national barriers placed upon the exchange of information as well as other differences such as language and ethnicity, humanity is being transformed with the emergence of a new homogeneous global culture. For this development to achieve its full potential, the social organization of man must be brought into alignment and there is no reason to believe that this adjustment from nations to a higher form of organization will take place with any less discontinuity than that of the period of world history that began with the rapid development of printing technology, the Enlightenment and the American and French Revolutions.
There are scientists and futurists who either proselytize or warn about the coming of the technological singularity, i.e., the moment in history when electronic media convergence and artificial intelligence will completely overtake the native capacities of humanity. The argument goes that these extensions of man will become irreversible, and civilization will be transformed in unanticipated ways either toward a utopian or dystopian future, depending on whether one supports or opposes the promises of the singularity. The twentieth century philosophical and intellectual movement known as transhumanism promotes the idea that the human condition will be dramatically improved through advanced technologies and cognitive enhancements. The dystopian opponents of transhumanist utopianism argue that technological advancements such as artificial intelligence should not be permitted to supplant the natural powers of the human mind on the grounds that they are morally compromising, and such a development poses an existential threat to society. Among these competing views, however, is the shared notion that the coming transformation of mankind will take place without a fundamental change in the social environment. Both the supporters and opponents of transhumanism envision that the extensions of man will evolve independently of any realignment of the economic or cultural foundations of society.
However, it is not possible to prognosticate about the future of communications technology outside of an understanding that the tendencies present in embryonic form nearly six centuries ago—particularly the democratization of information and knowledge that been vastly expanded in our time—bring with them powerful impulses for broad and fundamental societal change. In a world where every individual has the potential to communicate as both publisher and consumer of information with everyone else on the planet—regardless of geographic location, ethnicity, language or national origin—it appears entirely possible and necessary that new and higher forms of social organization must be achieved before this new media can carve a path to a truly post-printing age of mankind. While the existential threats are real, they do not come from the technology itself. The danger arises from the clash of the existing social structures against the expanding global integration of humanity. We have every reason to be optimistic about taking this next giant step into the future.
MULTIMEDIAMAN 