The Values of the Gutenberg Era: Myth and Media Rhetoric

Sixty years after its first publication, The Gutenberg Galaxy can still be read as an attentive and stunning analysis of the communicative complexity stemming from the sedimentation and re-organization of the typographic mindset. The transition from acoustic to visual patterns, along with the rise of quantitative and scientific knowledge, is one of the most relevant “values of the Gutenberg era” inspired by the decay of scholasticism and the rise of Renaissance individualization and decentralization. On the one hand there is the evolution of the rhetorical trails inherited from classical and Christian culture and, on the other hand, there is the construction of new media myths embedded in the symbolic imageries shaped by electric devices. In this account, McLuhan develops his media analysis with the purpose of highlighting the educational and relational shifts engendered by the communicative changes nourished by diachronic media renewal. Thanks to Harold Innis and Northrop Frye’s legacies, McLuhan builds his masterpiece as a mosaic while exploiting the numerous reflections, argumentations and insights provided in his critical essays forming his intellectual laboratory. As Terence W. Gordon points out in reference to The Gutenberg Galaxy, “it is best read not simply as a harbinger of a post-literate society that would bewilder Johannes Gutenberg and that McLuhan himself would be shocked to find so entrenched so early in the twenty-first century, but as an enduring challenge to understand its subversive purpose” (Gordon, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. University of Toronto Press, 2011, pp. vii–viii). Thus, The Gutenberg Galaxy can be read as a kaleidoscopic journey into the rhetoric, mythographic values of our communicative identity, inextricably interwoven with our literary, aesthetic and philosophical heritage, especially in the era of hyper-connected relationships and media globalized risks.