Closing the Gutenberg Parenthesis
I have been following and engaging Jeff Jarvis, a veteran journalist, blogger and leading commentator on the future of news and digital media for a couple decades.
Being Jarvis was a strong advocate for bloggers, I sat down with Jeff, a journalism professor at City University of New York over five years ago, to discuss LexBlog’s growing network of legal bloggers and publishers. He may not recall it, but we even discussed Jarvis serving on a board I planned to establish for the LexBlog Network.
I had heard Jarvis discussing something called “The Gutenberg Parenthesis,” and even learned he had written a book by the same name. I’ll confess I did’t know the meaning of the concept until I picked up Jarvis’ book entitled “The Gutenberg Parenthesis,” in a Boulder bookstore a couple weeks ago.
Fascinating concept, and for those of you have been blogging the last decade or two, you’ll totally get “The Parenthesis” explained by Jarvis.
Gutenberg’s era—print’s era, the era of the book for the last 550 years—was a grand exception in the course of history. That is what Tom Pettitt, Lars Ole Sauerberg, and Marianne Børch, professors at the University of Southern Denmark, assert in the theory they name the Gutenberg Parenthesis. It goes like this:
On the other side of the Parenthesis, before printing, stories and information were passed along mouth-to-mouth by family, friend, traveler, new crier, and balladeer. News, rumor, verse, and song would evolve along the way. Knowledge and memory were collective, collaborative, and often performative using rhyme and lyric. There was little sense of authorship or ownership of information or tale. The business of books was expensive but simple: one manuscript, one scribe, one patron, and much time. The scribes’ higher mission was to preserve the knowledge of the ancients.
Then, halfway through the fifteenth century came Johannes Gutenberg with his Bible and the development of movable type. His Parenthesis opened. With the printed book, knowledge came to be bound in covers, with a beginning and an end. Our cognition of the world became linear; as Marshall McLuhan would say, “The line, the continuum—this sentence is a prime example—became the organizing principle of life.” Text evolved to become fixed, unchangeable, permanent. Eventually, texts were identical, consistent, no longer subject to the idiosyncratic edits, amendments, whims, and errors of scribes. That is how print gained trust. Society gravitated from collective credibility to that of the certified expert, honoring the graduate, the professor, the published writer. Print gave birth to the author as authority. Institutions were challenged: popes and princes. And institutions were reborn: new ideas of publishing, religion, education, childhood, the public, and the nation emerged. It took more than two centuries, but the industry found its economic foundation with the enactment of copyright law in England in 1710. Then writing, text, and creativity were seen as products and property: a commodity we call content. Content is that which fills the container, the book. Society no longer conversed so much as consumed.
Now comes the Internet and the closing of The Parenthesis. Today, as the world moves past the Gutenberg era, knowledge is again passed along freely, link by link, click by click, remixed and remade along the way.
With the Internet came the concept of citizen publishing. Legal blogging was born when lawyers were no longer dependent on, or constrained by, the traditional mainstream legal publishers as gatekeepers.
More than breaking through the walls of traditional legal publishing, practicing lawyers and other legal professionals with niche expertise who were blogging became the more trusted source.
Legal bloggers with common interests “listened” to what each were saying (the writng in other lawyers’ blogs). Listening largely enabled by legal bloggers citing and quoting each other in their own legal blog posts.
These legal bloggers, akin to the “family, friend, traveler, new crier, and balladeer” have become a trusted source on information, insight and commentary for peers, the judiciary and the public.
Law has squarely lived inside this parenthesis. Statutes, cases, and law reviews have all relied on print, until the Internet, and with it AI, have forced the publishers of same to digitize.
It’s been the legal bloggers though, and I am not talking talking of the content marketing lawyers or the legal publishers and marketing companies who “sell” blog posts to lawyers and law firms, who are now playing a big role in growing the law through “conversations.”
Like the pre-print generations on the left side of the parenthesis, people are again looking for legal knowledge, and with it the names of lawyers they can trust, from trusted, engaging and present individuals. And, ironically, just like AI, people are looking for authority.
As legal bloggers know very well, this authority and trust is earned by real and ongoing authentic dialogue and engagement in the form of a blog post or article rather than edited text befitting of printed copy.
For experienced and caring lawyers who have been publishing in an authentic, engaging and conversational fashion, welcome to the right side of the parenthesis. Your authority, name and business are only going to continue to grow as the number of people who trust you grows.
For the the unknowing majority of lawyers and law firms who are chasing “print like” copy, and lots of it, to garner views and analytics, you are going to remain in the parenthesis and with it not grow the trust and word of mouth authority that people, and AI, are seeking as trusted sources.