Pre-typographic, Typographic and Post-typographic Culture
In The Gutenberg Galaxy Marshall McLuhan describes the invention of printing press as marking the transition point in Western culture which transformed the audile-tactile scribal society into a culture that was visually biased. The scribal culture was predominantly oral in its practices and hence, relied on the interplay of different senses which mark oral and auditory interaction of any kind. In the print culture, the mass production of written texts undermined the oral modes of interaction by giving prominence to the printed word. Tracing back the history of technologies of writing, McLuhan asserts that the cultures based on ideographic and pictographic writing are different from those based on alphabetic writing. In the former the pictorial nature of the script allows for auditory/tactile interaction of the reader with the text. In the latter, however, the visual dimension is disassociated from other senses in that phonetic script represents individual alphabets as visual codes of the spoken speech which promotes abstract, sequential, linear description as well as experience of the text. Any new technology, he points out, is a mode of sense extension and its interiorization brings about a corresponding change in the cultural matrix. We only have to think back to the invention of phonetic alphabet, followed by mechanization of writing through printing, and now electronic revolution which is sweeping the globe. Each new technology has transformed the consciousness of the people who began to use it. Relying on the scholarship of scholars on oral cultures as well as scholarly works that deal with the advent of print culture in Europe, McLuhan develops the thesis that the introduction of phonetic writing in ancient Greece marked the beginning of the visual technology which reached its peak in the print culture only to be superseded by the introduction of consumer electronics that ushered in the age of mass communication and brought back the audile/tactile aspects of oral cultures. With the new physics and the rise of electronic modes of communication, according to McLuhan the linear modes of representation and experience are being once again replaced by audile/tactile experiences which involve interplay of senses. Even though he was specifically talking about the role of television in transforming our society and turning it into a global village, his words, as Eugene Provenzo out, are more applicable to the communication revolution brought about by the personal computer and which is ushering in the post-typographic culture. The ripples of this revolutions are only now being felt in all fields.