“Gutenberg’s book took off not because its early evangelists went around waving them in people’s faces…”

Gutenberg’s printed books took off because he started by printing Bibles, something that everyone needed. Since it was too expensive for average individuals to own even a printed book at first, the early “evangelists” of printed books were no doubt real religious “evangelists” whose job it is to wave those books like the Bible around in people’s faces.

“…because talented authors took the trouble to master this new way of working and to write great books”

Moreover, the first books printed from Gutenberg’s press other than the Bible were books that were already classics at the time — works from Aristotle for example. The only talented authors who took the time to master this new way of working; therefore, were (A) “god” (B) authors already long dead.

I read your book with great interest and delight, having felt uneasy about Facebook. I eventually joined up, but found it to be a huge drain on my time, and left.

Your book raises so many interesting issues; the origins of Web 2.0, the electro-hippies of San Fran in the ’70s, Marshall McLuhan – what lead you to write it?

I would also chuck in historian Garry Wills’ description of L.A., in “Nixon Agonistes”:

“Lanes of traffic knot and ravel out beneath a tangle of the city’s nerves. It is the dreary future of McLuhan’s vision – a quiver of disembodied awareness, signal and reception; America fondly creates the entity she has praised for years as a “live wire”. This part of the country looks like a crush of people speeding nowhere, a jam of signals saying nothing, a great human switchboard. No wonder Nixon left it as soon as he could”.

Is that now us, “a great human switchboard”, in Web 2.0?

I’m less sure about that cybernetics is a poor literary device, though I wouldn’t read it myself. CS Lewis referred to the “interwoven” or “polyphonic” technique of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Spenser, Boiardo, Ariosto and Tasso. It dominated European prose and verse fiction from the 13th to 17th century. “Artistic fitness, not a single, rigid “plot”, allows weird, voluptuous, exciting and melancholy to succeed one another. It adds depth, thickness or density. An improbable adventure is always liable to be interrupted by another improbable adventure, suggesting a vast forest in which this sort of thing is always going on around us, and will survive our brief visit there. We get a sense that the poet would show us more, but lacks the time to do so.”

Does “cyber-realism” tap into none of that?

Again, thanks for an extremely interesting book.

Tom,
Australia