The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man

Technologies as a means of transformation and reinterpretation of man

More than sixty years ago, in the days of black-and-white television and radio, McLuhan was able to predict the future - a rapid transition from technologies based on the mechanics of the wheel to technologies based on electrical plexuses.

How did the forms of experience, worldview, and self-expression change due to the appearance of the phonetic alphabet, and later due to printing? Why does a person also undergo changes and transformations when creating new technologies? How is the study of the processes of change accompanying the emergence of mass communications connected with the discovery of the concept of the "global village"?

Gutenberg's Galaxy is a series of historical observations of the new cultural formations that resulted from the "excitements" caused first by writing and later by printing. The work devoted to the study of the influence of mass communication on human thinking brought Marshall McLuhan fame as a media theorist and forecaster of new media. The author managed to predict dramatic technological innovations - a networked, compressed "global village" that will emerge in reality only at the end of the 20th and in the 21st centuries.