Gutengoogle, or the Future of Communication

In 1979 Elizabeth Eisenstein decided to research the history and impact of the printing press.

To her surprise, she discovered there was a lot of information about life in the early 1400s—the era before the invention of the printing press.

And there were endless descriptions of life in the late 1500s, after the full impact of Gutenberg’s invention was being felt.

What she could not find was very much information about the 100 years in between, when the printing press was introduced.

And so she wondered: What was life like in that period?

In her resulting book, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Eisenstein writes that it was a chaotic, uncertain and challenging time, a time when whole industries and jobs were rendered obsolete and new ones were created.

it was a lot like today, in other words.

The big difference between the printing press revolution then, and the digital revolution now, is the speed at which the change is occurring. 

It won’t take 100 years this time.

But the results are the same—uncertainty, lost jobs and disappearing industries.

While things are changing, those of us who work in communications and the media are desperately trying to keep up.

Conferences are held. Papers are written. Predictions are made.

Academics theorize and practitioners experiment.

Everyone is looking for the next big thing.

But figuring out what to do is an almost impossible task says Clay Shirky, one the leading thinkers about the impact of the Internet on the world today.

Reflecting on the nature of today’s digital revolution, Shirky says: 

“During revolutions, the old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.”

The hard truth for everyone living in such a time, he says, is that there are no certainties—nobody “knows for sure what will happen” in the future.

Except maybe for one thing: Print is no longer going to be the main way people share information.

But what will take its place? Something online, for sure. But what will that look like? And how will it be paid for?

I have no idea. 

Right now, we're caught in between the worlds of Gutenberg and Google, like the people and institutions in Eisenstein's book.

We live in a world of Gutengoogle, or maybe a Googleberg. 

We're looking back and looking forward, not knowing what comes next, and worried about what is being lost.

Then again, people caught in Gutenberg’s revolution didn’t know how things would turn out, either.

They just had more time to adjust.