Summary
Ever since the now classic Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979), the notion of print culture, as explored by E. Eisenstein, has become a recurring idea and a point of reference, either taken for granted or questioned as a basic concept, to refer to the nature of transformations that print allegedly brought to human history as a new kind of communication medium. More recently, the singular form of the collocation suggesting a uniform nature of such a cultural formation has been increasingly put to doubt in studies pointing to a need for more nuanced contextualization of different trajectories that culture(s) of print might take across varied socio-historical and geographical configurations. The same applies to the core idea describing the nature of the effect of the print culture as depending crucially on the shift from handwriting to printing. Other important conceptual framings of the nature of the socio-historical change highlighted rather a shift from orality to writing (Walter Ong, Jack Goody), while taking print as either an extension or amplification of the qualities, potentials, and limitations of writing. Earlier authors to reflect on print culture include M. McLuhan (whose inspiration in Eisenstein's ideas appears to be more often visible than the latter is ready to admit). McLuhan who contextualized its message, while locating it among other formulations, when he spoke of ‘a culture based upon the printed book’, ‘typographic culture’, and ‘the role played by print in instituting new patterns of culture’; but also of other cultural formations, such as ‘ear culture’, ‘auditory culture’, ‘visual culture’, ‘manuscript culture’, ‘electric culture’, and ‘alphabetic culture’. He did use the very collocation print culture; however, the latter one appears in Gutenberg's Galaxy often to be understood as a specific instance of a more general category of visual (or optical) culture which used—in McLuhan's view—to historically contradict the oral (or auditory) one in a radical, if not dramatic, way. He took print culture to represent one side of these binary and mutually opposing forces in cultural history. In spite of the intuitive rather than systematic nature of his remarks, some of McLuhan's ideas seem revealing, or at least inspiring, in the context of the present study.
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- Kingdoms of Memory, Empires of InkThe Veda and the Regional Print Cultures of Colonial India, pp. 11 - 26Publisher: Jagiellonian University PressPrint publication year: 2022