Talk Nerdy To Me Baby

By: jbenoit10

Jan 19 2012

Tags: a little rough justice, Gutenberg Parenthesis, internet freedom, Johannes Gutenberg, journalism, Martial, PIPA, plagiarism, secondary orality, SOPA

Category: Art/History, History, Nerdophilia, Sociology, Technology

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Wrong Gutenberg (this one has two Ts).

I went with this image, to discuss “intellectual property,” because the SOPA/PIPA battle on Capitol Hill is between those lobbying on behalf of Hollywood and those doing so for the Internet. The tension in this photograph (from TMZ– as if you had to ask) perfectly illustrates this.

Very early on in my Online Journalism class, late in 2010, my professor acquainted us with “the Gutenberg Parenthesis.” I’m not referencing Officer Mahoney of the venerable Police Academy movie series, but Johannes Gutenberg, inventor of the printing press.

Prior to 600 years ago, the only ways to transmit data from one human being to another was either orally, copying text by hand, or by copying from dictation. That is it. The sum of all religions, mythologies, proto-scientific observations, customer invoices, et al., were all conveyed via one of these three methods. If you pause to take in the breadth of what this means, it becomes clear that for the massive bulk of human history, there was no such thing as “intellectual property.”

Historians argue that Homer, the author of the earliest works of Western literature, the Iliad and the Odyssey, was probably invented many, many centuries after the works were composed. Whether it was the work of many people, or just one, it can be said for certain that these stories were initially transmitted orally, by traveling bards.

Around 1439, Johannes Gutenberg was involved in a financial kerfuffle, when a deal to display holy relics from the time of Charlemagne in Aachen fell through. To satisfy investors, he offered to share a “secret” he had been researching– that is, movable type. According to James Burke in his 1985 BBC documentary, ”The Day The Universe Changed,” the idea came to Gutenberg, “like a ray of light.” No other reason for including this bit than the casual Madonna reference.

For the first time in human history, it was possible to know exactly who had authored something, and publishing houses exploded onto the scene, each with their own trademarks that they fiercely protected. As time went on, the human brain began to accept the objects that contained these “intellectual properties”–books– as a new form of “what is true.”

Fast forward to present day, and the chaos of trying to determine the role of the Internet. That period of time from 1600 (as it took some time for books and “literature” to take hold) up through roughly the year 2000, is what Professor L.O. Sauerberg of the University of Southern Denmark has termed, “The Gutenberg Parenthesis.”

Most scholars agree on that date of roughly 1600 as being the start, as things such as copyright were still blurry before then– indeed, it’s widely believed that William Shakespeare plagiarized his classic revenge tragedy Hamlet from an earlier work by Thomas Kyd.

It’s interesting to note that that word– “plagiarism”– came about during an earlier time, an era that could be described as a “mini-parenthesis” itself. Western civilization proudly holds the Greco-Roman era as its ancestor, and it’s the 1st-century AD Roman poet Martial who is widely credited with inventing the word. When he discovered contemporaries were stealing his words, he composed new verses calling them out: “plagiarus” is a Latin word used within those verses, having meant, up to that time, the thieving of another’s slaves.

Also interesting to note, and very relevant to SOPA/PIPA, is that Martial wasn’t concerned with the fame associated with his works– he just wanted to be paid for their re-use. When the Roman Empire fell, all notions of “intellectual property” went with it.

The Internet has spent the past 10 years or so eviscerating every established medium it’s come across– speaking as someone with a journalism background, I can say my field was one of the first to arrive at the cyber-chopping-block. But more than that, the Internet has allowed humanity to reclaim that sense of primordial sharing, that we are communicators by nature, and that freely sharing ideas allow for our concepts to grow and evolve, and get better.

We are living outside the right-parenthetical of Sauerberg’s model, in an era of “secondary orality,” a term coined by scholar Walter Ong. What this means is that the Internet has led to a fusion of both the pre-literate and literate era’s notions of communication and sharing. As such, humanity is still trying to figure it all out. The danger, as recent protests have indicated, is legislating what we don’t yet fully understand.

So I support the Internet lobbyists in this instance, over Hollywood lobbyists. Hollywood doesn’t like what the Internet has done to its profits and projections, but anyone who’s had any education in mass media can tell you that movie studios eviscerated vaudeville, television eviscerated movies, and… the Internet eviscerates all. Inherently.

All of this having been said: PLEASE DON’T STEAL THIS PLEASE DON’T STEAL THIS PLEASE DON’T STEAL THIS PLEASE DON’T STEAL THIS PLEASE DON’T STEAL THIS PLEASE DON’T STEAL THIS PLEASE DON’T STEAL THIS PLEASE DON’T STEAL THIS PLEASE DON’T STEAL THIS PLEASE DON’T STEAL THIS PLEASE DON’T STEAL THIS PLEASE DON’T STEAL THIS.

As Romans of Martial’s day would say: cite me. Please.