Typographic Man

Paper Summary:

The paper discusses how handwritten script and the printed book cannot be considered equally responsible for the development of typographic man. The paper analyzes Alison Harwood's review of McLuhan's "The Gutenberg Galaxy". Rather, as this essay will contend, while script was important as a media for millennia, it was only through print technology that the signifying symbols of script could be mass produced in fixed, essentially identical, formats. The paper concludes that it was this mass production of fixed texts that altered human culture on such a broad scale as to lead to the development of what McLuhan terms the "typographic man".

From the Paper:

"Alison Harwood, in her review of Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, describes the key components of McLuhan's theory of how the development of print technology led to a fundamental transformation of human culture and human perception of the world. Print technology involved the mechanization of the scribal craft. This allowed the production of consistently identical texts and led to uniformity and homogeneity of spelling and grammar, ultimately promoting individual authorship and the ownership of intellectual property."

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