The Gutenberg Galaxy

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The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (University of Toronto Press) is a 1962 book by Marshall McLuhan.

This book popularised the terms global village and Gutenberg Galaxy. McLuhan analysed the effects of various communication media and techniques on European culture and human consciousness.

McLuhan studies the emergence of what he calls Gutenberg Man, the subject produced by the change of consciousness wrought by the advent of the printed book. A propos of his axiom, "The medium is the message," McLuhan argues that technologies are not simply inventions which people employ but are the means by which people are re-invented. The invention of movable type was the decisive moment in the change from a culture in which all the senses partook of a common interplay to a tyranny of the visual. He also argued that the development of the printing press led to the creation of nationalism, dualism, domination of rationalism, automatisation of scientific research, uniformation and standartisation of culture and alienation of individuals.

Movable type, with its ability to reproduce texts accurately and swiftly, extended the drive toward homogeneity and repeatability already in evidence in the emergence of perspectival art and the exigencies of the single "point of view". He writes:

the world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age.(136)

[edit] Hypothetical size of the Gutenberg Galaxy

It is possible to estimate a hypothetical size of the Gutenberg Galaxy. In 2004/2005, the British Library claimed it held more than 97 million items, including 13.3 million monographs [1]; the Library of Congress, approximately 130 million items, including "more than 29 million books" [2].

Given an estimated average book size of 6 Mbytes for a purely textual book containing 1 million words, the Library of Congress in this case would take up 174,000,000,000,000 bytes (174 × 10¹² bytes = 174,000 GB = 174 Terabyte; see SI prefix) of text. Assuming the same book size of the monographs in the British Library (13.3 million), the result is 79,800,000,000,000 bytes or 79.8 TB. Ignoring duplicate holdings (probably high, in the order of 25–50%), the combined size of the Gutenberg Galaxy by this method would be around 0.25 Petabytes, or around 1,000 hard disks of 250 Gigabytes each.

One contention of these calculations is that the definition of "book" is open to debate.