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Youtube / Web Culture Gutenberg's Long Shadow Breaking All the Rules:  Martin Marprelate and the Social Conventions of Print

 

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Youtube / Web Culture

  

Michael Wesch is a professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University who has been using YouTube for research purposes; he has his own channel there, to which his students have made a lot of contributions: see http://www.youtube.com/user/mwesch

The academic world doesn't know quite what to make of him. See the following articles for reaction, often negative. (Hint: search for 'anthropology YouTube' in Scholar's Portal to get all of them in one place with appropriate links.)

Young, Jeffrey R. "YouTube Professors: Scholars as Online Video Stars" Chronicle of Higher Education 54 (Jan. 2008)

For a sample of Wesch's work on YouTube titled "The Web is Us/ing Us" , see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

 

Miehlo, Gary. Misunderstanding Media: A Blurry 'Vision of Students Today'. (Part One of Two) ETC.: A Review of General Semantics 65:2 (April 2008) p. 191 (3) / (Part Two of Two) ETC.: A Review of General Semantics 65:2 (April 2008) p. 193-195.

Choi, V. Y. "Technology and Human Interaction" Current Anthropology 49:1 (2008)

Young, Jeffrey R. "An Anthropologist Explores the Culture of Video Blogging" Chronicle of Higher Education 53:36 (May 2007) p. A42

 

Leinster, Murray.  "A Logic Named Joe"  Originally published March 1946 in Astounding Science Fiction.  See http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Logic_Named_Joe for a link to the story, which is short but fascinating.  This is the first time that the personal computer was depicted in fiction.  It is a dark futuristic fantasy in which every household is equipped with a helpful domestic-appliance called a "logic", one of which runs amok.  It raises questions that we are grappling with now about privacy of information, and finding a way through too much information. 

 

Soules, Marshall.  "McLuhan Light and Dark" See http://www.media-studies.ca/articles/mcluhan.htm for a quick tetrad analysis of the internet.  Dr. Soules posted this material from Malaspina University College in 2007.  

 

Jeffrey, Liss.  "The Heat and the Light:  Towards a Reassessment of the Contribution of H. Marshall McLuhan"  Canadian Journal of Communication 14:4/5 (December 1989) 1-29.

Jeffreys tackles the question of why McLuhan is dismissed by many academic departments, and how his work may be usefully reintegrated with mainstream studies.  Much of the interest in this article lies in its analysis of the biographical facts.  Setting the man in his cultural context, and his ideas in their intellectual context allows Liss to address the three major charges about his work:  refusal to answer the critics; technological determinism and deliberate lack of moral stance.  She concludes that analysis of his intentions and context makes it possible to account for the negative responses, and that further work needs to be done in order to reconnect him with the intellectual forces he catalysed.

 

"Wonderland:  Virtual Adultery and Cyberspace Love" is a BBC documentary first aired in January 2008, and now available in four parts on youtube.  It follows the trajectories of two affairs conducted within the world of Second Life which involved partners with who were married to other people.  The word "adultery" appears in its title, and it attends to the emotional consequences of divorce, but it is not a particularly moralistic piece; it is even-handed and sympathetic to all participants.  It is interesting in its exploration of the complexities of interactions (weddings, real estate transactions, violence, sexual interaction, etc.) that are possible within Second Life.  See the following links:

Part One:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PniWHuv9Xko

Part Two:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0s5CTLRVUPY

Part Three:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9yGTVE3cg

Part Four:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06J89zCJGac

 

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Gutenberg's Long Shadow

 

• Birkerts, Sven.  The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age.  Boston & London: Faber & Faber, 1994. ROBA Z1003 .B57 1994.

    This book has a bad reputation as a Luddite anti-technology rant, and I anticipated something quite different from what I found.  Birkerts chose the word "elegies" for the cover in a very precise way -- this is a lyrical, un-theoretized, and very personal series of meditations about the effects of the technological revolution on human consciousness.  Here is a brief sample, from Chapter 8 "Into the Electronic Millenium"

     "A change is upon us... This is not, of course, the first such shift in our long history.  In Greece, in the time of Socrates... the dominant oral culture was overtaken by the writing technology.  And in Europe, another epochal transition was effected in the late fifteenth century after Gutenberg invented movable type.  In both cases, the long-term societal effects were overwhelming... The manner of the change is all around us, though possibly in the manner of the forest that we cannot see for the trees.  The electronic media, while conspicuous in gadgetry, are very nearly invisible in their functioning.  They have slipped deeply and irrevocably into our midst... And this is no longer the future, except for the poor or the self-consciously atavistic--it is now.  Next to the new technologies, the scheme of things represented by print and the snail-paced linearity of the reading act looks stodgy and dull." (118-119)

     Birkerts is clearly familiar with Marshall McLuhan and the Toronto school of thought on communications; he is not against progress per se (contra the critics), but his purpose is to draw the reader's attention to the enormity of the shift.  Birkerts characterizes the results of the shift in terms of language erosion, flattening of historical perspectives, and the waning of the private self.  His focus is not on the possibilities of the new, but on the losses inflicted upon the old. It is not qualitative or quantitative research or analysis; it is a purely personal take. 

 

• Briggs, Asa and Peter Burke.  A Social History of the Media From Gutenberg to the Internet.  (second edition) Malden, MA:  Polity Press, 2005.  ROBA P90 .B69 2005. 

     Introduction and Chapter One:  Briggs and Burke provide a survey of media and communications scholarship, including historians who have covered media in innovative ways.  They position their study between unambiguously positive or negative interpretations, and a recurring theme is that media normally co-exist, rather than exterminating one another.  Chapter One moves from 1450 to 1789, or roughly from the invention of movable type to the French and Industrial Revolutions.  This is not just a history of printing's effects, although they do cover it; they also cover continuing forms of oral communication and the development of physical transportation as a method of communication.  The emphasis is on social history.

 

• Derrida, Jacques.  Archive Fever:  A Freudian Impression.  (trans Eric Prenowitz) Chacago and London:  University of Chicago Press, 1995)

     While mostly a deconstruction of Yerushalmi's Freud's Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable, this short study nonetheless works out a few interesting ideas about archive-building, and by extension, email, electronic communication, and digital storage.  (1) Archiving is not only an interpretation of the past (what is important, in what order should it go), but also of the future (who am I preserving it for, and what will they need to know); (2) Archiving has its shadow side, the drive to obliterate and forget, as well as to remember; this is what Derrida means by 'archive fever'.  Of electronic communication, Derrida states:  "But the example of email is privileged in my opinion for a more important and obvious reason: because electronic mail today, even more than the fax, is on the way to transforming the entire public and private space of humanity, and first of all, the limit between the private, the secret (private or public), and the public or the phenomenal.  It is not only a technique in the ordinary and limited sense of the term: as an unprecedented rhythm, in quasi-instantaneous fashion, this instrumental possibility of production, of printing, of conservation, and of destruction of the archive, must inevitably be accompanied by juridical and thus political transformations.  These affect nothing less than property rights, publishing and reproduction rights. (p. 17)  It is difficult to summarize his dense and precise prose, but roughly speaking, what he is doing is a comparison of the processes of memory and identity formation to the process of the archivist.

 

• Eco, Umberto.  "Steps Back" Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism.  (trans. Alistair McEwan) London:  Harvill Secker, 2007. pp.1-6.  

     The book is a collection of articles pertaining to media coverage, mostly about 9/11 and the Iraq war years, from 2000 to 2005.  But the introduction mentions a previous article that was never translated out of Italian, that explored new media developments as a series of McLuhanesque reversions:  "A further stage in this triumphal return to the Gutenberg Galaxy would have been -- as I said at the time -- the radical elimination of the image.  We would have invented a box that emitted only sound and didn't even require a remote:  you could simply surf by turning a knob.  I was under the illusion that I had invented the radio, but I was only predicting the advent of the iPod." (p.3)  Disappointingly, the remainder of Turning Back the Clock does not pursue this line of thought, presumably because Eco had already done so.  The article was titled "Il Trionfo della tecnologia leggera" and it was published as one of his weekly columns in La Bustina di Minerva.  His line of thought in Turning Back the Clock is pessimistic:  civilization has been moving backward in history, rather that forward.

 

• Madden, John.  "Julia's Dilemma" in Gutenberg Two:  The New Electronics and Social Change. Edited by David Godfrey and Douglas Parkhill. Toronto and Victoria: Press Porcepic Ltd., 1979; fourth edition revised, 1985.  ROBA HN107 .G88 1985.

     We seem to have been worried about the same things for a surprisingly long time.  Much of the book is about the CBC and a Trudeau vision for Canada, and is very dated at this point.  But the piece by John Madden is a short story rather than an essay, which sets out to discuss the future results of a technological revolution.  It's not brilliant literature; a bit too much exposition and analysis, and not much in the way of plot development, but dated future fantasies do have their charms.  Essentially, Julia must decide to join one of two opposed camps:  the Humanity Firsters, who "claimed that human instincts and human behavior patterns were designed for the preservation of the human race, and that computers posed a definite threat to the future of the human race..." (33) or the Brains Firsters, a small minority of the intellectual elite who "pointed to the steady accumulation of order and intelligence over evolutionary history.  Mankind had emerged as the supreme intelligence on Earth over millions of years.  In the last few hundred years, his store of knowledge had increased at a phenomenal rate.  Now, from his own brain, he had created a new, superior intelligence." (33)  Artificial intelligence units are a basic piece of home equipment, providing advice in a seemingly telepathic manner, but susceptible to political and corporate manipulations, but the backlash has resulted in an edict that will exile the Brains Firsters to Australia, leaving Canada to the Humanity Firsters.  Julia must decide, based on research and personal experience, where to raise her son.  Perhaps the shadow of Quebec separation looms over this one; it is extreme, but one of the interesting things that it does is to situate the experience of a massive technological shift within one's memories, and to demonstrate a process of deciding on an ontological reality.

 

• Nunberg, Geoffrey. "Farewell to the Information Age" The Future of the Book (ed. Nunberg) Berkeley CA: U of California Press, 1996. 102-138.  

     A fascinating article in which Nunberg parses the ways we use the word "information" and the recent history of its usage in these senses.  Refreshingly, it is not pessimistic; the discussion is nuanced, and although it points out the ways that our conceptions of information are changing, it suggests more of an opening-out than a closing-down of civilization:  "If you are willing to make allowances (rather a lot of them), the tone recalls the early eighteenth-century periodicals and the first stirrings of the modern critical spirit" (p. 136)  "I think we should look to electronic discourse to provide a counter and complement to the informational forms of print -- a domain that privileges the personal, the private, and the subjective against the impersonal, the public, and the objective." (p. 137) 

 

• Winston, Brian.  Messages:  Free Expression, Media and the West from Gutenberg to Google. London and New York:  Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2005.  ROBA P90 .W56.

This is a survey of the changing availability of freedom of expression from the time of Gutenberg's invention (1455) to the present day, and it is deeply pessimistic.  The print history sections move quickly and superficially through 200 years in the first chapter, and without much analysis of what it all meant, because Winston's point is contemporary and political:  the  1990's utopian promises of 'digital convergence' concealed "a hostility to the existing liberal world of free expression." (p. 375)  The final chapter, "Free Expression is in Very Deep Trouble" explores the year from 1979-2002, highlighting the corporate convergence of media carriers, and ending with a call to action: "It is time to flee the enchantments of technology and the seductive rhetoric of the technicists, as well as the ignorances of the politicians, and put the right of free expression -- and its sister right of access to information -- on a new foundation, one that accepts their centrality in a democratic society." (p. 399)  Overall, it is a disappointing read; it should have gotten more accomplished than it actually does.

 

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Breaking All the Rules:  Martin Marprelate and the Social Conventions of Print 

 

Please read this short tract by 10 March to prepare for my in-class presentation:

http://www.anglicanlibrary.org/marprelate/tract3m.htm 

Titled "Certain Mineral and Metaphysical Schoolpoints", this tract is the third of seven that appeared in a 10 month period between 1588-89 by a pseudonymous author called Martin Marprelate (who may have been an individual or a group:  we still don't know). Published in February 1589, it was printed as a single-page broadsheet in a run of 1,000 copies and sold for a penny; only two copies survive.  I chose this text for discussion because it is the shortest of the seven, but it demonstrates most of the features of the longer tracts.  It names names and specific violations of Church principles, the tone is cheeky and ironic, and it satirizes the form of more established kinds of publication.

 

• Black, Joseph L.  The Martin Marprelate Tracts:  A Modernized and Annotated Edition. Cambridge University Press, 2008.  ROBA, TRIN, CRRS BR757 .M275

     Black's work untangles the many disciplinary strands that touch on Marprelate scholarship, presenting the seven Marprelate tracts in their social, literary, legal, and religious context.  His introduction is 74 pages long and provides a helpful survey of the historical terrain of theatrical allusions, jokes, arguments, and movements in Church management.   He argues that the tracts should be read primarily as social documents, rather than as literary artifacts.

 

• Black, Joseph L. "The Martin Marprelate Tracts (1588-89) and the Popular Voice" History Compass 6:4 (2008) 1091-1106.

     Black argues that the Martin Marprelate tracts played a key role in the creation of a public sphere of discourse by merging the older forms of the religion pamphlet and the manuscript libel into a new, faster-moving print form.  He also tracks the aftereffects well into the 17th century to show that the 'public jeer' that the tracts unleashed remained effective, at least in parts of England, for a surprisingly long time.

 

• Black, Joseph L.  "The Rhetoric of Reaction:  The Martin Marprelate Tracts (1588-89). Anti-Martinism and the Uses of Print in Early Modern England"

Black explores contemporary reactions to the appearance of the Martin Marprelate tracts, from the official to the unofficial.  He explores the connections drawn in the anti-Martinist pamphlets with the Shakespearean stage, including to Richard Tarleton and Will Kempe, both of whom were clowns with the King's Men.  He concludes that "Martinist and anti-Martinist works participated in a complex dialogue.  The Marprelate project almost certainly did not begin with a plan for a grand narrative spread over eight or more texts... Each successive work consequently shaped ensuing work on the opposing side, both in terms of argument... and in terms of framing strategies" (723).

 

• Croft, Pauline.  "Libels, Popular Literacy and Public Opinion in Early Modern England" Historical Research 68:167 (October 2007) 266-285.

Croft explores the literary form of the libel, which existed in manuscript form long before the invention of print.  The form gets its name from the Latin for "little book" (libellus), and began in Italy at the start of the fourteenth century: a mutilated statue was unearthed in Rome in 1501 and given the nickname Pasquino; it soon became popular to "stick topical verses on Pasquino" (267), and these began to be called pasquils, or pasquinades, a slightly more genteel form of the libel.  Croft is very interesting in her exploration of how libels were placed and transmitted: "found in the warder's room... found in the street by two bricklayers... traditionally fixed on church doors... stuck on posts, left on seats, cast into public places." (271-272)  Her coverage of the Marprelate tracts is glancing: "they heightened public awareness of religious issues and gave an immense fillip to contemporary comment." (269)  She follows the libel well into the 17th century, concluding, "The world turned upside down was not a sudden phenomenon, but rather the climax of at least a century of both increasing literacy and increasing social and political awareness" (285).  While she provides solid evidence of the availability and popularity of libels, there is no discussion of literacy in this context, which is disappointing. 

 

• Kumaran, Arul. "Robert Greene's Martinist Transformation in 1590" Studies in Philology. 103:3 (Summer 2006) 243-263.

Kumaran follows a young Elizabethan poet's development through the Marprelate controversy in order to track a mysterious shift in his writing, which broadens in scope and becomes more varied in tone just after the time with the Marprelate pamphlets were appearing.  Kumaran credits Marprelate with reinvigorating the forms written English was taking: "his adroit use of wit and wordplay... his mastery of the English language... his brilliant projection of himself as a scholarly but deeply subversive pamphleteer, and the tactical genius of his secret and moving printing press... injected a new sense of freedom into the language of the pamphlet and energized Elizabethan prose satire" (245).  Kumaran places Robert Greene's gentler critiques of the nobility alongside Marprelate's attacks on the bishops.

 

• Navitsky, Joseph. "Disputing Good Bishop's English: Martin Marprelate and the Voice of Menippean Opposition" Texas Studies in Literature and Language 50:2 (Summer 2008) 177-200.

Navitsky's article is a response to Poole (see below); he revises her claim that the Marprelate tracts can be read in light of Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque to claim that while the anti-Martin tracts fit, the actual Marprelate tracts are more like the ethical satire of Menippean comedy.  Typified by social leveling, rather than by 'the world turned upside down', Menippean comedy offers a "more nuanced" reading (195).  [Note:  I am always a bit wary of attempts to impose a theoretical reading on texts that were written a long time before their corresponding theories; while both Poole and Navitsky have some interesting moments, I don't find either to be completely convincing.]

 

• Poole, Kristen. "Saints Alive! Falstaff, Martin Marprelate, and the Staging of Puritanism" Shakespeare Quarterly. 46:1 (Spring 1995) 47-75.

Poole uses the ideas developed by Mikhail Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World to explore the socially destabilizing implications of the Martin Marprelate tracts and their responses.  Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque looks at moments of inverted social hierarchies as a source of renewal; but there is (still) an active debate among medievalists about whether this means that ultimately a temporary inversion works to restabilize and reinforce existing social order, or if it is more of a push toward revolutionary upheaval.  Poole doesn't get into all of that here, but she seems to find some revolutionary qualities in the Marprelate tracts the the anti-Martinist responses, while they lasted, at least.  She is more interested in tracing the possible lineage of Martin Marprelate to Shakespeare's figure of Falstaff.  This is a fun argument about possibilities, but its claims are not convincing.

 

• Griffin, Benjamin.  "Marring and Mending: Treacherous Likenesses in Two Renaissance Controversies" The Huntington Library Quarterly. 60:4 (1997) 363-380.

Griffin explores the anti-Martinist tracts and 1 Sir John Oldcastle, a play written in response to Shakespeare's portrait of Falstaff.  The trouble with responses, he finds, is that they become the very thing that they are trying to rebuke or correct.

 

• If you would like to see some of the Martin Marprelate tracts in their original form, you can visit them online at the Early English Books Online project:  www.eebo.org

However, this is a by-subscription project, and you will need to enter through the University of Toronto Library site by searching for Early English Books Online under Electronic Resources.  Once you are in, search for Marprelate under author.  You can also search by their bibliographical cataloguing number; most are given STC (Short Title Catalogue) numbers; one comes from Wing's later addition to the STC. 

The Epitome (STC 17454)

Hay any Work for Cooper (Wing/H1205) -- the EEBO copy is a seventeenth century reprint

Theses Martinianae (STC 17457)

      EEBO also provides searchable transcriptions of its texts; this is a very useful resource for tracking down obscure historical objects.

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