From Scribal Culture to Typographic Culture

Bureaucracy

The difference between the man of print and the man of scribal culture is nearly as great as between the non-literate and the literate. The components of Gutenberg technology were not new. But when brought together in the fifteenth century there was an acceleration of social and personal action tantamount to ``take off'' in the sense that W.W. Rostow develops this concept in The Stages of Economic Growth ``that decisive interval in the history of a society in which growth becomes its normal condition.''
Marshall McLuhan

• scribal culture characterized by distributed nodes of production, weak notions of authorship and ownership, and limited production




• typographic culture charcterized by centralized nodes of production, strong notions of authorship and ownership, and mass production