A Gutenberg moment?

The arrival of the iPad in Australia has been greeted with everything from quasi-religious reverence to cynicism. The Steve Jobs camp has largely been focused on the language of revolution – a savvy if slightly hubristic move from the Apple marketing department. ‘It’s already a revolution and it’s only just begun,’ the voiceover in the commercials declared, with Jobs himself calling the iPad ‘a truly magical and revolutionary product’ at the launch earlier this year. If ‘revolutionary’ has become Apple’s key selling point for the masses, then drawing parallels with the invention of the Gutenberg press comes a close second, especially for winning over aficionados of print. Even Jonathan Green of ABC’s The Drum admitted ‘This could be something of a Gutenberg moment, a technical innovation that will revolutionise how we communicate and distribute ideas.’

So what is a Gutenberg moment and does the invention of the iPad really qualify? According to Dennis Baron, a linguistics professor at the University of Illinois, the answer is not so simple. Technically, the phrase ‘Gutenberg moment’ refers to a point in time that dramatically changes the way we read and publish, much like the day Johannes Gutenberg rebuilt a Rhine Valley wine press in the mid fifteenth century to bring moveable type to the West. However, as Baron points out on his blog, Web of Language, ‘It’s fine to characterize a Gutenberg moment as a revolution in text delivery, but only if you acknowledge that it actually took not a moment, but several hundred years, for the real effects of printing to take hold.’

Production of the now famous Gutenberg Bible was much more time-consuming than many might think. The process involved laboriously breaking down the type of each page, drying and correcting them, adding the illustrations by hand and then binding the volumes. According to the Harry Ransom Centre, it took around five years to produce 180 bibles, the cost of which was still ludicrously high.

The real transformation might be thought of as taking place over a number of centuries rather than a short time. The invention of the steam press in the nineteenth century also led to cheaper, mass-produced text, as did the arrival of the typewriter. ‘The personal computer,’ writes Baron, ‘was closer to a Gutenberg moment than the printing press ever was.’ We probably won’t know for some time whether Steve Jobs is the new Johannes Gutenberg. Although one wonders whether the phrase ‘Jobs moment’ will really be one to catch on.