AC640 Government, Public Policy, and the Law (Political Communication):The Real World of Communication [2]
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关键词:GovernmentPublic PolicyPolitical CommunicationCommunication
aign 640 discussion board.
2.8 MSN chat on concepts in unit 2
Instructor facilitates optional MSN chat on concepts from unit 2.
Unit One Notes: Week One
Keywords for week one:
public sphere incunabula grotesque realism the carnivalesque
aesthetic
1. Context and Perspective: Gutenberg (1397-1468) and his legacy
a. the history of early media
Johannes Gutenberg, a German inventor and metalworker, had a problem. He was making a
meager living as a manufacturer of souvenir mirrors for religious pilgrims, and incurring debt.
He knew there was easy money to be made in the sale of “indulgences”—certificates sold to
pilgrims that earned them time off from suffering in purgatory after death but before entering
heaven. But the production of the certificates by hand, the only way of producing text, was
labour-intensive and time-consuming.
Gutenberg decided that the fastest way to publish indulgences—think of them as licenses to
sin—was to mechanize the writing process. So he created metal molds for letters, then filled
them with a molten lead alloy to create cast letters. The cast letters were uniform in size, and
could be aligned on a frame. Once aligned in the desired order—forming the words desired for
a page—the frame was inked and then pressed against parchment or vellum, producing
Europe’s first printed text in 1450 CE. (Note that BCE—before common era, and CE—common
era—have replaced in common usage the Christian means of marking epochs, BC and AD.)
The British Library’s collection of Gutenberg bibles can be seen here:
https://www.bl.uk/treasures/gutenberg/homepage.html
After printing indulgences, in 1452 Gutenberg began his now-historic project of publishing the
Christian Bible. Hand-copied books took a monk a year to produce; the new printing press
could produce books, pamphlets, and other printed materials at a mere fraction of the cost and
time it took to transcribe. What followed was an explosive growth in printing so great that the
Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan christened the new era the “Gutenberg
galaxy.” Between 1450 and 1500, more than twenty million books were published; between
1500 and 1600, the number of printed books grew to between 200 and 300 million.
But Gutenberg left behind more than the world’s first mass-manufactured commodity, the
printed book. His invention, one preceded by the Chinese inventor Bi Sheng in the year 1045
CE and his development of movable type, changed the culture of Europe and the West
forever.
b. the problem of the public sphere
In his famous 1962 book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Jürgen
Habermas defines the public sphere as follows:
“The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private
people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from
above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the
general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere
of commodity exchange and social labor. The medium of this political confrontation was
peculiar and without historical precedent: people's public use of their reason.” (p. 27)
The “public sphere” is a concept familiar to students of communication. It is the favourite
metaphor of those wanting to give material form to the necessary but intangible role
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