What Gutenberg and Snapchat Have in Common
This past Monday, 16 wide-eyed and eager graduate students (myself included) sat in room 430 of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and unpacked the ideals and philosophy behind Social Journalism. With professors Jeff Jarvis and Carrie Brown leading the charge in our Community Engagement course, we discussed the seismic changes that are happening in the journalism industry, from citizen journalism through social media to the rise of listicles. We were left with the following question: “But how did we get here?”
To fully understand this drastic shift and how our role as social journalists falls into the crossroads of an evolving business model and a future that is still unknown, we have to take ourselves back in time — like, 1450’s back in time . As part of our class discussion, Jeff Jarvis dramatically explained the genius behind Johannes Gutenberg, German printer and publisher extraordinaire of the Printing Revolution (imagine Steve Jobs, but with a longer beard and a bowl cut). His introduction of mechanical movable type to Europe sparked a mass communication movement and ultimately launched the modern period of human history.
However, we know that the iPhone 6s wasn’t built in a day, and it took nearly 600 years to make the transition from placing little value on ownership of the written word to making ownership, content, copyright and control the biggest priority.
Fast forward to 2016 and it seems as though we’ve reverted back to pre-Gutenberg, with less control and ownership in a constant frenzy of digital upgrades. Thomas Pettitt and Lars Ole Sauerberg, two scholars from the University of Denmark, note this trend as the Gutenberg Parenthesis — the idea that the digital age is actually the future’s way of returning back to practices and ideas that were prominent before Gutenberg’s invention entered the scene and changed the world.
With those ideas in mind, there seems to be a disconnect between what traditional journalism institutions say journalism is and should continue to be and what the public (aka, our communities) want and need from our industry. There is a light at the end of the tunnel, however. Could Social Journalism be the Gutenberg equivalent in the Digital Revolution? If the future of journalism rests in the hands of the community it serves, then that very well could be true.
As we enter a program that is carving the path for the future of journalism, it is our responsibility to share our knowledge as we learn and grow with our communities for the next 10 months. Just as Gutenberg ushered in the sharing of knowledge more than half a century ago, he has also inadvertently challenged each of us to create solutions for sharing information in the New Media Age.
Discussion Questions:
- What challenges or obstacles are you expecting as you begin to work with your communities?
- How do you plan to overcome those challenges in the weeks ahead?
- If Gutenberg had Snapchat, what would be his username?
