Journeying the Gutenberg Galaxy

Any technology tends to create a new human environment. Marshall McLuhan

Throughout our lives we make contacts with other people. Many contacts with many people. We talk directly or online, we phone them and they phone us, we write to each other, we plan or recap something. We live in live contact with other people, we get to know them and continue to get to know them. We form certain ideas about them. We devote a certain part of these ideas not to the people themselves, but to their thoughts. Contacts with other people thus lead us to imagine their thoughts, memories, assumptions, expectations, interests or plans: What are they thinking right now? How are they thinking about it? What do they think about other people's thoughts? There are many questions of this kind. It is not hard to imagine what this looks like in practice. For example, thoughts like these may arise during life: Mom probably wants Dad to think it's okay. Mary thinks Jane doesn't want Peter to go along with it. Brother probably doesn't know about Susan, but it would be awful if Mary found out. Mary knows for sure that I would be glad if Susan didn't take the job, but I wouldn't want her to tell Jane about it.

Other people's thoughts cannot be contacted directly. We do have a powerful mediator - speech - but speech is the medium of only some thoughts. Let us face it: people say much less than they think, and conversely, people think much more than they say. Our ideas about other people's thoughts arise only as a kind of theoretical guess - we only guess what the other person is thinking, only assume how they are thinking about it, how she probably imagines it, what he probably thinks, what they both think about other people's thoughts, and so on. By imagining individual people's thoughts, we build up a relatively complex picture of their thinking. We somehow count in advance that the other person is thinking, that they have a mind at their disposal which produces thoughts and which is shaped by those thoughts. So we live with the knowledge that there are other minds in other people, and so other thoughts, and conversely, there are other thoughts in other people, and so other minds in other people. Initially, we assume that our minds think like other people's minds. Later we find out that this is not quite so. Thus we develop an approximate theory by which we can understand other people, we can reasonably predict their reactions, speech and actions, we can influence them, and unfortunately, we can also manipulate them. Throughout our lives we make contacts with other people, and we use these contacts to check whether our theory of mind is correct.

But: there are also ideas about physically non-existent people. These non-physical people are found primarily in the world of books, in a separate media world - in the Gutenberg galaxy. It is a special place that exists thanks to our creativity of thought. In the Galaxy, one travels by reading. By reading, we create an idea of other, albeit physically non-existent people and an idea of their thoughts. When we arrive at people so created, we can participate in their lives in their environment, and at the same time have access to all the words they have spoken and all the ideas they have developed. The people of the Gutenberg galaxy are available as ideas, and they are available through books. The inhabitants of the Galaxy do not speak and think any more than they have been written down, they are available to us, so to speak, whole: we usually have an idea of what such inhabitants look like, we know their speech and their thoughts, they are simply accessible to us as recognizable individuals. Of course, they are not real people, they are only ideas formed in the mind, but these ideas think, speak and act like people.

People from the Gutenberg galaxy allow us more than real people. We can observe them interacting with other Galaxians - the advantage is that we can see into their minds. Any visitor to the Galaxy can observe the strange inhabitants of strange planets who, like real people, think something, want something, hope for something, fear something, or look forward to something. Moreover, if something unpleasant happens to, say, Holden Caulfield, it won't happen to us. What threatens him doesn't threaten us. We know that we are safe from what both the teenage Holden and the Weird Janko experienced, and from what Iľa the Queen and Anča the Viper experienced together. The same is true if something pleasant happens to a Galactic man or woman - we just know about it; it may not be pleasant to us. We know how these Galactic people react to pleasant or unpleasant events, how they talk about them, how they think about them, what they do in them, and how they act in them. And not only that: we even know what thoughts they assume in others - in real people and in the inhabitants of the Galaxy. This is shown quite well in the opening thoughts of Galaxian Holden Caulfield of planet The Catcher in the Rye:

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, an what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them. They're quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father. They're nice and all— I'm not saying that— but they're also touchy as hell.

(J. D. Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye)

Two moments are certainly worth noting. The first is Holden's notion of the thoughts of a traveler in the Gutenberg galaxy, at this point the thoughts he envisions in your mind. At first he is probably surprised that you are interested in his life (If you really want to hear about it...), Holden then assumes a certain expectation in you (First of all, you probably want to know...) so that he can describe it in more detail (...is where I was born, an what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me...). Holden - no matter who is reading his thoughts at the moment - assigns readers a mind, reckons with it, forms certain ideas about it. He has a theory about it. But he also has a theory about the thoughts in the minds of the galactic parents - and that's the second remarkable moment. For Holden gives the impression that he knows how his parents would react if they learnt he had revealed something of their private lives. Thanks to his theory, Holden can think that he understands his parents, that he can predict their reactions, and thus their speech, actions, and even serious changes in their health (...my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if...).

We can learn something useful from Galactic inhabitants about the people we make and maintain contact with. We seem to be able to understand them better when, at the same time, we seek to understand the people we are book-building, mind-constructing in our minds. It is reasonable to assume that journeys through the Gutenberg galaxy will lead individual travelers and entire crews in schools to a higher level of understanding of themselves and others. It may well be that they will also feel a little safer after such journeys - because they will, for example, better understand what the people they are talking to directly or online, or with whom they are recapitulating or planning something, are thinking and experiencing.

What do you think?

All rights reserved EDUAWEN EUROPE, Ltd.

Karel Dvořák PhD. – DaCoSiDe expert

Sources:

DUNBAR, Robin. 2009. Příběh rodu Homo. Nové dějiny evoluce člověka. Praha : Academia. 222 p. ISBN 978-80-200-1715-4

MAGRINI, Marco. 2021. Mozog – návod na použitie. Bratislava : Ikar. 256 p. ISBN 978-80-551-7204-0

MANGUEL, Alberto. Cestovatel, věž a červ. Čtenář jako metafora. Brno : Host. 147 p. ISBN 978-80-7491-568-0

McLUHAN, Marshall. 2008. The Gutenberg Galaxy. Toronto : University of Toronto Press. 293 p. ISBN 978-0-8020-6041-9

SALINGER, Jerome David. 1951. The Catcher in the Rye. New York : Bantam Book. 214 p.