The development of digital culture over the last 20 years has brought about issues regarding declining literacy and the future of conservation. With stupidity becoming fashionable and anti-intellectualism reaching an all-time high, the foggy future of personhood is becoming more and more clear: social media, more specifically the hostility towards literature, is changing society for the worse.
Functional literacy rates are dropping.
People are reading less and less. Those who do read are ostracized by those who do not.
It seems steadily more prevalent that the world is moving away from the period society was in before and onto a new, less intellectual, period.
In contemporary culture, the digitalization of media and content has created a system where ideas and news are spread by word-of-mouth rather than official sources. Memes spread from page to page and are filtered through the algorithm to fit each user’s specific desires. News is manipulated and catered to fit a certain political viewpoint. The product that the average consumer sees is different from what actually happened. The process that was once known as mass media seems to be disappearing, and this process of its closing is known as The Gutenberg Parenthesis.
The Gutenberg Parenthesis is an idea coined by Danish scholar Lars Ole Sauerberg, alongside colleagues Thomas Pettitt and Marianne Børch, which describes that after the invention of the Gutenberg printing press, society entered an era of mass media and moved away from the word-of-mouth transmission of ideas and news; however, with the modern revolution that is online social and informational spaces the “parenthesis” is closing, thus ending the period of mass media and print and moving towards a period of fluidity and quotation rather than exact citation. The theory posits that the contemporary spaces that are created by the digital age limit the capacity of stability in mass news and storytelling, and how the new era more closely resembles that of the period before the print was invented where word spread through people and not a greater medium. Though, through an eyesight of the current state of social presence in media, it is important to realize that this is not inevitable and can be prevented.
Many scholars and theorists, such as JA Westenberg and Jeff Jarvis, place particular blame on the rise of social media and the rapid development of online presence and culture to the closing. They argue that word-of-mouth transmission causes the loss of individuality. As Westenberg puts it, “We may lose individual authorship. In oral culture, the tribe speaks through every voice. In literate culture, individual thinkers can depart from consensus and have their departures preserved.”
Ideas and pieces of culture and events are passed around on the internet so much that what originally happened becomes lost. What really happened during this shooting? Why did Clavicular get framemogged by the ASU frat leader? What is the current progress of the government’s new actions? These questions are left without definitive answers, whether memes or political news, for people who search for them because credibility is being lost. The answer to how to stop this is to bring credibility to the digital world.
The loss of credibility is a crisis, and it must be fixed.
News stations must find exact data and sources for what they post. People must stop changing stories to fit their narratives. Governments must be clear and concise in everything they do.
Until changes are made, the deterioration of the period that everyone grew up in will continue. The parenthesis will close; however, it can be left open.
