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Page 1: Typographic Era

Typographic EraMechanical. Industrial. Expansive. XVI-XX centuries.

Electric AgeElectric. Automated. Media related. XX-XXI century. Implosive.

Try to take some distance and see those two as different civilizations organized around its technological means.

Page 2: Typographic Era

Typographic EraMechanical. Industrial. Expansive. XVI-XX centuries.

Electric AgeElectric. Automated. Media related. XX-XXI century. Implosive.

McLuhan said, technology ends shaping its users

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Typographic Era

Center

Mechanical. Industrial. Expansive.Western civilization. XVI-XX centuries.

A technological invention: The Movable Printing press (Guttemberg, XVI century) carries a deep changein western culture. With Knowledge being collected and transmitted through books and those being widely available,social roles change, religious reform happens, nationalisms grow, knowledge expands and science flourishes.Humans change their habits as a result of the accommodation to a new technology.

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Typographic Era

Center

Mechanical. Industrial. Expansive.Western civilization. XIX-XX centuries.

By mid eighteenth to nineteenth century, all the repercussions of this new technology had fully developed in the West.• Universities are the centers of transmission of knowledge.• Knowledge has become structured according to very different and defined disciplines. (Fragmentation)• All knowledge had been stored and classified through books. (Intensity)• Reading encourages grouping according to language. (Nationalisms)• There are specialists for every field of knowledge. (Specialization)• Specialist hold a high social/economical status.• People have become accustomed to follow a linear type of thought.• Storytelling has become linear.

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Electric Age

Margin

Electric. Automated. Media related. XX-XXI century. Implosive.

With a fully Industrialized society that has had little change in the last 70 years,New opportunities happen on the margin of the market, of society.

Cultural blending is not seen any more as a detriment of social identity.New cultural forms happen in the the margins of society, were immigrants blend.

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Typographic Era

Visual

The book as a way of transmitting information. The eye becomes the primordial sense (reading).All the other senses relegated to a second plane as recipients of information.

Official documents, proofs in Court, are always written documents .They have fundamental importance and need to have been verified by an authority (stamped).

Signature as a proof of identity. (it was a problem at the beginning of e-commerce)

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Electric Age

Tactile

All the senses have the same importance. Tactile/ Acoustic space (not visual!)

Sound becomes more and more important.Social revolution carried through Rock, Pop music during 20 century.

Quality of sound. Definition of Noise. (headphones to hear music, to not hear noise)

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Typographic Era

Eye

Typical of literary cultures.Writing is visual. Analytical sense. Allows distance/detachment.

Avid readers are generally not very emotional individuals.

Reading is actually decoding alphabetic combinations.Long reading demands high levels of concentration and intense brain activity in a very specific area of the cortex.Both seeing and assimilating speech 9in conversation) are natural activities in humans.Reading and writing implies another level of brain activity.

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Electric Age

Ear

Typical of oral culturesThe constant monitor. Sound emanates from every environment. Immersive.

Pre-literary cultures function like post-literary cultures (like the age of Internet)

Sound is more physically experienced (vibration).Is more compatible with other sensorial inputs, (taste, touch, simple seeing)It is processed by the brain in a more direct fashion.This is why it also has a more emotional effect.

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Typographic Era

Complete

Rational. Mechanical. Linear (like reading). Analytical. Extensive.Specific knowledge expands to very possible sphere of life (Dictionary, Encyclopedia)

Cataloguing, classifying is almost a vice of Western Culture.There are specialists for any field of knowledge. Those specialists learn through books, with little pragmatic verification of what they learn.

In a linear type of structure is mandatory to arrive to completion to obtain any kind of benefit from the whole process.

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Electric Age

Incomplete

Intuitive. Non linear (input from everywhere). Interactive. Synthesis.

In an intuitive kind of process, not every step is verified, and not specific sequence of though is needed.Though processes involving intuition work faster because they don’t need every bit of information(although the have a higher margin of error, of course).Non linear processes don’t need to follow an specific sequence of events either.

Both intuition and Interactivity work more with pattern recognition than with Analysis of the parts.

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Typographic Era

Rational

Detachment. Non involvement.Western rationalism: uniform, continuous, sequential.

A rational process needs to follow a very strict progress of thought.It needs to take into account every step of the process (to be verified through logic), what makes it highly sequential and linear in nature.

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Intuitive

Emotional deep Participation of oral cultures/ media cultures.(reality shows, celebrity culture…)

Intuition needs a pre-acquired knowledge (in a similar case).That type of knowledge can be socially and culturally transmitted.

Intuition is more social than rationalism. Because it needs less detachment is also more emotional in nature.Emotions are very easily spread through Humans, so emotions are also highly social. When a group has an emotional experience it always becomes a deep experience and a highly participatory one.

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Typographic Era

Composition

Literate. Rational. Linearly structured according to a structure.

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Electric Age

Improvisation

Intuitive. Fragment/collage. Free/random mix of elements. Integration.

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Typographic Era

Syntax

Literary culture. Highly structured. Written information.

Rules in the use of a language or a system.Its use and knowledge makes a highly instructed (specialized) individual in that language or system.You can speak a language without perfectly using/knowing its correct syntax.The more syntax you use, the more structured the language becomes.

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Mosaic

Collage. Every opinion counts (blogs, info from sites). Plural.

In a mosaic, a collage, every bit and piece counts as itself, without taking importance off their contribution to the whole.

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Typographic Era

Soliloquy

Specialization (only the specialist’s opinion counts)Partial point of view. Central government. Nationalisms.

In the same way that this era is characterized by a tendency to the center (to itself) through specialization, intensity, and productivity, it tends to produce soliloquy.“ The artist as a genius, as an exception”. “The voice of the country, the best of us”.

There is only one clear voice because a few broadcast and press Media control the flow of all information (news).That information spread through Radio, TV and newspapers actually comes from even fewer information agencies.

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Chorus

Internet. Information from every point of view. No borders. Involvement.

Media is easier to produce at a personal level. The cost and diversity/specialization of equipment needed has highly decreased. Distribution of media, with the internet, is free (citizen-journalism).When events take place, specially at international level, many versions of the event can be heard.

People with no influence in broadcast media/government can be heard.The influence of centralized institutions decrease.

Everybody can have a voice.

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Typographic Era

Self expression

Specialization. Individuality. Competition.

Individuality is greatly appreciated. With fewer social support (family/ group) success is more important.People compare themselves at a higher level ( not with their neighbor, relatives, small group surroundings, but at a more abstract level.People want to feel detached form their own social group. Success, individuality, original self expression are all valid pathways. Competitive character is also encouraged.

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Electric Age

Group therapy

Highly social. Tribal. Non egocentric.

Eve at a psychological level, we have gone from individual psychoanalysis to group therapy.When society tends to be less individualistic, we realize human interaction can be healing.

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Typographic Era

Active

Mechanical, analytical attitude. Expansive.Linear. Covering every aspect of experience.

The mechanical, typographical era, tends to follow every path to completion (linear paths need to get to the end).Science makes huge progress because of the increased analytical approach and the value given to work and success.This era wants to discover, understand and control. Expand.

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Electric Age

Reactive

Recycling. Readapting. Translating previous/other experience.Synthesis, not Analysis.

With most “systems in place” (medicine, science, education), the electric age doesn’t tend to build/act but to reorganize/react.The challenge now is not to be able “to understand as a way to build/discover/control something new”, but how to combine all existing systems into something better, simpler and more effective.That is to synthesize.

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Typographic Era

Build

Mechanical age. Analytical system. Splits, divides everything by means of control.Centralization.

Specialization in knowledge is not only a way of getting social prestige/higher salaries.It responds to a deeper need of an Analytical system of breaking everything into the simplest bit (in order to comprehend it better).With so much specialization (dedicated spaces), works of infrastructure become huge. Metropolis are developed following the model of the Roman empire, as huge centers connected by huge and long paths of transportation.

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Wander

Automation brings Decentralization as a consequence .Knowledge is not localized. Surfing the web.

At a physical level, the biggest consequence of the electric age will be the dissolution of the cities.There is no need to live at a certain place to be able to work.The very expensive and confining infrastructure is not needed either.

At a more abstract level, high specialists are not an imperative anymore. The result is that “career paths/professions are not live long options anymore.People need to be flexible. Everybody needs to have a certain level of technical expertise ( the same way that everybody needed to drive and have a car before, the computer is also the way of transportation).

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Experience

Rational. Linear. Specialist is valued by society.Appreciation of age as a synonymous of experience. Society organized acordingly.

Knowledge and specialization, individuality, are all values that increase with experience, with age.In the typographic era experts are people that have worked on the same thing for a very long time and have succeeded.

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Innocence

Intuitive/ innovative approach.Praise of youth. Everything is possible, since experience is not a pre-requisite.

Beauty follows exclusively the cannon of youth: men and women are more attractive the closer they get to the markers of youth in their own genders ( bright eyes, strong hair, tight skin, flat stomach, strong muscles, high breasts, narrow hips).Even psychologically, young characters are preferred: cheerful fearless attitude. Quick, loud, temperamental reaction to events. Pathological optimism. Endless energy.

At a work level, experience and a long career are not imperatives anymore. Some of the new technologies haven’t had time to be taught at a University and they are better apprehended by people with more time and “fresher brains”. Younger people are becoming socially/economically influential ( Steve Jobs, Bill Gates).

Since the apparition of Rock and Roll and Pop music, youth has highly increased its value.(that was also the time of TV and the formative years of pop culture).We have got to a time were there is nothing comparable to youth.

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Achievement

Consequence of experience. Competition.

In a linear-typographic society, achievement arrives at the end of the path.Television has been underlying for fifty years the exception of that: Athletes. People who’s career culmination happens before they fully enter adulthood.Notice that in the Film era, athletes were celebrated as a group (by nationalities!).TV presents celebrity-athletes. Individuals whose career can be emotionally followed.

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Electric Age

Celebrity

Praise of youth. Everything is possible.Equivalent of experience and achievement. Celebrities become mediatic role

models.

With experts and older people emptying the stand of role-models, a new kind of those enter the mediatic scene: the famous people.

Notice that a celebrity figure doesn’t exactly match the role of the self-made individual or the genius. People are famous for not very deep reasons and they are so as a need of the media to present new faces (by popular demand). Later on, celebrities become role-models for the media (just as living hangers, they personalize the different products that advertisers sell in that media).

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Typographic Era

Science

Expansive knowledge. Categorized, analyzed, structured.

Science, as an expanding, analytical, systematic type of knowledge has flourished through the Mechanical-typographic era.

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Magic

Emotional knowledge. Non rational (intuitive). Non structured according to traditional formulas.

Other types of knowledge that were not recognized by the center are accepted now (examples on health issues).

Those are systems that are not as rationally based, but that may have more emotional impact (reiky therapy, sound therapy).Also systems that could not match the traditional formulas of those fields (Acupuncture).

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Typographic Era

Will

Structured knowledge. Individuality. Expansive attitude.

The Mechanical-typographic era needs conviction and constant hard work to flourish.

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Wish

Emotional knowledge. Immediate.

Because the electric age causes time to compress, doesn’t need the individual to accumulate large amounts of knowledge, and doesn’t need him to have a long path of experience.Because individuals are allowed and encouraged to have a very developed emotional side, WISH, with it its immediate and emotional character becomes more dominant than will.

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History

Expansive knowledge. Categorized, analyzed, structured.Facts, partial point of view. Self importance.

History is a very important source of knowledge for the Mechanical-typographic era.Historical facts are some of the first things ever recorded in writing.

History is just a point of view about past events. They can fabricate whole systems of believe, not always based on the true facts.

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Leyend

Emotional knowledge. History, facts are not important.Masses are impacted and influenced emotionally.

In the Electric era, with all parties given they point of view, History gets highly discredited.Knowing the past has become less important, almost a form of entertainment.A piece of history, reviewed as a movie, resembles more a legend than anything else.If history doesn’t make so much emphasis on the facts, but gives more importance to its emotional aspects,We are back into a legend structure.

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Politics

Organized, structured society. Centralization.

A very structured society, with will to expand and tendency to centralize, produces strong governments, so politics are very important to its good functioning.Political issues are taken with a got of energy and very serious focus.

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Prophecy

Emotional knowledge. Facts are not important.

Politics, and specially national politics are also highly discredited in the Electric era.Nationalism is not seen as a value anymore, there is plenty of information, social relations and sympathy towards people/institutions from other countries, so having been born somewhere else is not a big issue.Borders seem to collapse, and this one is not an exception.

Regarding politics as a way of foretelling the future (political campaigns), it comes back to almost an entertaining arena. It is a colorful social event, fully supported by the media, but the ultimate seriousness is gone.

People still react to politics, but in an area closer to emotional participation. And not with too much will.

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Art

Product/object oriented society. IndividualityProduct of specialization.

In the Mechanical-typographical era, Art is a product of the self-expression of the genius.An artist is an exceptionally gifted individual, and art is mostly appreciated as something greater that what the average can do.It is also highly elitist in its content (difficult to apprehend, takes time and study to be familiar with).In many cases it is presented as the maximum achievement of a nation.

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Dream

Emotional knowledge. Intuitive approach. Non specialization.Facts/objects are not important. Reality is not praised.

Art has lost its social prestige. Everybody can express themselves in the audiovisual medium.The mediums that Art, Work and Communication use are almost identical, so the traditional difference in medium that distinguished Art (painting, stone sculpture, forge and cast) is gone.Art has become more democratic.

Even people that dedicate themselves to be an artist, tend to produce less and less “real objects”.Reality, execution, facts are not so important in this era. Reflection, experience and emulation (virtual reality) can work as well as the others.

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Doubt

Structured knowledge of reality. Expansive. (verification needed)

In a civilization based on verified facts and clearly structured paths of work, one needs to doubt to keep the quality of work.It is a guarantee of the perfect functioning of the system.Doubt implies effort and more work (it is expansive in nature).

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Certainty

Emotional knowledge. Non rational (intuitive).Knowledge not so related to facts.

In a civilization with high emotional presence, with emotions not understood as weakness, but as a way of participating in the social arena, certainty is more present than doubt.

Believing in a legend is less dangerous than believing in History, specially if you are not wishing to act on it.