Journalist and educator Jeff Jarvis returns to the Plutopia podcast to discuss Hot Type: The Magnificent Machine That Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad, exploring how the Linotype transformed printing and helped launch mass media. Through stories of inventor Ottmar Mergenthaler, printers’ unions, and Twain’s disastrous investment in a competing machine, Jarvis traces the connections among technological innovation, labor, and the advertising business model. The conversation follows printing’s evolution into desktop publishing and considers parallels with generative AI, including opportunities for creativity and concerns about homogenized writing and human control. Jarvis challenges the idea that mass media ever represented a unified public, arguing that its decline offers an opportunity to build more conversational, collaborative media grounded in communities and individual agency.
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Jeff Jarvis:
In this [next, after Hot Type]book, about the Death of Mass, I want to look at the fact that mass was an invention. Mass media was an invention. It wasn’t forever. It wasn’t a natural state of things. And as it disappears, I want to look at how we got here to recognize that there were choices that were made that could have turned out differently, so that today, as mass disappears and there’s a void left, we can recognize the choices we have going forward. I can’t predict what’s going to happen. There will definitely be chaos, but I think we have a huge opportunity now to replace this, what I see as an insult to people—to put them in this gigantic bucket of the mass and make presumptions about them, and to shift back to a more conversational, community-based, collaborative society, if we do it right.
Links
- Buzzmachine by Jeff Jarvis (Blog)
- Rare Book School: History of Typography.
