Tom Haymes
“But the scanty wisdom of man, on entering into an affair which looks well at first, cannot discern the poison that is hidden in it… Therefore, if he who rules a principality cannot recognize evils until they are upon him, he is not truly wise; and this insight is given to few.” – Machiavelli, The Prince, XXII
“Ted’s vision requires much greater re-coding of our basic assumptions and operating environments.” – Frøde Hegland, 2014
“It [film] was born as a sideshow, a novelty, quick fun like fast food. But almost at once it became clear that it was also a language, a new language, a language of ideas.” – The Story of Film, Episode 1 at 24:45
Introduction
Human beings like to objectify everything, if we take that term in its most literal sense. We feel the need to create physical metaphors in part because we have only recently graduated from a world dominated by physicality.
The Gutenberg Parenthesis is a term originally coined by Lars Ole Sauerberg. It refers to the period between the invention of mass printing in the 15th century to the present day. ”The perception of the book as a ‘sacred’ and fixed object is central to the Gutenberg Parenthesis.” (Sauerberg, 2009, p. 3)
Because of the power of the book to store and share ideas, it became a source of legitimacy both inside and outside of academia. “However, the period of the bound volume retaining a certain sanctity should be considered a perception, regardless of what the material history of print culture might say.” (Frost, 2009, p. 4)
The underlying technology, however, changed starting 30 to 40 years ago as new forms of digital representation emerged. This challenged both the physicality of the book and, eventually, it’s legitimacy.
In the 2020s, we inhabit a space between media paradigms. We have to go back centuries, if not millennia, to find spaces in western culture to find a period where this wasn’t true.
However, this was not like flipping a switch. There were liminal periods where the technology of writing and literacy coexisted with oral traditions, much like literacy and digital representation exist today.
We find ourselves amid a paradigm shift much like the one we see in the sciences between Copernicus and Newton (Kuhn, 1959). During these periods past methods and thought patterns were discredited but new patterns had not yet emerged.
This paper will argue that we are in the late stages of such a period now. The primacy of physical media as the primary conduit of ideas and legitimacy is being questioned across a broad spectrum of intellectual practice. However, the legitimacy of printed text still dominates, much like the earth-centric views of the solar system hung on for over a century after Copernicus.
The Gutenberg Parenthesis
There were times where oral and written text existed side-by-side. Edward Haymes and Susann Samples write:
The one route heroic legend did not take was through written texts. It has been suggested that works like the Nibelungenlied were historical fiction built on chronicle knowledge about the past. Many scholars are uncomfortable with missing links in the written historical chain. We need to keep in mind, however, that legends know much that is not in the chronicles and vice versa. (Haymes and Samples, 1996, p.47)
In other words, there was a period of transition when oral and written media coexisted and commingled. Today, it is almost impossible to separate the idea of a word from its written concept. We may think of oral narrative as being essentially the same as written narrative, but as Walter Ong writes,
Though words are grounded in oral speech, writing tyrannically locks them into a visual field forever. A literate person, asked to think of the word ‘nevertheless’, will normally (and I strongly suspect always) have some image, at least vague, of the spelled-out word and be quite unable ever to think of the word ‘nevertheless’ for, let us say, 60 seconds without adverting to any lettering but only to the sound. This is to say, a literate person cannot fully recover a sense of what the word is to purely oral people. (Ong, 1982, p. 12)
We have become used to the fixity of text, and by extension, paper or paper metaphors in our lives. The very idea of ending the primacy of text seems as alien to us as writing down poems was to the bards of Europe in the early part of the last millennium.
The primacy of text has persisted despite the intrusion of electronic media from radio to television to digital narratives. All are structured underneath by textual forms because that’s how we conceive of information now. (Ong, pp. 11).
Lars Ole Sauerberg takes this a step further when he refers to the Gutenberg Parenthesis as something that, “will be seen as dominated and even defined by the cultural significance of print.” (Sauerberg, 2009, p. 2) He goes on to write that this period is coming to an end:
As the opening of the Gutenberg Parenthesis meant the closing of privileged production and consumption of textually communicated knowledge, statement and information, the closing of the Gutenberg Parenthesis symmetrically implies the opening up to a completely new and so far only partially glimpsed – let alone understood – cognitive situation. (Sauerberg, 2009, p. 3)
If we are still within the Gutenberg Parenthesis, we will tend to conflate the textual object with its ideas. We don’t say, “that’s a great thinker” as much as we say, “that’s a great book.” When ideas transitioned from orality to literacy, Europeans had several centuries in which to adjust their perceptions and practice. We are going through it over the course of decades, within a single human lifetime.
Thomas Kuhn refers to these events as paradigm shifts. These are often difficult even in the face of scientific discoveries that disrupt existing paradigms and practice. Humans are resistant to change.
Though some scientists, particularly the older and more experienced ones, may resist indefinitely, most of them can be reached in one way or another. Conversions will occur a few at a time until, after the last holdouts have died, the whole profession will again be practicing under a single, but now a different, paradigm. (Kuhn, 1994, p. 152)
The scientific paradigm shift Kuhn is describing took well over a century and the transition from orality to literacy took multiple centuries. We are having to manage an ideational paradigm shift over the course of a single human lifetime. This shift requires both deeper and broader changes in our information landscape than either of these aforementioned shifts, which was concentrated within fairly small, literate elites.
A person born in the 1960s started out in a world of mimeographs and Xerox copies and now lives in the world of social media and AI. From a media perspective this is an even bigger shift than the lifetime between horse-drawn carriages and jet aircraft in the first half of the 20th century. Media technology shifts are easier to overlook or dismiss than physical technology shifts because you are not confronted with a discordant physical object.
Informational shifts lack a physical presence. They are mental and perceptual shifts.
Kuhn also argues that debating conceptual paradigms is an especially difficult process because, while it’s easy to debate the flaws of the old paradigm, it’s impossible to rationally argue for the new paradigm without referring to the old one.
When paradigms enter, as they must, into a debate about paradigm choice, their role is necessarily circular. Each group uses its own paradigm to argue in that paradigm’s defense. (Kuhn, 1994, p. 94)
Thus, as the Gutenberg Parenthesis closes, we are facing a unique challenge in human history. We see the flaws in the old paradigm but have no clear understanding of what the new paradigm will look like.
Since we’re discussing the most fundamental of concepts, ideas themselves, it’s particularly difficult to find firm footing in arguing for alternatives. Further complicating the situation, most of us have no idea that we’re even experiencing a paradigm shift, much less have any understanding of the kind of adaptation that’s going to be required of our thinking.
That thinking is tied to our literacy, as Ong points out. Literacy, however, imposes invisible constraints in how we approach problems. Indeed, the very idea of paradigms (and paradigm shifts) is determined by the written record, at least since Gutenberg. In other words, even the concept of “next” is textually bound. This has real consequences for a world seeking direction in the face of political uncertainty, climate change, and automation.
The Problem of Fixity
It was only by ignoring the externalities of the industrial age that we marched blindly into a world of rapid climate change. In a narrative devoted to material progress, dissonant narratives are easy to ignore. For example, as early as 1939, G.S. Callendar documented the dangers of increasing the carbon dioxide load of the atmosphere (Callendar, G.S., 1939, pp. 33-39).
Callendar’s argument was outside the narrative mainstream in 1939 just as much as Copernicus’s ideas of a heliocentric solar system were outside of the mainstream for over a century, so it was largely ignored for decades. Since it did not conform to the linear text-driven narrative, it was swept aside by the teleology of capitalism, and its derivative, communism, both of which focused on material betterment over all else.
The United States elected a president in 2024 that denied the idea that man-made climate change is happening. President Trump is drawing on the narrative of unlimited growth that has been central to the American, and the wider capitalist, narrative. This teleology achieved gained momentum following World War II when the world accepted the US narrative of unlimited growth as the way out of poverty and scarcity. While President Trump is expressing a maximalist position, both political parties in the US subscribe to this narrative in one form or another, as do many others worldwide.
However, this linear narrative has been challenged by everything from climate change to automation (by replacing workers) to international trade. The idea of material progress has persisted even though the reality of it largely stalled for most people in the US in the 1980s, if not before.
We feel the need to tell stories to justify our past. Linear text limits this to teleological stories with a beginning, middle and end.
For over 60 years, Ted Nelson has been writing and speaking about a new way of thinking about information. His ideas were so radical that he had to invent new vocabulary just to be able to describe them. Like Doug Engelbart and the mouse, he is principally recognized for a small part of his vision: hypertext. Even more frustrating for him has been the fundamental misapplication of his original ideas from the early 60s.
Xanadu®, Nelson’s system for organizing information is fundamentally different from the web as we know it today, which he hates. After hypertext, he developed the term “transclusion” to differentiate his concepts from one-way information flows based on paper metaphors.
The web that evolved in the 1990s was based on paper, with all its limitations. It is impossible to see how information is connected through the hyperlinks of Tim Berners-Lee. This led to the proliferation of information without a coherent model to organize it. This is not the hypertext that Nelson conceived.
This is important for our discussion here because transclusions imply a galaxy of information, not an “information superhighway” as the internet was commonly described as in the first decade of its existence. As he writes in Possiplex: “A link connects two things which are different. A transclusion connects two things which are the same.” (Nelson, 2011, p. 300)
This is a critical distinction. It allows for the separation of ideas from fixed media. Roy Ascott calls this telenoia:
The word I coined to describe both the means and the meaning of this process is “telenoia,” from the Greek roots tele,“far oª,” and nous,“mind.” Telenoia is networked consciousness, interactive awareness, mind at large (to use Gregory Bateson’s term). And although it’s a new word, I think you might agree that its meaning has a very old provenance, in that it perhaps should have been the very first word to be uttered as we emerged into our humanness, as we evolved our distinctiveness amongst the primates, signalled by the emergence of shared consciousness, from which I suppose our sense of society and social responsibility grew. But if, in the beginning, the Word was Telenoia; it is evident now that we lost it, perhaps in inverse ratio to our gain in verbal intelligence, or at any rate in the cultural prioritisation of linear, mechanical thinking, which was especially accelerated during our recent history of deterministic industrialisation. Certainly, we abandoned right hemisphere thinking—visual, mosaic, all-at-once-thinking—long ago. (Ascott, 2007, p. 260)
We are looking at the augmentation of our capacity to think and conceptualise, and the extension and refinement of our senses: to conceptualise more richly and to perceive more fully both inside and beyond our former limitations of seeing, thinking, and constructing. The cybernet is the sum of all those artificial systems of probing, communicating, remembering, and constructing that data processing, satellite links, remote sensing, and tele-robotics variously serve in the enhancement of our being. (Ascott, 2007, p. 320)
Nelson’s vision of Xanadu effectively disconnected ideas from their media and made them infinitely interchangeable. Transclusion may finally cross the line between artisanal and mass tool. Telenoia provides one vision of where this process might lead.
In 2025, we might be at the Newtonian phase of this paradigm shift. We live in an information environment every bit as disjointed and uncertain as the physical environment was in the 17th century. Like Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler we have broken the old fundament and are searching for a new system of thinking.
The Bounded Promise of Print
 
Like the Medieval oral poets, we are reaching the end of our capacity to manage information at scale. The boxes in which we store information are no longer sufficient for our information needs. Most of our problems are driven by information bottlenecks.
We no longer suffer from crises of scarcity; we now suffer from crises of distribution. Distribution is an information problem.
We no longer suffer from the linear challenges of production; we suffer from the intertwingled challenges of climate change and wealth distribution. Again, we will find our solutions in the intersections, not right in front of us.
We know how to do democracy correctly to empower everyone in a society, even if we have never truly approached that ideal in most countries. Politicians are very good at framing complex challenges as linear ones. Breaking these linear narratives requires a whole new way of thinking about information.
The New Tools

Our tools are no longer fit to purpose, just like the physics of the 17th century was no longer fit to purpose in explaining a heliocentric cosmology. Newton’s insights required the invention of a whole suite of scientific instruments, from the telescope (which he refined) and the microscope to more sophisticated tools of mathematical and physical measurement. However, they represented the culmination of a shift in perception more than anything else.
Like Newton, it is our challenge to recognize how these pieces fit together and leverage the tools we need to invent to be able to perceive them. For one thing, we make inadequate use of visual communication to break ourselves from the linearity of text.
Visual language loosens the tremendous restrictiveness of the alphabet and prose. With visual language, the funnel can be circumnavigated. Reality and understanding can be poured back into our midst. It does not avoid the human condition of always filtering data. Of course, human perception systems in themselves act as filters: We must translate all data received through the senses and conceptual systems. Visual language, however, opens wider the gates of communication. It lets more data through, with greater complexity, accuracy, and nuance. (Horne, 2017, p. 242)
Up until now, our telematic tools were not developed enough to make this plausible. This is shifting because AI has lowered the barriers to entry in remixing information into different formats, perspectives, and connections.
Large Language Models, based on transformer technology, also increase the telematic possibility for information. We are going back to an early way of thinking about information as a fluid object rather than fixed onto a sheet of paper.
This does not mean we should discard text but rather that it becomes just one part of a larger canvas of expressive media. Sometimes you want a teleological approach. However, we now need to consider the very direction of argument when making decisions about our narrative. Our tools should no longer condition how we think. This is the perceptual shift we need to make going forward.
In much the same way as the refinement of 17th century physical and analytical tools were necessary for the Newtonian Revolution of the sciences, our current moment requires visualization, as well as the ability to process information in the abstract, like Ted Nelson proposed. The unique capability of LLMs to separate ideas from their medium has brought us to a point where whole new ways of connecting information are possible.
Unlike literacy which took centuries to achieve broad distribution, this paradigm shift will occur in a matter of years or decades. This is only possible because the barriers to entry are so much lower. We no longer must rely on a small elite with access to the tools and time to change how we see the world. The real question is whether we can cross the perceptual barriers inherent in a paradigm shift.
We are no longer just upgrading our thinking tools. We are changing the shape of thought itself. To meet the challenges of this age, we must unshackle ideas from the constraints of print, resist the seduction of oversimplified narratives, and embrace a new visual, fluid, and augmented intelligence. Transclusion is not just a technical innovation, it is a cognitive invitation. Whether we accept it may determine how we learn, govern, and survive in the decades ahead.


Bibliography
- Ascott, Roy. Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2007.
- Callendar, G.S. “The Composition of the Atmosphere Through the Ages.” Meteorological Magazine, vol. 74, no. 878, London, March 1939, pp. 33-39.
- Frost, Simon R. “Shopping Beyond the Parenthesis: An Equivalence of Books and Bottled Ketchup.” Orbis Litterarum, vol. 64, no. 2, 2009, pp. 83-103.
- Haymes, Edward R., and Susann T. Samples. Heroic Legends of the North: An Introduction to the Nibelung and Dietrich Cycles. (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1996). (Garland Reference Library of the Humanities; vol. 1403). ISBN 0-8153-0033-6
- Horn, Robert E. Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century (Bainbridge Island, WA, Microvu, 2017)
- Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 3rd. ed., 1994.
- Nelson, Theodor H. Possiplex: Movies, Intellect, Creative Control, My Computer Life and the Fight for Civilization: An Autobiography of Ted Nelson. Mindful Press, Hackettstown; distributed by Lulu.com, 2010.
- Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. (London: Routledge, 1982)
- Sauerberg, Lars Ole. “The Gutenberg Parenthesis – Print, Book and Cognition.” Orbis Litterarum, vol. 64, no. 2, 2009, pp. 79–80.
Some Further Reading
NARRATIVE
- Heidegger, M. (1977). The question concerning technology and other essays (W. Lovitt, Trans.). Harper & Row.
- McNeely, I. F., & Wolverton, L. (2008). Reinventing knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet. (W. W. Norton & Company)
- Ong, W. J. (1982). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. Routledge.
DESIGN
- Ascott, R. (2003). Telematic embrace: Visionary theories of art, technology, and consciousness. (E. A. Shanken, Ed.) (University of California Press)
- Pendleton-Jullian, Ann and John Seely Brown (2018), Design Unbound: Designing for Emergence in a White Water World (MIT Press)
TECHNOLOGY DESIGN - Bush, Vannevar, “As We May Think” The Atlantic Monthly (July 1945).
- Dechow, D. R., & Struppa, D. C. (Eds.). (2015). Intertwingled: The work and influence of Ted Nelson. Springer.
- Engelbart, Douglas (1962), “Augmenting Human Intellect,” (Stanford Research Institute at https://dougengelbart.org/pubs/papers/scanned/Doug_Engelbart-AugmentingHumanIntellect.pdf)
- Morville, Peter (2014). Intertwingled: Information in systems (Semantic Studios)
- Nelson, T. H. (1974). Computer lib: You can and must understand computers now/dream machines. Hugo’s Book Service.
- Nelson, T. H. (1994). Literary machines (93rd ed.). Mindful Press.
- Nelson, T. H. (2010). Possiplex: Movies, intellect, creative control, my computer life and the fight for civilization. (Mindful Press)
VISUALIZATION
- Bodenhamer, D. J., Corrigan, J., & Harris, T. M. (Eds.). (2015). The spatial humanities: GIS and the future of humanities scholarship. Indiana University Press.
- Horn, R. E. (2014). Visual language: Global communication for the 21st century. MacroVU, Inc.
- MacEachren, A. M. (1995). How maps work: Representation, visualization, and design (The Guilford Press)
- McCloud, Scott (1993). Understanding comics (Harper)
- Sousanis, N. (2015). Unflattening. Harvard University Press.
SYSTEMS THINKING - Kuhn, T. S. (1957). The Copernican revolution: Planetary astronomy in the development of Western thought. Harvard University Press.
- Kuhn, T. S. (2000). The road since structure: Philosophical essays, 1970–1993, with an autobiographical interview. (J. Conant & J. Haugeland, Eds.). University of Chicago Press.
- Kuhn, T. S. (2012). The structure of scientific revolutions (4th ed.). University of Chicago Press.
- Taleb, N. N. (2012). Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder (Random House)
MEDIA STUDIES - Frost, S. R. (2009). Shopping beyond the parenthesis: An equivalence of books and bottled ketchup. Orbis Litterarum, 64(2).
- Haymes, E. R. (1986). The Nibelungenlied: History and interpretation. University of Illinois Press.
- Haymes, E. R., & Samples, S. T. (1996). Heroic legends of the north: An introduction to the Nibelung and Dietrich cycles. Garland Publishing.
- Jarvis, Jeff. (2023). The Gutenberg parenthesis: A century of print, book, and cognition. Columbia University Press (Bloomsbury Academic)
- Manovich, L. (2001). The language of new media. The MIT Press.
- McLuhan, M. (1962). The Gutenberg galaxy: The making of typographic man. University of Toronto Press.
THE NATURE OF THOUGHT (CONSTRUCTIVISM) - Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. Verso.
- Foucault, M. (1984) ed. Paul Rabinow. The Foucault reader. (Random House).
- Hughes, T. P. (2004). Human-built world: How to think about technology and culture (University of Chicago Press).
- Sauerberg, L. O. (2009). The encyclopedia and the Gutenberg parenthesis. Media in Transition 6: MIT.
- Wiebe, B. E., Hughes, T. P., & Pinch, T. J. (Eds.). (1987). The social construction of technological systems: New directions in the sociology and history of technology. The MIT Press.