Ong’s Ramus , it will be possible to use these three great 
studies to give an entirely new understanding of the events 
that make up the Gutenberg galaxy. As might be expected, the 
printed book was a long time in being recognized as anything 
but a typescript, a more accessible and portable kind of 
manuscript. It is this kind of transitional awareness that in our 
own century is recorded in words and phrases such as 
“horseless carriage,” “wireless,” or “moving-pictures.” 
“Telegraph” and “television” seem to have registered a more 
direct impact than mechanical forms such as typography and 
movies. Yet it would have been just as difficult to explain the 
Gutenberg innovation to a man in the sixteenth century as it is 
now to explain the utter diversity of TV and film images. Today 
we like to think that there is much in common between the 
mosaic image of television and the pictorial space of the 
photograph. In fact, they have nothing in common. Neither did