Response to "Printing, Bookselling, Readers, and Writers in Eighteenth-Century London" by Alvin Kernan

“The ‘logic’ of a technology, an idea, or an institution is its tendency consistently to shape whatever it affects in a limited number of definite forms or directions” (49). 

In the chapter “Printing, Bookselling, Readers, and Writers in Eighteenth-Century London”, Alvin Kernan states how “print logic”, multiplicity, systematization, and fixity, became ingrained in the structure of not only the printing process but also of the writers' process. The need to mass produce books created a demand for writers; as Kernan differentiated, “print logic” transformed writers into laborers instead of workers. The writers were another piece in the book making business whose value correlated with that of the sales. That mentality was adopted by the writers as Kernan points to the few “hacks” on Grub Street who were driven either to madness or lying to try to make it in the writing industry. In a way this changed the preprinting ideals of writing where the work was based on quality into an industry of quantity, “print’s logical tendencies toward system and numbers objectified in the social world” (62). People were operating under this logic that didn't account for human nature, the emotions, creative process, or even time, but placed people under a structure in order to function and operate to meet the needs of "print logic". 

This reflects back to Peter Berger’s quote Kernan uses to describe logic’s influence on social aspects in which man made tools whether material objects or not take on a system that although humans created they still had to work within the parameters of that system. This is an interesting point Kernan focused on because he then shows how the printers, booksellers, and writers have used the “print logic” to navigate their way around this new printing culture. Kernan also compares the print culture to the rise of films and in a new culture some components lose their meaning in “translation” as seen by the way the authors took a back seat to actors, directors, and other writers on a film. In a circle that began with anonymity of authors through oral traditions, with the author being brought to the forefront with the mass production of books, to eventually taking the back seat with the emergence of film. Oral, print, and digital all are comprised of their own form of function with everything else trying to fit into it.