Who Decides What Counts as Knowledge Now?

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

Today, I had a conversation with a generative AI tool that converted my voice to text, processed it, and replied aloud. This reminded me that educators now straddle two worlds: one rooted in centuries of text, the other increasingly shaped by voice and digital interaction.

University of Southern Denmark scholars Tom Pettitt, Lars Ole Sauerberg and Marianne Borch proposed the Gutenberg Parenthesis, the idea that print culture is just a temporary phase in human communication. Before Gutenberg, fluid oral traditions shaped knowledge; with the advent of print came fixed grammar, standardised spelling, the notion of intellectual ownership, and curated authority. Now, digital platforms like TikTok revive collaborative storytelling, echoing medieval ballads. Unlike past oral cultures, today’s conversations are mediated by platforms whose logic is driven less by tradition than by engagement metrics.

The Gutenberg Parenthesis is still a debated framework, with some critics questioning its periodisation or its applicability across cultures. It may be more accurate to think of the Gutenberg Parenthesis as a curator: for centuries, print defined what counted as knowledge and who had the right to speak it. That order is collapsing, and what remains is the struggle to establish new forms of authority, authenticity, and credibility amid the flood of voices. Just as editing and publishing emerged with print, and the magazine as a genre followed the steam-powered press, we may need to imagine new institutions to play these roles at the scale of speech today. History offers some unexpected precedents. Before print, credibility itself functioned as a kind of social system: Fama, as it was known in medieval Europe, described the circulating reputation of people and ideas, carried by word of mouth, rumour, and collective memory. Authority was certified by the weight of repeated voices. Something similar may be re-emerging now, though shaped less by village gossip than by algorithms that amplify, rank, and reward particular forms of speech.

We tend to understand new technologies through old paradigms. Gutenberg imagined print as a better way of copying manuscripts; early web developers treated the internet as little more than a publishing tool. TikTok, by contrast, was built for collaboration, and it is that energy that explains why Walter Ong’s notion of “secondary orality” feels so powerful in the digital age.

Every disruptive medium also provokes fears. The Gutenberg era brought rules for determining textual authority; today we face epistemological panic, a sense that the ability to tell truth from falsehood is dissolving as trusted institutions falter. History reminds us, however, that cultures move fluidly between oral, written, and visual media. Each medium, once disruptive, eventually becomes part of the toolkit.

Responsibility is another recurring question. Early printers were held liable for content, then responsibility shifted to intermediaries like publishers. With Generative AI, similar instincts emerge: should technologists, platforms, or users bear the burden of potential harms?

History happens only once, but its echoes matter. The upheaval that followed print was not instantaneous; it unfolded across centuries, shaping the Reformation, revolutions, wars and the establishment of borders. Compared with that slow burn, today’s apparent acceleration may partly reflect what historian Reinhart Koselleck describes as “the experience of contemporaneity”, the sense that one’s own moment is charged with significance. Still, this convergence of orality, visuality, interactivity, and AI is unprecedented. Will algorithms become the new arbiters of credibility, or can we invent institutions of our own?

For educators, the challenge is how to harness this moment to create more dialogic approaches to learning without abandoning the written word that still anchors so much of our thought.