Sometime in the last December, in Copenhagen, I was catching up with life and telling a great friend of mine about my most recent living arrangements; he led me towards noticing how recent the concept of room is. In the past, sleeping was done together, beds were shared, and rooms were not really a thing until rather recently in human history.

Then I wonder: how has the notion of private space changed throughout time?

More recently, the book Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time devoted a chapter to some adjacent ideas to this, and through a sequence of paragraphs, the author draws upon Walter Benjamin to explore the dichotomy between interiority and the public sphere.

Benjamin was noticing a connection between interiors, interiority, and a generalized retreat from the public sphere. People no longer gathered publicly to discuss news and politics; they went home to read about news and politics on their own (the first tenements in New York City were constructed in 1840 and The New York Times started publishing in 1851).

I'm particularly interested in that last part. When reading Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, as Postman traces the history of the written media, there is a claim about how

"[...] typography fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration."

There is no further explanation to the point, and I am left wondering what exactly he meant. For the medieval sense of community, there might be clues in another passage of the book, when Postman quotes Marx on the importance of the Illiad, and whether it would be possible in the age of the printing press.

But obviously I do not mean to say that print merely influenced the form of public discourse. That does not say much unless one connects it to the more important idea that form will determine the nature of content. For those readers who may believe that this idea is too “McLuhanesque” for their taste, I offer Karl Marx from The German Ideology. “Is the Iliad possible,” he asks rhetorically, “when the printing press and even printing machines exist? Is it not inevitable that with the emergence of the press, the singing and the telling and the muse cease; that is, the conditions necessary for epic poetry disappear?” Marx understood well that the press was not merely a machine but a structure for discourse, which both rules out and insists upon certain kinds of content and, inevitably, a certain kind of audience.

The relationship between typography and individuality stayed with me for a few days; later on, by chance, I stumbled upon an article in a Portuguese literary magazine, that at some point mentioned

[translated from the original sobre as grandes mudanças na sociedade e educação]

[...] this already happened at the end of the Middle Ages. The press eliminated scholastics and provoked the fall of universities, and the tumult led to Humanism, the protestant revolts, and the political revolutions. Our world arose from the wreckage of the old alliance between universities and the crowns, whose implosion was set in motion by the press.

and a related idea on the possibilities uncovered by the printed word (from The Shallows):

The sixteenth century saw Gutenberg’s technology leap from Europe to Asia, the Middle East, and, when the Spanish set up a press in Mexico City in 1539, the Americas. By the start of the seventeenth century, letterpresses were everywhere, producing not only books but newspapers, scientific journals, and a variety of other periodicals. The first great flowering of printed literature arrived, with works by such masters as Shakespeare, Cervantes, Molière, and Milton, not to mention Bacon and Descartes, entering the inventories of booksellers and the libraries of readers.

(note: Coming To Our Senses does not necessarily trace this specific part of history, but it deals on the role of mirrors in contemporary society; there might be an intersection, or an overlap, with the transition to individual beds and dwellings.)