ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 focuses on the role of media in the square, ranging from oral culture and the role of speech to the effects of alphabetization, and further to the effects of print culture. From Isocrates to Galbert of Bruges, it is pointed out that the exchange of words in market squares implants the means of eloquence in men, and that this eloquence is indispensable to the creation of urban communities. The question that arises, however, is what would be the effect of mediated words? Victor Hugo declared that the book would kill architecture. Was this claim corroborated by the fact that the reading (and writing) public had increasingly left the open squares in order to get together and exchange opinions in cafés? – cf. the Spectator-literature in London, the Enlightenment writers in Paris, and the Kaffeehaus-literaten in Vienna. As a radicalized Hugo, Marshall McLuhan declared that the city no longer exists, and in the 1980s, the invention of cyberspace made William Gibson predict the death of the city square. In spite of these death sentences, however, big screens and the idea of digital “square-hopping” reveal that the square as well as the idea of the square are still alive.
