CRDM 701

Blog Post #2, Kathy

Orality to Literacy, Literacy to ... ?

Reading this week about the years between the alphabet and the printing press, I couldn't help but think forward to modern technologies. But first, some background...

Ong (1985), Havelock (1982, 1986), and Burke (1985) discussed the ways that literacy reshaped man's conciousness: Ong discussed primary orality (to serve as a basis for understanding the impact of writing); Havelock (1982) attributed "the alphabetic mind" (p.7), and "artificial memory" (1986, p.71) to literacy and the document, respectively; and Burke (1985) discussed the printing press, which brought with it both "a loss of memory" and "our modern way of ordering thought" (p. 119, 123). The order and impact of these technologies aside, I was interested in what Ong had to say about primary-oral cultures and the notion that even through secondary orality, it is nearly imposible for us to understand what it would have been like to live in primary-oral culture. "Freeing ourselves of chirographic and typographic bias in our understanding of language," he says, "is probably more difficult than any of us can imagine" (1985, p. 76).

Havelock (1982) says that "alphabetic technology is of a kind which ceases to be recognized as a technology. It interweaves itself into the literate concoisness of those who use it so that it does not seem to them that they could ever have done without it" (p.29). Following this, as well as what Ong has to say about our inability to understand primary-orality, at what point will we forget literacy? The dominant media of our day is no longer the printing press - at what point will we be so ingrained with digital technology and ways of thinking that a world based on literacy alone seems primative and alien?

Something else hit me - If orality brought us together to share things collectively, and writing and the printing press served as an artificial memory, what can we say about the Internet? Does our ability to collectively store a virtually limitless amount of information give us a collective artificial memory? Does the addition of a search engine make it a "selective collective artificial memory"?

With digital media now more part of our lives than ever, there are a lot of questions to be answered regarding these new technologies, their use, and their adoption. My broad goal is to study the way that technology and digital media are tied to the world we live in, and to make sure that the last thing they are is "transparent".

Posted at 07:22PM Sep 04, 2007 by kfoswald in Week 3  |  Comments[4]