Surprisingly I never thought of writing or the alphabet as something that is new technology. For some reason I have never thought of a time when there were different ways of communicating with each other. Ong brings up the idea primary orality, which means a culture that has no knowledge of writing. Forms of writing including print or even digital sources we see in mass media are a new invention that we have recently started using. In medieval times they had the transcript and it had to be handwritten. Newer technologies have made it easier to use print and words so that is where we are at in our society now.
Once print came into place, we moved to secondary orality and then to electracy. Thinking of the cognitive shift that words and the alphabet have caused is overwhelming. Not only do we have books, we have all forms of mass media. We can now what is happening around the world in seconds. We have advertisements that are made with the intentions of reaching all and selling products. The list may never stop. Lines of communication have opened up to never-ending possibilities. It will be interesting to see how this unfolds slowly over time and see where we are going next.
1 comment:
with the speed of light expression wont things unfold rather quickly?
In the good old days as Ezra Pound expressed it the artist are the antennae of the race. But it seems now that an upshot of our new situation is that art is dead. without our antennae will we be able to see where we are going?
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