A little late...

We humans have a hard time seeing what is right in front of us, as well as predicting the future or remembering the past. -Daniel Gilbert

Personally I am fascinated with history, language, memory, technology and everything in-between and outside. I can read for hours, or listen attentively to an interesting lecture, and often feel empowered by such experiences. However, memory becomes a necessary obstacle when it comes to recollecting the thoughts and ideas expressed. Maybe I just need to take some fish oil vitamins, but I doubt that will yield any improvement. This factor of limited memory was the stimulus for the move from oral to written communication. And in my opinion, is the same factor inhibiting my understanding of life during that time.

The late Professor Walter Ong said it nicely, "Fully literate persons can only with great difficulty imagine what a primary oral culture is like..."

The better I can recall information about oral cultures, and simultaneously forget about literacy, the better I can visualize what life was like in such a time.

As for accelerating mechanisms of change, memory was the sole impetus for intellectual thought in oral society. Ong describes how tags and labels were inconceivable in pre-history and how this determined knowledge acquisition and practice. With the exception of conversation, completely aural communication does not allow for very rich information processing; they didn’t have a gig of RAM for number crunching. The medium is the message; an ideal sound is a harmony or rhythm. With orality, the most salient information employs mnemonics. An extremely mundane example of this is the virulence of pop-music and lyrics. Gotta get that new Chamillionair ring-tone:! These things stick. But for them, this was the key to success, the better they could iteratively chunk thoughts into beats, the better chance they had of recalling this information down the road.

I very much like these similarities with our current situation...