This will be the site of our continuing online discussion of the readings for the course, since we will not have enough time in class to discuss them as fully as we might like, and you would probably like to have tangible evidence of your reading activity for your Learning Records.
Posts will be due by noon each Monday we meet in class (including the Monday after spring break). Posts should be around 250 words, +/- 50--something substantive, more so than observations of activity are. You will offer two different responses to these posts by noon on Wednesday of each week, of approximately 150 words, +/- 50. Timeliness is paramount, as is topicality (they do have to have something to do with the readings for the given week).
Please use your first name and last initial as a screen name so it will be easy for all of us to know whose posts are whose.
1 comment:
“Perhaps we will find that a world with too much information presents as many problems as one with too little.”
I find this statement by Adam Greenfield very interesting to consider. Will the advent of ubiquitous informatics cause our society to become the antithesis of an oral culture? Or will we become the same, spiraling back to a world reliant on orality or in our case InfoTech, so completely that we come to fear its power.
There is no doubt that InfoTech has provided a great benefit to those who have been fortunate enough to have access to it. Yet unlike a completely oral culture, we have the power of written experience/history that has given us knowledge beyond our spoken thoughts to reason out truths. For this reason alone it seems we are better equipped to battle the problems that may arise. The power of literacy allows us to overcome the same fears a completely oral culture might have of exterior sounds and surroundings because we are more aware of the world around us then they had been. Yet it is not foolish to think we are not similarly affected by the fears of our technology. For example, there are clinically proven fears of cell phone neglect. The, always on phenomenon has lead to the psychological creation of the phantom ring, when someone thinks their phone is ringing when it is not. This example of InfoTech’s power on society might prove that InfoTech’s complete integration into society might lead to internalization of technology to where it becomes so much apart of us, much like our sense of sound.
I also found it intriguing to think of sound as having “no visual reference” as discussed by Walter Ong. That is such a foreign thought to our world of complete visualization of words and images through TV, the Internet, advertisement etc. A visual society filled with signs used on different technologies as well as stone and clay, In a sense we live like the Egyptians. These signs have in part embedded this visual culture to where I truly do not know how to imagine our world differently. It is cool to imagine that speaking in a completely oral culture was in a way like poetry with a rhythmic phrasing to it. There must have been such a great need for memorization of events and happenings. It seems as though a culture completely dependent on orality would have a highly intelligible social life and musical sense. I really do like the idea of a completely oral culture even as I write these thoughts.
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