“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.
2 comments:
It’s funny thinking about sound with no visual reference because we forget how visually oriented we are in making decisions. It brings to mind television and how its invention effected society and the even the government of today. During the 1960s first televised presidential debate between Nixon and Kennedy, there was some debate (even more than usual) on who actually won. Those who listened to it over the radio said Nixon won for sure, but those who watched it televised said the exact opposite. Nixon, if I remember correctly, had just gotten out of the hospital and was sickly and weak looking. While Kennedy, who had just come back from campaigning in the sun, looked healthy and strong. Though most say that Kennedy still would have won, there were a high percentage of voters that said that that exact presidential debate was in their thoughts when they went to vote. Today images, media, and radio seem to mold into one and soon I think we’ll be reminiscing to our grandchildren about the times we had to listen to scheduled radio shows, walk uphill to our car both ways, and watch television that couldn’t be paused nor stopped.
Seeing is forgetting. Most experience, when describe through symbols, texts, or even orally to later be reconstructed by imagination is extremely different from the actualy experience. "I guess you had to be there" is a phrase we use quite often, but do we really understand? I know I struggle with this dicotomy in many aspects of life. Reading is the first to come to mind. Using the Internet to consume text and tons of multimedia all day is great, but it is incomparable to experience. Sure I am experiencing it through my imagination and internal processing, but I'm sad to say that is extremely limited; although it hold its own pretty well. For example, Philosophy is linked entirely to text. Textual contradiction and reasoning are invaluable to human thought and understanding, yet can only go so far. Forget names, labels, tags; why do we call a bird a bird, or...even stopping at a red lights? What if we didnt associate a red light with stopping? Obviously there would be some seriously fatal consequences, and is completely ridiculous, but I just find it interesting that language, itself the ether of thought, is in effect nothing more than translations. And that these translations are symbolic, and not the physical object.
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