Innovations

[caronbot]

I just finished reading Ong's Orality and Literacy passage and it's a very inspiring piece of work.  Not inspiring in the way someone overcoming adversity is, but rather inspiring in the "what is possible" sense.  Usually when I would consider what print brought to the world, I would think in one category: wider distribution because of higher

Comments

[jamiebussey86]

I also enjoyed Ong's piece for this weeks class. It really got my mind thinking about the impact of print in a whole new way. One thing I found particularly interesting was when he said, Hearing rather than sigh had dominated the older noetic world in significant ways, even long after writing was deeply interiorized ... 'Sight is often deceived, hearing serves as guarantee' (119). It was such an odd statement, because to me I can't always remember what I hear, nor do I believe it sometimes until it is print. I mean think about it most people write down everything they hear a professor say in class. I also wondered to myself, what has all this print done to our listening skills? What about our sense of memory? Furthermore what do cell phones or computers do for our memory? I mean why remember something when you can look it up on the Internet, or phone numbers? How many people actually memorize people's numbers, instead they are identified by a name in a phone or by an email address

[martin_doc]

Jamie wrote: Finally, I did have trouble with one part of his text. He says: Print culture of itself has a different mindset. It tends to feel a work as 'closed', set off from other works, a unit in itself. Print culture gave birth to the romantic notions of 'originality' and 'creativity', which set apart an individual work from other works even more, seeing its origins and meaning as independent of outside influence, at least ideally.

This reminds me about McLuhan's discussion of closed and open systems of meaning, and how print privileges the the former, in part because it is all about one sense -- sight.

MKF

[se101]

Remember, the basic purpose of language is to be able to transmit your thought to another person and in a way that they can understand it. If the other person can understand your "misspellings" or slang and still understand the meaning of your thought then there really is nothing wrong with using that type of language.

Language has been abbreviated more and more over the years. I'd be surprised if we don't eventually completely eliminate language in our quest for a shorter sentences and abbreviated words.

-Ross

[caronbot]

Oh I know, but people could always understand what other people were trying to get across before the "correctness" fad. That knowledge of what was correct urged people to encourage correctness. What I'm curious about is what makes today different from back at the advent of print when correctness suddenly became an issue? Are we tired of adhering to that rule?

-Matt

Correctness . . .

[martin_doc]

It should be pointed out that this "fad" has been ongoing since writing was invented!

Since we're reliving the glory days of ENGL 405 and linguistics, Matt, remember our discussions about prescriptive and descriptive notions of language . . .

MKF

Re: Correctness . . .

[caronbot]

Oh snap you went there...

-Matt