Question: What do we call knowledge transfer which came before even oral tradition? I'm talking about things like "hold your axe this way", watching and learning stuff. These traditions are even more easily lost than oral tradition, I'd suppose.
The Tyrrany of Literacy. On oral tradition and what is lost
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Re: The Tyrrany of Literacy. On oral tradition and what is lost
#32Literacy didn’t just spread knowledge, it narrowed what we recognize as knowledge.
And that is a double win, right?
Superstitions should never be considered "knowledge", the same way that stupidity is not intelligence and noise is not information.
Re: The Tyrrany of Literacy. On oral tradition and what is lost
#33Question: What do we call knowledge transfer which came before even oral tradition? I'm talking about things like "hold your axe this way", watching and learning stuff. These traditions are even more easily lost than oral tradition, I'd suppose.
Imitative learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imitative_learning
Re: The Tyrrany of Literacy. On oral tradition and what is lost
#34So the Bible is real? Got it I mean some people think that a 65,000 years old story is true [0] so surely a 2000 years old one is more valid 0, https://www.abc.net.au/news/deeptime/tell-me-a-story/
You're either by accident or maliciously misrepresenting what some people think is true. It's really not cool.
Re: The Tyrrany of Literacy. On oral tradition and what is lost
#35It is ironic that the essay comes from UPenn in Philadelphia. Many of you may find it shocking or unbelievable, but literacy is slipping in many parts of the US (like Philadelphia). The number of functionally illiterate people is increasing, schools are failing to educate students for a constellation of reasons. The reality is that we instead suffer from a "tyranny" of illiteracy. I think those folks in their ivory t…
Do you have data for philly? i can’t find anything that shows a decline before covid.
Re: The Tyrrany of Literacy. On oral tradition and what is lost
#36I dullard authors never mention the telephone game, but at least two comments mention this.
Re: The Tyrrany of Literacy. On oral tradition and what is lost
#37Question: What do we call knowledge transfer which came before even oral tradition? I'm talking about things like "hold your axe this way", watching and learning stuff. These traditions are even more easily lost than oral tradition, I'd suppose.
Imitative learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imitative_learning
Thanks!
Re: The Tyrrany of Literacy. On oral tradition and what is lost
#38So the Bible is real? Got it I mean some people think that a 65,000 years old story is true [0] so surely a 2000 years old one is more valid 0, https://www.abc.net.au/news/deeptime/tell-me-a-story/
The tallest ever person was 8 foot 11. So that makes me at least 7 feet tall.
Re: The Tyrrany of Literacy. On oral tradition and what is lost
#39The oral tradition is not lost, it just evolved to suit the times; urban legends and creepy pasta just have a lot more relevance. Literacy created the written tradition, moved writing past being just a medium for storage and transmission and moved the word beyond the limitations of speech. What really killed the oral tradition (in the sense TFA means) is technology, the ability to reproduce without error and the idea…
I think this view is doing a bit of a disservice to the article and to the concept by looking at things a little too narrowly. The point is this is not about myths this is about reality -- valid oral records exist in the modern world that are not myths.
Let's take a modern example. There is a place where the road to it's entrance has changed recently. It's been six months and Google Maps has still not updated the "written record" (Incidenetally this a real situation I'm talking about, not a hypothetical fhough it shouldn't matter.) The only reason people in the vicinity know the correct way is through word of mouth. It's a simple case where the oral record is correct and the written record is false. The truth has propagated orally from the people witnessing the change to the surrounding region.
Another example. The educated member of family of farmers always teases their mother about how she always tells them to use oils extracted from various plants whenever they have different ailments, recommending a specific plant depending on what the ailment is. Since the educated child can't find scientific literature supporting the claim, they often ignore the advice. Big pharma is not incentivised to fund clinical studies on these type of plants since they'd rather create a synthetic form of whatever property of the plant is aiding the healing and patent that synthetic formula instead, so studies like these are not prioritized. Years later, when someone finally gets around to conducting clinical studies on some of the regional plants, they end up supporting their mother's claims.
It should be even more apparent if we use the legal system as an analogy, since everyone now understands that if you are not literate in legal matters or don't have a top notch lawyer you can lose even if you're in the right. People are abused because they are legally illiterate, and it is in fact a type of tyranny. Oral records vs written records have the same problem. It's a very hard problem to solve but it is a problem.
Re: The Tyrrany of Literacy. On oral tradition and what is lost
#40It is ironic that the essay comes from UPenn in Philadelphia. Many of you may find it shocking or unbelievable, but literacy is slipping in many parts of the US (like Philadelphia). The number of functionally illiterate people is increasing, schools are failing to educate students for a constellation of reasons. The reality is that we instead suffer from a "tyranny" of illiteracy. I think those folks in their ivory t…
Basically, people in Philadelphia are not allowed to write about topics that interest them, in this case literacy, oral tradition and history unless they all peraonally become elementary school teachers?
No talking about Homer or territorial expansion of 1880 for them anymore.
Make it make sense.