41–50 of 59 posts
It 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…
>The ‘tyranny of literacy’ makes us sceptical of knowledge being retained in oral societies for such a long time
This is actually not what I thought this would be about from the headline: I thought someone would pull the Plato quote from Phaedrus about how literacy was inferior because it forced us to engage with views from dead men who were not able to answer for what they wrote.
It's just making the point that if you have a society that's entirely dependent on memory, it's going to have a better memory. This seems logical; their example about remembering phone numbers is simple and relatable.
And Plato made this point as well: "They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks."
I'd imagine there's a fair amount of motivated reasoning behind rejecting this point.
having spent significant time with people who hold spoken knowledge, I can promise you that there are still many things that can only be passed this way, and an ancient comment, passed verbaly to me, is directly relevant, as it concerns the adoption of writing by an affiliated tribal group, and how this was proof that "their minds are weak"
If you video the speaker and I watch the video, what knowledge do you learn that I do not?
smell, of course, being one of the oldest and strongest senses. And one which incorporates a vast amount of knowledge. True, most of this knowledge is non-verbalizable, but that's true for many many forms of knowledge.
I can think of a number of other things which would also be lost by video, but smell was an obvious choice.
As for practical, let's say I was teaching you to cook, or to hunt, or to practice medicine. Several areas where smell gives really rich information.
The 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 "wr…
This is a silly myth that "alternative medicine" advocates preach. Big pharma is completely incentivised to fund clinical studies, exactly so they can refine a form of the chemical(s) involved and patent them. Even field research into Archaea species is funded by this.
What they are not interested in doing is saying, "Yeah, well, if you gather a few ounces of this wild plant and make a tea from it's roots, it's 90% likely to do the same thing as our pill."
In this thread: many people missing the points being made in the article. >The ‘tyranny of literacy’ makes us sceptical of knowledge being retained in oral societies for such a long time This is actually not what I thought this would be about from the headline: I thought someone would pull the Plato quote from Phaedrus about how literacy was inferior because it forced us to engage with views from dead men who were no…
Not as relevant today, you say? OK, name someone who has memorized a work of similar length.
So, I agree with you. That kind of "long-read" memorization is no longer appreciated and cultivated, and I have no doubt it impacts our brains differently than watching a YT video.
I had similar thoughts while thinking about the right to own copies of music or films. That is - increasing ease of recording and transmission of cultural artifacts has homogenised that output, and reduced the urge and ability of individuals to preserve and pass on that output.
I'm not sure that's true, at least for music we've seen an explosion of covers and style remixes. Depending on the popularity and virality of a song, you can often find between dozens to hundreds of different covers of varying quality. And there are artists dedicated to converting popular songs into various other genres.
Used to be, almost everyone learned to play an instrument. Families would play together around the fire, or children who excelled would be invited to perform to entertain at their parents' party.
Sheet music was the "Top 40" of the pre-Edison days, and people made good livings writing it.
OTOH, mixes and remixes, greatly spurred by innovations in rap, have proliferated in the last 30 years. But that's not the same pervasive skill set in society.
Literacy 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.
It 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody has oral history from 7700 years ago.
Of course they can, why not? The example in the article is really good and perfectly believable. People at that time would wander around a lot in their everyday life, and it would be very easy to remember these small stories which are connected to the landscape. A father would tell his son when they were walking past this feature of the landscape, and the son would later tell his son and so on. Why? Because they didn…
Humans aren't capable of repeating stories without permutation.