Proving once again why those handsome fellas at Snarkmarket are my new man-crushes, Tim has a great post up that thinks through recent changes to literacy that, rather than falling into the usual dichotomies – “kids can’t read no more!” vs. “down with printed words! long live video!” – instead thinks about the changing dynamic between the oral and the literate:
This is where most of the futurists got it wrong – the impact of radio, television, and the telephone weren’t going to be solely or even primarily on more and more speech, but, for technical or cultural or who-knows-exactly-what reasons, on writing! We didn’t give up writing – we put it in our pockets, took it outside, blended it with sound, pictures, and video, and sent it over radio waves so we could “talk” to our friends in real-time. And we used those same radio waves to download books and newspapers and everything else to our screens so we would have something to talk about.
But rather than asserting a fundamental primacy of writing, unchanging and universal, writing is now changed. It’s more than just our awareness of language’s constant slippages, the fact that when I say “Wow, this Lil Wayne album is sick”, I could mean one of at least two things. Instead:
This is the thing about literacy today, that needs above all not to be misunderstood. Both the people who say that reading/writing have declined and that reading/writing are stronger than ever are right, and wrong. It’s not a return to the word, unchanged. It’s a literacy transformed by the existence of the electronic media that it initially has nothing in common with. It’s also transformed by all the textual forms – mail, the newspaper, the book, the bulletin board, etc. It’s not purely one thing or another.
This seems key: that the experience of reading is not simply different on the screen and the page – it isn’t that paper is simply the linear antecedent of the web. Instead, writing remains forever changed by the web as it simultaneously alters the text that appears on screens as screens alter the text that exists on paper. And that isn’t good or bad necessarily. It just kinda’ is. As argued by Walter Ong – who Tim quotes at length in his post – once you make the transition from the oral to the literate, there isn’t any going back. This, I think, is sorta’ the same thing.
Anyway, I highly recommend you read the full post. It is, as always, smart and a pleasure.
