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| Hearsay: |
Is it more important for your kids to be literate in text or film/media? The future (the present?) is one where anyone can make moving images that engage culture and mass audiences, and the level of professionalism necessary to reach the world with art or media is changing forever. Ouch. This one is going to hurt, people.
When technology shifts, it bends the culture. Once, long ago, culture revolved around the spoken word. The oral skills of memorization, recitation and rhetoric instilled in societies a reverence for the past, the ambiguous, the ornate and the subjective. Then, about 500 years ago, orality was overthrown by technology. Gutenberg’s invention of metallic movable type elevated writing into a central position in the culture. By the means of cheap and perfect copies, text became the engine of change and the foundation of stability. From printing came journalism, science and the mathematics of libraries and law. The distribution-and-display device that we call printing instilled in society a reverence for precision (of black ink on white paper), an appreciation for linear logic (in a sentence), a passion for objectivity (of printed fact) and an allegiance to authority (via authors), whose truth was as fixed and final as a book. In the West, we became people of the book.
Now invention is again overthrowing the dominant media. A new distribution-and-display technology is nudging the book aside and catapulting images, and especially moving images, to the center of the culture. We are becoming people of the screen. The fluid and fleeting symbols on a screen pull us away from the classical notions of monumental authors and authority. On the screen, the subjective again trumps the objective. The past is a rush of data streams cut and rearranged into a new mashup, while truth is something you assemble yourself on your own screen as you jump from link to link. We are now in the middle of a second Gutenberg shift — from book fluency to screen fluency, from literacy to visuality.
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November 24th, 2008 at 10:40 am
This chaotic sense of mashup seems like the type of center that cannot hold. I agree that, in many cases, authority is out the window. Writers (or in the spirit of this quote, content providers) who get into this business with hopes of being a big name are going to be disappointed. But most of the big names now are already unrecognizable to anyone outside of the industry in which they work. This is nothing new.
I just don’t see tumblr, twitter, youtube, and facebook really taking the place of Hemingway and Shakespeare. There is a sort of solidity to the written story, and in the widening gyre, sometimes solidity can be a much sought after phenomenon. For those who work knee deep in letters, times are and will continue to be tough, but if we are flexible enough to try new platforms while remaining founded in our belief in the quality of letters, we will find the audience coming around once again.
November 24th, 2008 at 11:13 am
You know, I swear Marshall McLuhan and I were having this same conversation not forty years ago.
There are two things going on in this article: 1) a claim that we’re moving out of written culture and into the supersaturation of what McLuhan called “hot media”, where the high-definition product doesn’t leave a lot of gaps for the consumer’s imagination to fill; 2) the widespread access to an inexpensive means of production, resulting in the emerging cult of the amateur that we see now. From this, I can’t see a shift in literacy occurring when the standard of competency in visual language is going down, not up. YouTube hasn’t made your average citizen more aware of the elements of visual language that allow one to persuade, manipulate, and inspire.
A hierarchy of literacy will always exist in any medium, visual, verbal, or otherwise, especially given the democratization of the means of communication. And mastery of the hierarchy will still grant power. If we were in for a Gutenberg-like shift, we would have seen it by now.