Marshall McLuhan Culture Without Literacy Discussion by John David Ebert 1/2

My new book "The New Media Invasion" can be ordered here: http://www.amazon.com/New-Media-Invasion-Digital-Technologies/dp/0786465603/r...

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[johndavidebert]

Jamp: With the advent of writing in Mesopotamia in 3300 BC, we arrive at a massively differentiated civilization that has divorced consciousness from nature so thoroughly that it produces the man who is alienated from the cosmos, i.e. Gilgamesh. This is a new type of alienation that isn't present in the Paleolithic, where people make their world, but are not simply present inside it. "Weed in a river am I," goes the Eskimo saying, which means that the cosmos is an extension of human energies.

[johndavidebert]

Re: Jampelhamo: With the evolution of writing, there corresponds a steadily widening gap between the human and the environment around him. In the caves, the writing is pictographic and humanity is still embedded in the animal world. With pictographic incisions on pottery, so too in the Neolithic human culture is diversifying and complexifying in new ways: i.e. specialization of crafts, advent of pyrotechnologies like pottery and metallurgy, the technology of agriculture and temple building, etc.

[johndavidebert]

Re: Jampehamo: You are failing to understand the whole point of media studies, which is that different media disturb sensory ratios in different ways. Yes, language is the first and oldest medium and begins the process, but the evolution of consciousness shows that the mind breaks down in different ways under the impacts of different media. Your theory doesn't take the evolution of human consciousness into account. It presupposes that it has never changed and that media have no effect upon it,

[johndavidebert]

Re: jampelhamo: The very reason history is disappearing is because we are shifting from a literate mode of storage, which is historically minded, to an imagistic culture in which knowledge vanishes the moment it's articulated. Hence, the 48 hour memory syndrome of our news media. You have to understand these basic distinctions between oral memory, literate memory and the lack of memory in electronic culture. They are basic points to get right for understanding the theory of media studies.

[johndavidebert]

Re: jamepehamo: The distinction does indeed hold: the entirety of human oral cultural tradition is there to back it up. These societies do not store their memory in writing, but have learned prodigious feats of memorization to create what Eric Havelock called a "tribal encyclopedia." This is a very different form of cultural storage than the storage of collective memory in writing. Visual culture, the culture of images, is a culture of evanescence, real time and the disappearance of the past.

[johndavidebert]

Re: Jampelhamo: Yes, language itself does divorce man from his surroundings, but different media divorce him in radically different ways. Writing creates a new cognitive space in the mind that just simply isn't there in the same way in oral cultures. It is a matter of degree: writing is abstract by comparison with oral; manuscripts are more abstract and de-sensualized than Egyptian hieroglyphics; and printed books favor the eye even more so and are even more abstract.

[fckuvrymch]

fascinating.

[galikazoid]

i request better audio so i don't need to use headphones to catch every word

your content is so valuable

[Vikt0rEremita]

@jamphellhamo sub-point: your distinction between memory as "visual" and memory as "writing" doesn't hold, since all memory is a form of marking or imprint. This is evident even in the way you say "visual recordings", as in to record by having the sensible image traced in the substance of mind. The danger lies in assuming that purely "visual" media is without sense, as if it is something unmediated by writing and language, without which the visual would be invisible because unintelligible.

[Vikt0rEremita]

@jamphellhamo

If man were not already set apart from the world as a subject to an object, then there would be no reason for language. Language is a means by which this original separation is mediated; it is one of our attempts at mastering the object, bringing it under our dominion, making it our own. The distance is a condition for the possibility of language, for how else could we name things if there are not already things distinct from the act of naming?

[TheWillwillwill]

the world wil be covered with a web....Nostradamus, The Hopi, and I think mother shipton... So I guess the internet is funneling individual reality tunnels into a collective intelligence that transcends space and time...