Technology is Ideology

...what is happening in America is not the design of an articulated ideology. No Mein Kamp for Communist Manifesto announced its coming. It comes as the unintended consequence of a dramatic change in our modes of public conversation. But it is an ideology nonetheless, for it imposes a way of life, a set of relations among people and ideas, about which there has been no consensus, no discussion and no opposition. Only compliance. Public consciousness has not yet assimilated the point that tech...

 The Three Crises in Western Education

America is, in fact, the leading case in point of what may be thought of as the third great crisis in Western education. The first occurred in the fifth century H.C., when Athens underwent a change from an oral culture to an alphabet-writing culture. To understand what this meant, we must read Plato. The second occurred in the sixteenth century, when Europe underwent a radical transformation as a result of the printing press. To understand what this meant, we must read John Locke. The third i...

 Intelligence in Oral and Print Societies

In a purely oral culture, intelligence is often associated with aphoristic ingenuity, that is, the power to invent compact sayings of wide applicability. The wise Solomon, we are told in First Kings, knew three thousand proverbs. In a print culture, people with such a talent are thought to be quaint at best, more likely pompous bores. In a purely oral culture, a high value is always placed on the power to memorize, for where there are no written words, ,the human mind must function as a mobil...

 Criticism of "The dawn of post-literate society"

I enjoy reading as much as anyone, but I find these kinds of posts to be very short-sighted. First off, civilization precedes mass reading by millennia. To attribute the Enlightenment and modern industrial civilization to reading, and any counter-movement against the Enlightenment as anti-reading, is to fundamentally misunderstand most of history. E.g., Romanticism was an explicitly anti-Enlightenment movement and arguably had more interest in poetry and literature than the forces it was rea...

 The False Promise of WWW Enlightenment

Never before have so many people been connected together in an instantly responsive network through which memes can spread faster than natural viruses. But the notion that taking the whole world online would create a utopia of netizens, all equal in cyberspace, was always a fantasy—as much a delusion as Luther’s vision of a “priesthood of all believers.” The reality is that the global network has become a transmission mechanism for all kinds of manias and panics, just as the combinati...

 Diderot on Information Overload

As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes. When that time comes, a project, until then neglected because the need for it was not felt,...

 Phonetic Spelling Saves Time and Effort Through Fewer Let...

Simplified spelling means shorter spelling. Of the 32 Rules printed in Part 3 of this Handbook, 27 drop letters from words as now speld; 3 involv trans- positions of letters to reconcile conflicting analogies; and 2 involv substitutions of one letter for another, with the same object. In no instance has the Board recommended a change involving the addition of a let- ter to a word. Further simplifications wil result in fur- ther abbreviations. A completely fonetic sistem of notation, ...

 The Printing Press is the Messiah

The printing press has come like a true Messiah to emancipate the great family of mankind from this double yoke. This Messiah is immortal, and its saving powers must be universal and perpetual. By this, and by no other Messiah, can man be saved from ignorance and misery; the only hell that he has to fear. It will prove the true Messiah of the Jew, of the Christian, of the Mahometan, and of the Pagan. It is a Messiah for all, and it will go on to unite under the name and title of Man and Citiz...