Commentary: The Consequences of Literacy

When widespread literacy is gained in a society, what is culturally lost? In an oral culture, the transmission of information was a group experience, immersive; the process itself a piece of the cultural tradition. When the written word came along, it allowed for a richness and complexity of language and words that was impossible (and impractical) with the oral tradition. But by doing so, an individual could no longer 'know' a cultural tradition in the same way anymore. There becomes too much information to ever digest or comprehend, and so society can only know a small portion of what there is, just a piece of the whole. This results in a kind of loss of unification among a people, as their understanding of and adaptation to information/change no longer happens homogeneously. The adoption rate is sporadic, happening in spurts by groups not easily defined. These disjointed groups are another consequence of increasingly diverse information within specific (specialized) subject areas: socio-economic class alone ceases to be an accurate indicator of the cohesion of a social group. Individuals have choice in the depth of their understanding of an area or topic, unlike in the oral tradition when cultural transmission was straightforward and homogeneous.

The method of cultural transmission also causes different types of conflict. In the literate society, individuals can simply choose not to read or write. By isolating themselves from the information, they choose not to participate in culture. Conversely, the written word cancels out the need for a community experience or participatory culture in order to receive information. One can comfortably read or write in solitude. In the non-literate society, that isolation would have meant a separation from culture and the social experience.

There is a similarity here between the affects of literacy as 'something lost' to the ideas posed in The Concept of Enlightenment. The organization of written language creates a mechanicality of thought not unlike the scientific method - it limits the ability to experience and conceptualize things when thoughts are limited to words. Thought is not meant to be so definitive, so stale, so cut and dry. The mind loses its fluidity, becomes rigid. Thoughts need to stay lubricated by abstraction and imagination. Some things don't belong to the world of literacy, and can't be rationalized. The social experience of culture has intrinsic value, as it allows the individual to be a part of the whole, without the necessity of compartmentalizing and describing and defining the experience as a thing that exists in space-time. Time is an illusion anyway, and past and future don't really exist. All we have is the eternal present.

One part of the paper reads: "...it is still evident that the literate individual has in practice so large a field of personal selection from the total cultural repertoire that the odds are strongly against his experiencing the cultural tradition as any sort of patterned whole." My question in response to that statement is, "Is there even a "whole" anymore at all?" What does it look like? Would we recognize it if we saw/experienced it? Do we need it? Isn't reality an individual experience shaped by our perceptions, our beliefs and memes hand-picked as we see fit to create a version of reality that fits our schema? With so many layers of the cultural tradition from which to choose, does it really matter if a 'whole' exists? Is it possible to tease out meaning in such depth of complexity? What would it teach us?

But I think salvation may still be found in the literate society. Though something may have been lost in the transition to a literate society, modern technologies and modes of communication may bring us back around full circle. This line by Durkheim presents a silver lining:

"...The state of anomie is impossible whenever interdependent organs are sufficiently in contact and sufficiently extensive. If they are close to each other, they are readily aware, in every situation, of the need which they have of one-another, and consequently they have an active and permanent feeling of mutual dependence."

For me, this statement hasn't been more appropriate or relevant than it is today. We're living in an increasingly networked world, where people can connect instantaneously in ways never before possible. As we enter a knowledge era, enabled by web 2.0, the fabric of society and culture is being ripped and reshaped, and the ways we perceive ourselves and our relations to others is fundamentally changing. It's true that we're experiencing accelerating change, and we'll continue to be affected by disruptive technologies that will force us to reconsider how to operate within the changing framework of the world. Things will move in fits and starts. It will be painful sometimes, especially when handled with inflexibility and resistance verse adaptation and innovation. The advantage is that the world is flattening, and we don't have to be individually isolated islands unto ourselves. We don't have to experience a state of anomie. We can face the changes in unity, with mass collaboration and transparency highlighting our triumph as a global human society. The modes of communication enabled by the internet will continue to break down the barriers to cultural transmission in a literate society. Reading and writing no longer have to be isolated activites that are either accepted or ignored. Online real-time communities, viral videos/machinima, and collaborative environments like virtual worlds and 3D spaces will bring back some of the conceptual learning that took place in protoliterate societies.

The way we use the internet and interact goes beyond humans using tools. The technologies are extensions of ourselves, and are being integrated into our definition of culture. The system is an intelligence amplification feedback loop. The more we build the network and social graph, the 'smarter' it gets, and in turn, the smarter we get, and so on. The next stage of the web will be semantic, and information will become more easily searchable and meaningful. We're on the path to building a global brain, where patterns and connections become apparent, and data becomes information. Perhaps we'll realize Goody's hope of "experiencing the cultural tradition as...a patterned whole" after all.

----------------------------------------------
word of the day: anomie

an emerging state of social deregulation; social instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values

quote of the day:

God has not been so sparing to men to make them barely two-legged creatures, and left it to Aristotle to make them rational.
- John Locke