[lbo-talk] media

[Mike Beggs]

On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 9:59 AM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu> wrote:
> Doug, you (and the rest of us) are emerging from the Gutenberg Parenthesis:
>
> "the post-Gutenberg era — the period from, roughly, the 15th century to the
> 20th, an age defined by textuality — was essentially an interruption in the
> broader arc of human communication ... we are now, via the discursive
> architecture of the web, slowly returning to a state in which orality —
> conversation, gossip, the ephemeral — defines our media culture."
>
> http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/04/the-gutenberg-parenthesis-thomas-pettitt-on-parallels-between-the-pre-print-era-and-our-own-internet-age/
>
> Birth is difficult, and you're longing for a return to the reading-womb.
>
> But there's no going back.

I have no problem reading for long periods, whole books, on the laptop
(although not fiction), and having grown up with computers there is no
way I can write anything longhand - I just can't think with pen and
paper, and it's _so slow_.

But ditching text for 'orality'? It sounds horrible. I don't think
things will ever go that way actually because there is just so much
you can do with text that you can't do any other way. Clearly, though,
TV news has come to dominate print media in terms of most people's
media consumption - and that's surely for the worse, in my opinion.
But I think textual media still has a dominant cultural position
because of its relative depth - elites and anyone engaged in politics
need text and are shaped by textual media.

Mike Beggs