Sure, capitalist society may in fact be headed back to "orality" for the mass of its population. If so, it will be part of a general rollback of the universalizing goals of the Enlightenment, which makes good if horrifying ruling class sense. Fits in quite nicely with the assault on universal public education.
Wherever it has existed, literacy has been the sine qua non of an educated elite. There is a reason for this: The technologies of the written word are superior for the promulgation of large amounts of complex technical or abstract thought with minimal error. Those who have mastered--or, more accurately in most historical periods, those who have been allowed to master--the written word possess a real form of power. There is no evidence that this dynamic would disappear in a presumed mass culture of "orality" under capitalist rule. The dominance of the literate is ancient and cross-cultural--is there any society with an elite more dedicated to the written word than that of classical China? Literacy for the rulers, "orality" for the masses--that is the Eden to which we are to aspire, passively if not gleefully?
BTW, and I consider this good news, you're wrong about the web's role. So far the "discursive architecture of the web" has sparked a revival of the written. The key mass communication technologies of the last century--recorded sound, radio, film, television, and (very important) the telephone--had worked in the opposite direction.
On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 1:59 PM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu> wrote:
> Doug, you (and the rest of us) are emerging from the Gutenberg Parenthesis:
>
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