THE COMPUTER CULTURE
I registered for this capstone course simply because its description in the English Department course guide intrigued me. I never imagined that the central issues of the course would intersect so often and so dynamically with the postmodern ideas of truth and representation in which I was already immersed as part of my Honors thesis.
I first articulated (for myself) the differences between oral and literate culture in a post to our class listserv on November 15, 2001. The major difference between oral and literate cultures is the primacy of the word itself. In oral culture, the words are everything; they are performance, they are meaning, and they are central to all understanding and memory. In literate culture, the words have been once removed by the representation of written language; they are now letters on a page. The sounds and actions are lost and the interpretation of language becomes more private and individual. Instead of being experienced, as in oral culture, words are simply absorbed in literate culture.
These ideas are further illustrated by referring to Metaphors We Live By, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. An obvious focal point of the book, and the idea that my first summary for this class explored, is the notion that the title implies: we live by certain dominant metaphors. This is a function of oral culture despite the fact that we live in a predominantly literate culture. After certain metaphors become commonplace to speak in and with, they begin to transcend speech; they enter thought processes and allow people to not only speak, but also think, in the dominant metaphorical concepts of the culture.
The concept love, for example, is structured mostly in metaphorical terms: love is a journey, love is a patient, love is a physical force, love is madness, love is war, etc. The concept of love has a core that is minimally structured by the subcategorization love is an emotion and by links to other emotions, e.g., liking. This is typical of emotional concepts, which are not clearly delineated in our experience in any direct fashion and therefore must be comprehended primarily indirectly, via metaphor. (85)
This excerpt from Metaphors We Live By aptly supports the idea that people think in terms of metaphor, and thereby experience metaphor in the structures of oral culture as much as (if not more than) literate culture. At the same time, this excerpt throws a wrench into my argument.
Fortunately, I embrace this wrench and everything it entails. To re-quote the passage, emotional concepts “are not clearly delineated in our experience in any direct fashion and therefore must be comprehended primarily indirectly, via metaphor” (85). Lakoff and Johnson typify metaphor as “indirect” and consequently imply a representation. Metaphor represents some otherwise unquantifiable (unable to be worded) experience. Does this make metaphor as good as written language and inherently non-oral culture? Or can metaphor be an equal part of both oral and literate cultures?
This discrepancy is furthered by another idea brought up in class: even in literate (especially print) culture, there are instances when remembering and commemorating practices are changeable from one occurrence to the next, or from one person’s experience to another’s. In another post to our class listserv, on September 27, 2001, I talked about some of the issues this changeability surfaces in the broader discussion of oral versus literate culture. Specifically, when fiction writers represent themselves in their stories, as they undoubtedly do in most cases, their “selves” change from one story or novel to the next. In her first novel, Author X may represent her naïveté in the main character’s journey through life. As Author X writes her second novel, maybe she will decide to include her own sense of independence and strength in her main character’s plight. This resembles oral tradition because the story (of her own life) is at least slightly different each time Author X tries to tell (or write) it.
In the summary of Albert Borgmann’s Holding On to Reality I wrote for this class, I said “it seems logical that if something is not written culture, it is oral culture, whether it is thought, said, or done.” This makes sense with regard to Borgmann, but it complicates the current discussion. In the first paragraphs of this essay, I suggest the main difference between oral and literate culture is a matter of removal. Oral culture is an immediate experience. Literate culture is a removed, representative, and more private or individual absorption. But now, if everything not written is oral, this difference seems less poignant. Especially in the case of thought: because thought is very private, and can often be a representation or interpretation, removed, not centered on the immediacy of words but rather on a flight of ideas. Is thought a structure of oral culture?
So what is my point? It seems to me I set up an idea and then proceeded to counter its viability as an argument. This is all just to show the confusion: between oral and literate cultures, between oral and oral cultures, and between literate and literate cultures. What is what? How can a line be drawn between the two? At first glance, it seems obvious that literate culture begins with written language. But it becomes more complicated when thought processes, interpretation, and the battle between spoken and written story come into play.
This brings the discussion to computers and our Information Age. The continuously evolving use and technology of computers has created a third kind of culture. It combines aspects of both oral and literate cultures, and it adds structures unique to its own culture—the computer culture, or the Information Age. These new structures are hypertexts, images, sound bites, Flash animation, links and cookies of websites, online audio and video broadcasts, etc., etc. But the old structures are also incorporated. Anything can be read on the Internet--in any language, any format, any color or size or font. Literate culture exists on the Internet, in the Information Age, at its height. Almost anything can be put into words, and words are finding new ways of expressing themselves (e.g. hypertexts). Additionally, the privacy and individuality of literate culture is increasing perpetuated by the computer culture. Anything can be done from the privacy of one’s own home, office, or bedroom. People are meeting, talking, and exchanging ideas (and much more) without ever meeting or talking.
Oral culture also flourishes in the computer culture. If oral culture is everything not literate culture, then it is a great deal of things in the computer culture: again, images, sound bites, and Flash animation technologies are only a few of the ever-evolving non-written mediums available through the computer culture. And if oral culture is something more specific than simply “everything not literate culture,” it is still at home in the computer culture. With real time audio broadcasts from around the world and the availability of different voices, music, and language via the Internet, oral culture is in some ways being kept alive on the Internet.
In Linda Hutcheon’s The Politics of Postmodernism, she uses theoretical language to explain an idea that Tim O’Brien puts into practice in his novel, The Things They Carried. She writes about the “confrontation that [she calls] postmodernist: where documentary historical actuality meets formalist self-reflexivity and parody…an exploration of the way in which narratives and images structure how we see ourselves and how we construct our notions of self, in the present and in the past” (7). An important postmodern issue focuses on the ways in which people understand both their lives and their histories. Hutcheon asserts that people tend to use narratives and images—stories and mental pictures—to comprehend both historical events and modern, day-to-day life. In other words, the best way for people to create vivid, coherent understandings of any given event is by inventing a story or picture. It is through these stories, images, works of art, that people can most easily relate to an abstract or historical concept.
Hutcheon’s ideas are a small piece of my Honors thesis. These concepts are relevant to this essay because of their incorporation of everything into one compact notion: understanding. Every culture has sought to understand its existence—its past, present, and future—in whatever means available. In an oral culture, understanding is reached through performance, storytelling, and the collective passing down of history and ideas to preserve memory. In a literate culture, this same understanding is reached on a more individual level; each experience of “passing down” is private and personally interpreted for each reader. In some ways, understanding becomes more subjective as a result of its isolation. And finally, in a computer culture these two are combined. Understanding is reached collectively through navigation of the Internet (everyone sees the same pages/pictures/words; it is an experience of the performance of the Web). At the same time, each person interprets each page, image, and sound bite into a private world in the home or office.
The existence of a computer culture somewhat neatly encapsulates life, literature, and Information Society. Here we all are, with new technologies arriving in our lives everyday, and everything we do, say, want, or need can be, in some form or manifestation, accessed via computer and Internet. This is not necessarily a good thing. While technology brings many new freedoms and luxuries into everyday life, it also disallows freedoms such as self-sufficiency and independence. There is increasing reliance on technology and the advances of the computer culture to structure everyday life, and this reliance circles back to the question posed in the introduction to this website: Where will that leave us?