Sarah K. Wilson
29 November 2001

Culture is a strange thing.  It is all around us, around everyone.  It is a large part of who we are and how we think.  The strange thing is that culture is so ingrained in us that often we don’t even recognize or can’t decipher its effects.

We assume from the very beginning that our way of thinking about and doing things is the universal way of doing so.  We so often label certain courses of action and certain thought processes as “common sense.”  In one text we read in class, “Common Sense as a Cultural System,” Clifford Geertz states that this assumption is a natural inclination.  However, he also points out that our ideas of “common sense” aren’t necessarily all that common cross-culturally.  “Common sense is not what the mind cleared of cant spontaneously apprehends; it is what the mind filled with presuppositions . . . concludes,” he says (84).  Our idea of common sense, like so many aspects of culture “lies so artlessly before our eyes it is almost impossible to see” (92).

Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson examines the metaphors in our language and claims that they are in fact a major way that culture subconsciously influences our thoughts and actions.  When language is examined, these metaphors become clearly apparent.  For example, Lakoff and Johnson point out the metaphor of “Time=Money.”  This metaphor underlies our commonplace language that assumes that time is valuable: time can be “spent,” “wasted,” “saved,” and “given away.”

Lakoff and Johnson claim that “metaphor is one of our most important tools for trying to comprehend partially what we cannot comprehend totally: our feelings, aesthetic experiences, moral practices, and spiritual awareness” (193).  This is a positive result of metaphoric language; however, by their very nature, metaphors “highlight and make coherent certain aspects of our experience” and in doing so, necessarily hide other aspects (156).  Metaphors do not merely serve a descriptive function; they are also structural.  Metaphors structure our thinking and have the power to “create realities for us, especially social realities.  A metaphor may thus be a guide for future action” (156).  Deconstructing the metaphors in our everyday language is one way that we can uncover the ways that culture is ingrained in our thinking and our action.

Technology is another extremely influential cultural force whose effects are often disregarded or simply not made conscious.  Marshal McLuhan’s article “The Medium is the Message” was a groundbreaking work in which McLuhan deconstructed the influence of technology on culture.  His central argument is that the medium which coveys a message is in itself a message as well, a message that may support or contradict the content of the medium.  The media that is present in a culture is conveying messages which shape that culture and influence people’s thoughts, identities, and even actions.

In English 495, we specifically looked at the ways that technology, as an extension of culture, influences our daily lives.  To do this, we looked first at the ways that print technology (the commencement of which is dated around 1450 with the invention of the printing press) changed the oral and manuscript culture of the ancient and medieval times.  Then, we considered the ways that electronic technology is changing--and projected the possible ways that it will continue to change--our current print culture.

Michael E. Hobart and Zachary S. Schiffman have detailed some of the cultural changes that occurred with the advent of the alphabet in their article “Orality and the Problem of Memory.”  According to Hobart and Schiffman, writing changed the way that people thought about the concept of memory and in turn literature.  In oral cultures, past events are commemorated with stories in song; an audience “does not listen critically to the bard, as we might study the text of a poem, but participates in the action” (13).  They continue to say that “poetry in oral culture serves not aesthetic but practical purposes” (19).  In the act of participating with a bard, an audience is sharing an experience as a community--an experience that will be adjusted to fit present circumstances.  Poetry is not static in oral cultures; the story and the listeners are different with each telling.

In literate cultures, memory serves as a container for information.  We can write down poems and stories and remember the words--we have no more need to remember images.  Writing is therefore a conduit through which this information is transferred.  Unlike aural literature in oral cultures, information can be studied, analyzed, and experienced individually.  Hobart and Schiffman argue that literacy created a divide between the “knower and the known” (29).  There was now written information that existed independent of an informer.

In print cultures, however, this unseen informer has earned a near god-like status.  Literary theorist Roger Chartier expands this phenomenon using Foucault’s term “author-function”--the role that the author of information plays in our reading of print texts.  In Medieval Europe, the author of a manuscript became important to the manuscript itself.  The authority of a manuscript was determined by the authority of its author.  Chartier argues that in print cultures, authors have come to be viewed as the proprietors of information who then gush this information from their soul onto paper.  These ideals subconsciously affect our ideas of literature and our ideas of ourselves.  We revere authors as representative of an ideal: authors are coherent human beings who have ideas that they can understand and express.  We compare our perception of ourselves to this ideal.

Recently, with the advent of the Internet, America has begun to experience the shift to an electronic culture.  Just as the alphabet changed oral culture and print technology changed manuscript culture, electronic technology has already greatly changed print culture.

Karen Armstong, in her book The Battle for God, points out several ways that technology has changed religion.  As our culture has become one so eager to demand scientific proof and provable fact, the mystery of religion which accompanied it in premondern cultures, has been largely lost.  Where early Christians believed that the bread and wine of the Eucharist became the body and blood of Christ, most modern denominations reject that belief as myth and embrace the Eucharist as a symbolic act instead of a literal one.

This semester, in light of the September 11th attacks, we also discussed ways in which modern technology has influenced terrorism.  The Internet has made it extremely easy for terrorists to gain access to weapons--it has made it easy for high school students to make pipe bombs.  Yet, digital and satellite technology has made it easier for intelligence agencies to find and stop terrorist acts as well.  Internet news has made it easier for the entire nation to stay informed; Internet rumors have fueled unnecessary paranoia.

Electronic technology, especially the Internet, is also changing our culture’s views of individualism and ourselves.  In Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, Sherry Turkle discusses the effects of the Internet, especially the effects of Multi-User Domains (MUDs), on personal identity.  She asserts that “computers don’t just so things for us, they do things to us, including to our ways of thinking about ourselves and other people” (26).  Similar to an interactive chat room, in a MUD, anyone can assume an identity (of any gender, age, or physicality) or even multiple identities and experience virtual life.  Turkle argues that the “self” as experienced in the MUD is different than the “self” experienced in real life (or “RL”).  She says, “In my computer-mediated worlds, the self is multiple, fluid, and constructed in interaction with machine connections; it is made and transformed by language; sexual congress is an exchange of signifiers; and understanding follows from navigation and tinkering rather than analysis.  And in the machine-generated world of MUDs, I meet characters who put me in a new relationship with me own identity” (15).  It is easy to be confident in the MUD, even if you are normally shy.  It is easy to be seductive in the MUD, even if you aren’t normally so.  Our experiences in virtual reality can blur with our experiences in real life, and as this happens, are creating new ideas of ourselves and the people around us in real life based on our experiences with our fantasy selves and our interactions with virtual people in the MUD or online.

Electronic technology is also changing literature.  Most significantly and visibly, this change is happening with the advent of hypertext.  Unlike a printed novel, hypertext creates stories in a nonlinear fashion that can be explored on a computer screen and not only read from beginning to end.  A hypertext story is a collection of pages that can be experienced in the order in which the reader wishes to read them; “stories” are constructed largely upon the experience of the reader.

Ted Nelson has proposed “Xanadu,” an Internet system that would turn the web into something like a hypertext as well.  Writing posted to the web would be linked directly to the information which inspired it and anyone would be able to add to any part.  A system like this (and even a system like the web we now experience) publishes mass amounts of information without discriminating based on the authority or reputation of the author.  In this way, the Internet is greatly changing our view of author-function.

With these changes in literature and writing, the teaching of such writing will undoubtedly be different.  The reader is becoming more important than the author.  Meanwhile, with access to the Internet and MUDs, the reader is constructing an identity and a view of the world different than the ones before him.  With electronic technology, our culture will enter a new era and will experience changes similar to the ones that occurred with the alphabet and with print technology.  But in order to recognize these changes, we’re going to have to keep looking closely at the culture we are a part of and looking closely at the ways it is changing us and the people around us.