Information Ages:

Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution

Our society thinks of the oral world as preliterate. While teachers tell us that poetic song is a form of memory before writing existed, we should keep in mind that oral memory may function differently than we literates assume it should. The authors say that we think today of memory as a container for information. However, in the preliterate world, memory is the social act of remembering called commemoration.

In the oral world, commemoration had a different meaning than it has today. In the oral world, commemoration bound "the community together as a living entity" (15). The authors say that memory in the oral world was limited to commemoration. However, Havelock who worked on the study of orality says that memory in the oral world was like a container. But Havelock's work was based on the assumption that "memory in an oral culture serves the same function as it does in a literate one, to contain information" (22). In Hobart and Schiffman's view, however, information did not exist in the oral world because everyday speech communicated facts without storing them as information. When we talk about commemoration today, we think of it in terms of celebrating the memory of someone or some event.

About two weeks ago, we commemorated September 11, 2001. Around the nation and around the world, people reflected on what happened one year ago and celebrated the memory of the people lost in the attacks. Today, a year after the attacks, we all took part in different ceremonies to commemorate the lost lives. However, twenty years from now, the young generation might not feel the same about this historical day and might not see the point in having yearly September 11th commemorations. This big gap would not have been created in an oral culture where commemoration established a common memory of the past. However, our notion of commemoration reinterprets the past based on a changing present. The authors explained that memory in the oral world had a different meaning that it has today.