Prisoners of Literacy

For the last five hundred years we have been reading more and more - publishing more and more. Both of these developments have had an immeasurably profound effect on our politics, religion, technology, economy, and society. In short, our whole culture was transformed with the invention of movable typography. The development of typographic man has been admirably traced by many scholars from Marshall McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy and Febvre, Martin, & Gerard's The Coming of the Book.

As the argument goes, a fundamental transformation in the ordering of our senses emerged from typography such that we have come to rely on vision as our dominant sense - hence, seeing is believing, but also we have come to develop ever new and inventive ways of extending our nervous system into space with vision as the dominant sense in any ratio of the senses. This is accomplished not only with cameras in remote and diverse places, but also the network of computers that make publishing this blog possible. It would be easy to say that the invention of movable type printing transformed the way we communicate - but it is important to remember that these changes were not simple linear developments and they included a devaluation of speech as well as the power inherent in our entire bodies to communicate messages to others.

Walter Ong captured some of these changes in his masterful The Presence of the Word. Building obviously and purposefully on St. John's discussion of the Word made flesh in his gospel, Ong seeks to show the ways the western mind is severely limited by uncritical reliance on typography and takes pains to show how important it is to appreciate the power of speech and sound in communication. He writes,

Sound is more real or existential than other sense objects, despite the fact that it is also more evanescent. Sound itself is related to present actuality rather than to past or future. It must emanate from a source here and now discernibly active, with the result that involvement with sound is involvement with the present, with here-and-now existence and activity. . . .

Presence does not irrupt into voice. One cannot have voice without presence, at least suggested presence. And voice, as will be seen, being the paradigm of all sound for man, sound itself thus of itself suggests presence. Voice is not inhabited by presence as by something added: it simply conveys presence as nothing else does. . . .

That is to say, the spoken word does have more power than the written to do what the word is meant to do, to communicate. We are inclined to think of writing in terms of the very specially gifted and specially trained individuals, professional writers or literary artists who can use writing often in specially controlled or limited circumstances, in truly exceptional ways. We are also likely to forget how very small part of spoken speech can be put into writing that makes sense (111-2, 114-5).

It is not simply that all of this writing and reading brought on by the tremendous increase in publishing since 1455 have been a benefit to humanity. They have also led us to develop our minds and cultures in particular ways - ways that both liberate and constrain us. To be sure, Typographic Man is by no means dead, but he is gradually being made redundant by Digital Man whose tastes tend toward the cinematic-televisual available by way of the personal, handheld communication device and the changes wrought by this new character remain to be seen, but they will be no less profound or deep in terms of the overall picture of humanity five hundred years hence.

What I hope is never lost is the passionate orator in the flesh appealing with voice and body to a multitude of embodied auditors . . .