subtext

Greetings:By post-literate I mean post-text based literacy: the milieu of media from Television, Film, internet which has to be “read” in increasingly complex ways. These media are very non-linear. Will they or have they already changed the way we, post-literates, think?

The Thanksgiving Dinner piece was interesting to a point. I kept waiting for her to make a point, but finally just relaxed as she continued to catalog the linguistic devices she and her friends used during a casual dinner conversation. If anyone actually took the time to think of all of these devices as they were speaking, very little would get said. Language is complicated. It has amazed me for years that what with all of the obstacles to communication we have to overleap that any thought occurs at all. William Burroughs said that language is a virus from outer space. Miscommunication caused by language difficulties certainly has killed quite a few of us over the years.

Greetings:

I missed the first class meeting with Bomer, because I cannot read a course schedule. A bad start to a program in Literacy. I read the comment about Nietsche and the typewriter from another classmates blog, it made me think of Roland Barthes comment in an interview I read years ago where he said his writing changed depending upon what type of pen he was using. I started reading the Ong book last summer after I found it in the Coop. It got me all worked up. Massively divergent ideas concerning Orality and Literacy. The idea that literate cultures think differently because of the linear nature of text made me think of M. McLuhan, “The medium is the message” mantra. Are we in a post-literate world now that most of what we, or at least my students, gather from the world comes from non-print media: TV, film, the web? Does this affect our thinking? In a graduate class years ago, we were reading passages from Finnegans Wake. It is a difficult text, to state the obvious. We came to the conclusion that the only way for meaning to be made was through a communal effort, which to state the obvious, is how meaning is made with any text.