Last night I referred to this article in the New Yorker, and promised to revert to it today. So here goes.
The central premise is worrisome for someone like me, brought up in a culture of reading: that it’s not just my biased perception, people really are reading less. Why worrisome? Because of the implications of such a state of affairs, implications that I hadn’t considered deeply enough.
Here are some excerpts from the article, let me try and encourage you to read the whole thing:
It can be amusing to read a magazine whose principles you despise, but it is almost unbearable to watch such a television show. And so, in a culture of secondary orality, we may be less likely to spend time with ideas we disagree with.
Self-doubt, therefore, becomes less likely. In fact, doubt of any kind is rarer. It is easy to notice inconsistencies in two written accounts placed side by side. With text, it is even easy to keep track of differing levels of authority behind different pieces of information. The trust that a reader grants to the New York Times, for example, may vary sentence by sentence. A comparison of two video reports, on the other hand, is cumbersome. Forced to choose between conflicting stories on television, the viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed before he started watching.
No effort of will is likely to make reading popular again. Children may be browbeaten, but adults resist interference with their pleasures. It may simply be the case that many Americans prefer to learn about the world and to entertain themselves with television and other streaming media, rather than with the printed word, and that it is taking a few generations for them to shed old habits like newspapers and novels.
In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. There’s no such concept as plagiarism, and redundancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex argument. Opponents in struggle are more memorable than calm and abstract investigations, so bards revel in name-calling and in “enthusiastic description of physical violence.â€
As the scholars Jack Goody and Ian Watt observed, it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth.
We never had a television at home, and for sure that influenced my reading habits and those of my siblings. I don’t particularly like the idiot box; I tolerate it for period drama, sport and humour. Wherever possible, I’ve switched to the laptop or handheld device. Part of this switch was driven by my not liking broadcast media. But another part was this need to balance graphics with text. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but an endless diet of pictures alone creates modern cavemen.
When graphics entered the hitherto text-based world of computing, I loved it. Not by sacrificing text, but by augmenting text with graphics. [When I speak at conferences, where listening aids are called for, I tend to use a mixture of words and graphics, a word or phrase supported by a picture or two.]
I’ve never experienced anything other than a literate culture, so I was fascinated by some of the observations of what an oral culture represented. My thanks to Halley Suitt again for pointing this article out to me, there is now something else for me to research and learn about.
Much of the article intrigued me; some of it fascinated me; and some of it worried me.
The most worrying thing, from my perspective, is the apparent increased risk of groupthink and herd instinct. I had never considered the secondary orality issue before. I think it’s so important that I’ll repeat the quote here:
It can be amusing to read a magazine whose principles you despise, but it is almost unbearable to watch such a television show. And so, in a culture of secondary orality, we may be less likely to spend time with ideas we disagree with.
The world has enough bigots and narrow-minded people and intolerant people already. I dread to think that we could be creating an environment where there will be more such people. If that is what TV 2.0 is likely to mean, then I guess I need to consider moving. To Mars maybe.
