CMNS 110 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Language Technology, Marshall Mcluhan, Pictogram
8 Jan 2021
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Document Summary
The persistence of the word: orality vs. literacy: a society"s primary form of communication shapes its inhabitants" world and perceptions of reality. Gleick looks at why and how changing a society"s dominant form of communication affects its people on both a societal and an individual level. In other words, it could only be perceived by people near the person speaking, and only for a short period of time: the hardest technology to erase from our minds is the first of all: writing. Perhaps without writing, everything would have faded away with just spoken words: after writing became common, it made communication relatively permanent, shareable, and durable through space and time. Not perceived as a they represent are visual. They are sounds. separate from the mind; it is what the mind does: when writing is instantiated in paper or stone, it takes on a separate existence as artifice.
