Saturday, August 30, 2008

oral vs written culture

For me writing is impersonal, does not carry emotional intonations as well as speech, and lacks the identifying characteristics (pitch, tone, timbre, rate, etc.)
I am more on the oral cultures side because of plato’s influence on me. Plato talks about how many rhetoricians used a technique known as the Art of Memory for facilitating their recall. He laments how writing has made the once noble Art of Memory largely a forgotten art. Many cultures utilized an entirely oral tradition for maintaining their cultural sagas and mythos. Even today, there are bards which remember and sing national epics and tales which are thousands of lines long. Plato may not have been the first one to notice that writing may have destroyed man's own memoric talents.