As Crain argues in her chapter "The Republic of ABC: Alphabetizing Americans," the way we're taught discipline, literacy, discourse, and structure shapes the way we think and how we perceive culture. One of Crain's example is a common word-association alphabet in the eighteenth century that associated things with the letters of the alphabet, and because noblemen, kings, beggars, soldiers, etc., were some of the things associated with letters, it instilled a sense of class and hierarchy in the children who were exposed to these media.
I'm going to use the same example- how the alphabet and certain word-letter associations would associate very different cultural meanings on our chlidren.
If we lived in a socialist community, where the community was the highest valued idea, the alphabet taught to children would look very different. A would stand for Alarm, the thing that makes every good worker get out of bed on time to go to work. B would stand for the Bricklayer, who makes all of our buildings, C would stand for Coal that keeps the great furnaces of the nation burning, so on and so forth.
As Crain argues, this works two ways. Children are acculturated by these learning devices, and then as they age and become part of the system they shape the culture. So a Marxist/Socialist style country that produces this media would possibly raise children with a predisposition towards those ideas, children who are permanently acculturated in a society where community is center of all government. These children would then go on to promote the society even more. It's not just the society imparting its ways onto its children, these children eventually grow into the society and shape it.
Likewise, in the society that would teach children through catechisms children would be far more predisposed towards faith, the bible, and Christianity. A might stand for Adam, B for Bible, C for Christ, D for Deuteronomy, E for Eve, F for forgiveness...
These cultural mnemonics mean significant things down the road. When an entire society of people was raised on "A for Adam," at some point in their lives they have to remember the letter A as the signifier for any reason, the signified "Adam" automatically comes to mind, which instantly generates the Bible, Christianity, and all of the implications of that in their mind. Likewise, a society that thinks "A for Alarm" would think of the signified "Alarm" every time they had to use the alphabet, and would thus be reminded of getting up to go to work like a good citizen. Having these cultural leanings in one's mind can affect the construction of someone's entire being within their culture, as is the basic premise of Crain's argument.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Monday, October 4, 2010
Internet Authorship Scrutiny
I hope by now this particular case hasn't been done to death, but I couldn't get my mind off of the vast expanse that is the internet when I was reading Adrian Johns' book.
His entire thesis is that our notions of veracity in print is not inherent- printed texts aren't reliable, authoritative, and their content isn't true by virtue of the fact that they are printed texts. The accuracy of the information in print is only possible with lots of effort and construction put into the system to make it so- and it's made so that we can easily digest it without any acknowledging of the work that goes on behind the scenes of printed materials.
His evidence is that throughout the early modern period when print was in its beginnings, textual media wasn't as solid and fixed as it is now. The Manuscripts article too discussed the mechanics of copying and how copies of texts were made in the early modern period. Johns' article discussed in detail that one could never really rely on text as some unfaltering source of true information, that if a reader picked up a book "he or she could not be immediately certain that it was what it claimed to be." He then discusses Tycho Brahe and how his distributed works differed from place to place depending on where they were made and the circumstances they were acquired in. It really challenges the idea that print culture promotes the basis of gaining knowledge, that "durable paper entities" are the foundation of learning.
That being said, we are experiencing the same thing all over again in this era regarding the dissemination of knowledge over the internet. As Johns argued, there weren't always the legislation, practices, and systems in place to guarantee the accuracy and authority of all printed media that we take for granted, and as I argue, there aren't totally solid and reliable systems in place to censor all of the information online, at least not nearly as well-established ones as we have for print today. The internet is a mess, simply put. With such a ridiculously large host of information out there planted by almost anybody and everybody worldwide, there's no control over who can post, when, where, and what. The systems we have established to authorize content online only really work for a small portion of the content. Things like Creative Commons and Copyright laws help make sure that some authors are credited for their work, along with other systems. But at the point the internet is at now, it's impossible to guarantee that information or media discovered online is accurate and true. Only after much scrutiny and research can we guarantee anything- very much like the world Johns discussed in the early modern era. There are definitely parallels with what he was saying about printed texts back then and texts online today.
I also couldn't help but notice how this tied in with something Ong said in work of his we had to read a few weeks ago- something about how oral accounts had much higher gravity and veracity than printed accounts back when print was just getting started, and nobody gave written accounts as much significance and weight as they do today.
His entire thesis is that our notions of veracity in print is not inherent- printed texts aren't reliable, authoritative, and their content isn't true by virtue of the fact that they are printed texts. The accuracy of the information in print is only possible with lots of effort and construction put into the system to make it so- and it's made so that we can easily digest it without any acknowledging of the work that goes on behind the scenes of printed materials.
His evidence is that throughout the early modern period when print was in its beginnings, textual media wasn't as solid and fixed as it is now. The Manuscripts article too discussed the mechanics of copying and how copies of texts were made in the early modern period. Johns' article discussed in detail that one could never really rely on text as some unfaltering source of true information, that if a reader picked up a book "he or she could not be immediately certain that it was what it claimed to be." He then discusses Tycho Brahe and how his distributed works differed from place to place depending on where they were made and the circumstances they were acquired in. It really challenges the idea that print culture promotes the basis of gaining knowledge, that "durable paper entities" are the foundation of learning.
That being said, we are experiencing the same thing all over again in this era regarding the dissemination of knowledge over the internet. As Johns argued, there weren't always the legislation, practices, and systems in place to guarantee the accuracy and authority of all printed media that we take for granted, and as I argue, there aren't totally solid and reliable systems in place to censor all of the information online, at least not nearly as well-established ones as we have for print today. The internet is a mess, simply put. With such a ridiculously large host of information out there planted by almost anybody and everybody worldwide, there's no control over who can post, when, where, and what. The systems we have established to authorize content online only really work for a small portion of the content. Things like Creative Commons and Copyright laws help make sure that some authors are credited for their work, along with other systems. But at the point the internet is at now, it's impossible to guarantee that information or media discovered online is accurate and true. Only after much scrutiny and research can we guarantee anything- very much like the world Johns discussed in the early modern era. There are definitely parallels with what he was saying about printed texts back then and texts online today.
I also couldn't help but notice how this tied in with something Ong said in work of his we had to read a few weeks ago- something about how oral accounts had much higher gravity and veracity than printed accounts back when print was just getting started, and nobody gave written accounts as much significance and weight as they do today.
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